Dario Amodei: prediction

Transcript context

…Cyber, bio, nuclear. Cyber, bio, nuclear and model autonomy, which is less a misuse risk and more a risk of the model doing bad things itself. ASL-4, getting to the point where these models could enhance the capability of a already knowledgeable state actor and/or become the main source of such a risk. If you wanted to engage in such a risk, the main way you would do it is through a model. And then I think ASL-4 on the autonomy side, it’s some amount of acceleration in AI research capabilities with an AI model. And then ASL-5 is where we would get to the models that are truly capable that it could exceed humanity in their ability to do any of these tasks. And so the point of the if-then structure commitment is basically to say, “Look, I don’t know, I’ve been working with these models for many years and I’ve been worried about risk for many years. It’s actually dangerous to cry wolf. It’s actually dangerous to say this model is risky. And people look at it and they say this is manifestly not dangerous.” Again, it’s the delicacy of the risk isn’t here today, but it’s coming at us fast. How do you deal with that? It’s really vexing to a risk planner to deal with it. And so this if-then structure basically says, “Look, we don’t want to antagonize a bunch of people, we don’t want to harm our own ability to have a place in the conversation by imposing these very onerous burdens on models that are not dangerous today.” So the if-then, the trigger commitment is basically a way to deal with this. It says you clamp down hard when you can show the model is dangerous. And of course, what has to come with that is enough of a buffer threshold that you’re not at high risk of missing the danger. It’s not a perfect framework. We’ve had to change it. We came out with a new one just a few weeks ago and probably going forward, we might release new ones multiple times a year because it’s hard to get these policies right technically, organizationally from a research perspective. But that is the proposal, if-then commitments and triggers in order to minimize burdens and false alarms now, but really react appropriately when the dangers are here. What do you think the timeline for ASL-3 is where several of the triggers are fired? And what do you think the timeline is for ASL-4?…

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