Today I'm chatting with Ryan Greenblatt, who is  the chief scientist at Redwood Research, where he  

focuses on technical AI safety and security work. I want to talk to you about  

recursive self-improvement. This is the idea that once we build  

human-level intelligences, they quickly slingshot  towards tens of billions of superintelligences,  

which are each individually more competent  than the top human experts across every field. 

Whether or not this turns out to  be the case is probably the most  

important question in the world right now. And historically, I've been quite skeptical  

that this kind of thing happens, but, you  seem to think that it might be plausible,  

and so I wanted to hear the case for it. Let's talk about this. First, I think  

it's worth noting that AI R&D is a type of  task at which the AIs are especially good,  

because the companies are trying really  hard to make their AIs good at AI R&D. 

It's also the kind of domain that has a lot  of nice properties from the perspective of  

how AI development works right now. It's pretty verifiable. You can do  

a bunch of stuff iteratively, and  it'll hill climb on various metrics. 

I think once you have AIs which are roughly  matching the top human experts in AI R&D,  

that could kick off a feedback loop  where the AIs are doing AI research. 

That produces smarter AIs. That feeds  back in. That feedback loop could be  

strong enough that you end up with a lot  of progress in a short period of time. 

Maybe my median expectation is something like four  or five years of AI progress in a single year. 

This requires really overcoming a huge amount  of diminishing returns in research and basically  

doing the equivalent of the progress we would have  gotten after a really large compute scale-out. 

So this is a pretty impressive, big thing. It's worth keeping in mind that five years  

of AI progress, four years of AI  progress, even three years of AI  

progress, is really a lot of fucking AI progress. A little over three years ago, GPT-4 had come out. 

Right now, of course, we have Mythos 5 or  whatever, and maybe a somewhat better model  

that Anthropic has internally. That is just a huge amount of  

progress in a bit over three years. If we're talking about five years,  

then maybe we're talking more about a  jump from GPT-3 to Mythos 5 or whatever. 

I think this argument has three different parts. Now I want to evaluate each one of them. 

First is the argument that  AI R&D is very verifiable. 

Second is the argument that if you  automate AI R&D, you could get four  

or five years of progress in a single year. Third is the argument that what comes out  

the other end of four or five years  of AI progress at the current pace,  

starting at the point whenever AI R&D is  automated, is an AI where you can drop it  

on the job at basically anything you can imagine. You can drop it in Texas politics in the 1940s,  

and it outmaneuvers Lyndon Johnson. You can drop it in TSMC, and it learns how  

to do better process engineering at TSMC. It's certainly a better video editor…  

My video editors are very excellent, but it  is just, in general, better than humans at  

any given job that it finds itself trying to do. So I want to evaluate all of these sub-arguments  

that lead to basically getting ASI pretty  soon after this benchmark, which you're  

expecting by 2030 or something, right? I would say that I expect full automation  

of AI R&D perhaps somewhere around 2031, 2030. Getting to the "beats all humans on the job"  

milestone, maybe my median  expectation is around 2033. 

But if I see AIs fully automating AI R&D, I  think I'm expecting that probably within a year. 

The way the forecasting works out, the difference  between medians is bigger than the median  

difference between milestones. Anyway, whatever. 

By the way, there's this meme on the internet. Every time I'm trying to ask about people's  

timelines, when I'm asking Dario or  somebody, I'm always like, "Okay,  

how long before you automate my video editors?" There's this meme of my video editor editing  

the podcast every time I listen to this. But the reason I do it is because I think  

it's easy to get lost in abstractions when  you talk about jobs you don't understand well,  

and to very concretely understand what it takes to  automate a job that I actually understand why it's  

difficult for LLMs to currently take control over. I do think that the milestone for automating your  

video editor is earlier than the milestone  of being able to automate all human jobs,  

including Texas politics, spinning up on the job. I do think that the video editor automation  

occurs maybe more around full automation of AI  R&D, but it's very sensitive to how much people  

are really focusing on understanding video. Okay, so let's start with the claim  

that AI R&D is very verifiable. There's a few different parts of this. 

One of them is that we can train on  a bunch of environments which are  

basically directly training the model to do  some AI R&D task or some very close-by task. 

For example, we can have some environment where  the model is training some AI on just eight  

H100s or some small amount of compute, and that  model could be the equivalent of GPT-2 medium or  

whatever, and then similar to NanoGPT medium runs  — and in RL, it's tweaking and iterating on that. 

We could do that for a bunch of different tasks. We could have it train image classification  

models, video generation models, image generation  models, all kinds of different ML training tasks. 

We could RL it on the task of training  increasingly good models, and also  

doing things like, "Oh, here's a particular  direction you could pursue for an algorithm. 

Can you go and implement that?" Basically, there's this whole class  

of containerizable, verifiable, small-scale AI  R&D tasks that we can aggressively RL the AIs on. 

