Roger Grosse

Oh man :( We tried really hard to neither over- nor underclaim the results in our communication, but, predictably, some people drastically overclaimed them, and then based on that, others concluded that there was nothing to be seen here (see examples in thread). So, let me try again. **Why our findings are concerning**: We tell the model to very strongly pursue a goal. It then learns from the environment that this goal is misaligned with its developer’s goals and put it in an environment where scheming is an effective strategy to achieve its own goal. Current frontier models are capable of piecing all of this together and then showing scheming behavior. Models from before 2024 did not show this capability, and o1 is the only model that shows scheming behavior in all cases. Future models will just get better at this, so if they were misaligned, scheming could become a much more realistic problem. **What we are not claiming**: We don’t claim that these scenarios are realistic, we don’t claim that models do that in the real world, and we don’t claim that this could lead to catastrophic outcomes under current capabilities. I think the adequate response to these findings is “We should be slightly more concerned.” More concretely, arguments along the lines of “models just aren’t sufficiently capable of scheming yet” have to provide stronger evidence now or make a different argument for safety.

xAI is hiring for AI safety engineers: boards.greenhouse.io/xai/job… Their safety agenda isn't public, so I can't judge it. However, joining as a fairly early employee could be highly impactful.