Recorded by Robert Miles: http://robertskmiles.com More information about the newsletter here: https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfGGFXwKpr-TJ5HfxEFaFCg HIGHLIGHTS Unsolved Problems in ML Safety (Dan Hendrycks, Nicholas Carlini, John Schulman, and Jacob Steinhardt) (summarized by Dan Hendrycks): To make the case for safety to the broader machine learning research community, this paper provides a revised and expanded collection of concrete technical safety research problems, namely: 1. Robustness: Create models that are resilient to adversaries, unusual situations, and Black Swan events. 2. Monitoring: Detect malicious use, monitor predictions, and discover unexpected model functionality. 3. Alignment: Build models that represent and safely optimize hard-to-specify human values. 4. External Safety: Use ML to address risks to how ML systems are handled, including cyberwarfare and global turbulence. Throughout, the paper attempts to clarify problem’s motivation and provide concrete project ideas.   Dan Hendrycks' opinion: My coauthors and I wrote this paper with the ML research community as our target audience. Here are some thoughts on this topic: 1. The document includes numerous problems that, if left unsolved, would imply that ML systems are unsafe. We need the effort of thousands of researchers to address all of them. This means that the main safety discussions cannot stay within the confines of the relatively small EA community. I think we should aim to have over one third of the ML research community work on safety problems. We need the broader community to treat AI at least as seriously as safety for nuclear power plants. 2. To grow the ML research community, we need to suggest problems that can progressively build the community and organically grow support for elevating safety standards within the existing research ecosystem. Research agendas that pertain to AGI exclusively will not scale sufficiently, and such research will simply not get enough market share in time. If we do not get the machine learning community on board with proactively mitigating risks that already exist, we will have a harder time getting them to mitigate less familiar and unprecedented risks. Rather than try to win over the community with alignment philosophy arguments, I'll try winning them over with interesting problems and try to make work towards safer systems rewarded with prestige. 3. The benefits of a larger ML Safety community are numerous. They can decrease the cost of safety methods and increase the propensity to adopt them. Moreover, to make ML systems have desirable properties, it is necessary to rapidly accumulate incremental improvements, but this requires substantial growth since such gains cannot be produced by just a few card-carrying x-risk researchers with the purest intentions. 4. The community will fail to grow if we ignore near-term concerns or actively exclude or sneer at people who work on problems that are useful for both near- and long-term safety (such as adversaries). The alignment community will need to stop engaging in textbook territorialism and welcome serious hypercompetent researchers who do not post on internet forums or who happen not to subscribe to effective altruism. (We include a community strategy in the Appendix.) 5. We focus on reinforcement learning but also deep learning. Most of the machine learning research community studies deep learning (e.g., text processing, vision) and does not use, say, Bellman equations or PPO. While existentially catastrophic failures will likely require competent sequential decision making agents, the relevant problems and solutions can often be better studied outside of gridworlds and MuJoCo. There is much useful safety research to be done that does not need to be cast as a reinforcement learning problem. 6. To prevent alienating readers, we did not use phrases s