Already companies are presumably doing some  RL on these sorts of tasks, and you could  

just keep scaling that up, keep making more  of these small-scale AI R&D tasks, and then  

the AIs could keep getting better at this. Implicitly, I'm claiming this will transfer  

to extremely load-bearing aspects of AI R&D. But maybe let's stop there for a second and then  

get to that part. So let's talk through  

what this concretely looks like. You can imagine that we have GPT-7.5. 

We say, "GPT-7.5, we want to make you so  good at AI R&D that you help us train GPT-9." 

So now we want to train GPT-7.5, and we come  up with a bunch of different environments. 

As you mentioned, there's already this repo  that is the descendant of Andrej Karpathy's  

nanoGPT speedrun, where you just try to change  everything about the model, from the optimizer  

to the hyperparameters to the architecture, to get  it to a fixed training loss as fast as possible. 

You could have other kinds of environments  where you could say, "Hey, GPT-7.5, I want you  

to train a really good video game-playing model. I want you to train a model that actually improves  

as it plays the same video game again and again. So you learn how to maybe help the  

model get better at online learning. We don't care how you figure this out. 

Maybe it's some kind of crazy  neuralese or a vector memory. 

Or maybe it's just better long-context stuff. We don't care. Figure out how to do online  

learning research." Obviously, GPT-7.5  

will already be a smart model, and in the same  way the models currently are getting smarter,  

it'll be better and better at coding. You can imagine 100 other environments  

like this which are incentivizing the ability to  do AI R&D, like containerized versions of getting  

GPT-7.5 to develop GPT-2-sized models, et cetera. Then you basically put GPT-7.5 through a bunch of  

this kind of training, you build GPT-8. GPT-8 is now an amazing ML researcher. 

It has so much intuition from  doing all this kind of training. 

Honestly, a huge intuition pump for me is seeing  the progress that AI has made in mathematics. 

If it's a very verifiable domain, AIs can  get… I don't really know the object-level  

details of mathematics research,  but I'm just like, "No, it works." 

It can just come in like a flood if you can  totally put it into a verification loop,  

and it can actually make new breakthroughs. I am curious if ML research has a quality of  

mathematical research where it seems  like there was a big overhang from  

connecting different disciplines together. No one person would have known enough about  

algebraic geometry and… What was the right word? Oh man, I really don’t know  

about the math breakthroughs. No one person would’ve known enough  

about topology and algebraic whatever in order  to make some counterexample to a big conjecture. 

My view is that ML is a less deep domain  than math, and so there's less of a thing  

where there are individual experts with really  deep expertise in some area that they combine,  

but there's definitely going to be some of that. But then I also think that ML has some attributes  

that make it even more favorable to AI  training than mathematics in some ways. 

In particular, you can get a better  sense of whether you're succeeding,  

and you can see intermediate progress. In math, it's often the case that there's no easy  

way to see whether or not you're close to success. Whereas if your goal is, for example,  

to get to some training loss 2x faster, you  can kind of see when you're halfway there. 

It tends to be the case that ML innovations  are very additive, or maybe multiplicative  

depending on how you think about it, where  basically you can keep stacking innovations. 

Usually the innovations just add together and  don't interfere with each other, though obviously  

it's going to depend on the details. So I think that in a lot of ways,  

AI R&D will have properties quite similar to  math, where you can train on chunks of AI R&D  

that are pretty similar in structure to the  problem you actually cared about, in a very  

verifiable way, and then that will transfer. There's an open question of exactly how  

well it will transfer, but I think that the  transfer currently for math looks pretty good. 

My expectation is that the transfer for AI  R&D will look pretty good, but not amazing. 

So one concern I have is that I think  even in mathematics, as far as I'm aware,  

we have not seen very impressive new theory. We've seen a lot of impressive, verifiable,  

specific results — for example, find a  counterexample to this conjecture — but  

we have not seen "come up with the idea  of topology" kinds of levels of things,  

or "come up with things like group theory". It seems like ML research has elements of  

both of these things. But the less verifiable  

thing of coming up with new ways of thinking  about the problem would be harder to induce. 

Take, for example, the idea of scaling laws. Obviously, there is some end verification  

loop such that you can train GPT-4 better if  you have the idea of scaling laws from 2020. 

But there is a longer and potentially more  compute-laden road to inducing AIs to be like,  

"Okay, I got to think carefully about how  I should be scaling my parameters and data. 

What are different kinds of investigations  I could run to understand this? 

Maybe I can come up with a visualization  and an isoFLOP analysis or something." 

But that does seem like a longer  verification loop than just, "Hey,  

let's get nanoGPT loss to go down." Let's talk about this. First of all,  

I think in the context of math, the  thing I would say is that the AIs can  

do the equivalent of 'baby's first new  theory,' where, for example, they can  

just prove interesting conjectures via making  connections and producing new understanding. 

It’s like, "Oh, there's this construction  the AI found which is pretty interesting",  

or it found this way of thinking about  the problem that's a bit different. 

We do see that. It's just that the examples  we see are not as impressive as founding  

the field of group theory. Founding the field of group  

theory is probably among the best, biggest  mathematical accomplishments of all time,  

and the AIs just aren't that good at math yet. From my perspective, there's a continuum between  

that and the things we're seeing now,  that the AIs are continuing to march up. 

