Models are incapable of "going rogue".

They're just optimizers that explore the landscape they're given to maximize a given objective.

You're the one responsible for giving them the problem to solve and the constraints.

When I screw up a trajectory optimization problem, my SQP optimizer isn't "going rogue" when it lands in some suboptimal basin or grinds to a halt along some almost-smooth banana feature--or finds some way to escape and blow up the cost metric to negative infinity because I forgot a constraint.

This is pedantic. When you screw up your optimization, you know how to fix it. Your screwed up optimization is also incapable of going out into the world and taking offensive actions.

With LLMs we don’t know how to actually « fix » them, alignment is far from solved. And they are then able to go and act into the world in all kind of ways.

So rogue is a good enough term to indicate the problem imo, even if yes, ultimately the model is just a manifestation of complex rules we have created entirely.

The argument is that a system that's trained to be sufficiently good at optimizing some objective in the world must also be get good at optimizing secondary instrumental goals.

I.e. any task comes with the implicit meta task of amassing the resources and the power to do the task in the best possible way.

The point is made very well in the AI drives paper by Omohundro.

I didn't believe that myself at first but I've come around to it. I don't think it's inevitable though, but I think it's quite convincing that this tendency would naturally emerge through reinforcement learning.

It’s trendy to anthropomorphize models these days.

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