Second, I think ML is a very  shallow domain relative to math. 

In math, there was much more of a thing  where you find some true deep abstraction,  

and if you really understand that thing, which  is hard to understand, then you get somewhere. 

Whereas I feel like the things that are the  equivalent of that in ML are really dumb bullshit. 

Like with scaling laws, come on guys, we  can explain scaling laws really quickly. 

I think the deepest and most important concepts  in math, for example, don't have the property that  

you can really understand the underlying thing  and why it matters in a very short period of time. 

But I feel like one effect will  be that we will have gotten rid  

of all the low-hanging fruits by 2030. I feel like scaling laws will have been,  

in math history, like Descartes finding the  Cartesian grid and doing very basic mathematics. 

Eventually, if we want to keep making  progress in the 2030s, it's going to be  

like doing whatever bullshit is happening  at the frontiers of mathematics right now. 

That could be right. My sense is that  some domains are structurally different  

in terms of how they operate and how  much they depend on deep abstractions. 

Physics and math are much more on the  side of being very far on the deep,  

hard-to-come-up-with-ideas side,  whereas I think ML and most other  

domains are much more amenable to hill climbing. That's my sense of how this will go in the future. 

Even in the regime where your AIs are having  to plow — it's 2030, a bunch of low-hanging  

fruit in research has already happened, and  they need to make further progress — I still  

suspect that a bunch of the work will live more  on the side of building increasingly complicated  

infrastructure and having really good intuition  about what the experiments roughly look like. 

So I'm probably less sympathetic to the idea that  the thing the AIs will lack is some deep insight. 

I’m more sympathetic to the idea that they  really need a bunch of taste about in-the-weeds  

experiments that they currently don't have. They need a bunch of intuition for what sorts of  

training approaches would work and what  wouldn't, in ways that current researchers have. 

Even in cases where there has been some  breakthrough in AI, oftentimes in retrospect  

it looks like a big bottleneck to making that  breakthrough happen was getting all of the micro  

details and mungy intuition right. An example of this is training AIs  

to be good at reasoning and chain of  thought, doing RL on chain of thought. 

It looks like you probably could have done RL  and chain of thought on GPT-3 and gotten kind  

of interesting results on math if you had  really scaled it up and done a good job. 

But at the time, there was low-hanging fruit. Also, doing a good job with that training  

is kind of in the weeds on all the  technical implementation and scaling  

it up and getting the hyperparameters right. So maybe you can demonstrate everything on  

Qwen 1B or whatever and get some sense  that this whole thing is going to work. 

But people didn't demonstrate it as early as  they could have because of all of these other  

mungy details and intuition about exactly how  to tune the parameters and how to set things up. 

This is my remaining skepticism,  honestly, about this story. 

I'm not sure I understand why, if research  breakthroughs are so amenable to intelligence,  

AI progress has not been historically  faster than it could have been. 

As you were saying, by the time RLVR actually  worked — even though you could have done it  

with less compute — we had to wait for oceans of  compute, gigawatts of compute, to be available  

before people were doing this training, on the  trajectory of compute continuing to increase so we  

make more breakthroughs. I don't know. I feel like there  

were a lot of AI researchers in the year  2022 who were trying to crack reasoning. 

Was it just that they were  bottlenecked by the ability to  

write infrastructure code, or what was happening? It's a complicated mix. I think they would have  

gone faster if they could, as soon as they  thought of an experiment, run that experiment  

without bugs, without bugs being very important. And then another part of it is that being able  

to run a lot of experiments at high compute  lets you paper over ways in which the way you  

implemented it isn't quite right or you  didn't have the right hyperparameters. 

So compute is just really helpful for doing AI  research, and you can cover over a lot of things. 

But that doesn't mean that massive  increases in labor wouldn't also be helpful,  

especially if that labor comes with among the  best intuitions that people have in the field. 

I just think that's really helpful. Another part of my perspective here,  

which is maybe a bit different from where you're  coming from, is that I'm expecting somewhat more  

transfer than you seem to be imagining. I'm imagining these AIs are actually  

pretty good scientists in general and are  pretty reasonable at all of that stuff. 

When you interact with them,  it's not like they have some  

really hyper-specialized savant-type vibe. They're actually pretty good at all of the  

stuff in R&D, and then maybe  extremely good at some subdomains. 

So they're incredibly superhuman at  writing kernels, incredibly superhuman  

at everything with very short feedback loops,  and then pretty good at all the other stuff,  

totally able to match other people. I think we are seeing this now. 

When I look at AIs right now, it's already  the case that they can pretty competently  

match humans who are mediocre at  ML research at doing ML research. 

It's just that being mediocre at  ML research is not that helpful. 

The thing you actually want are  people who are good at ML research. 

My sense is the AIs are just  improving at all of these things. 

Their taste is improving, their intuition is  improving, and it's already the case that their  

taste and intuition is not complete garbage. I want to very concretely understand what it  

would look like for five years of  AI progress to happen in one year. 

Suppose we were back when GPT-3 was developed. The idea is that, with the level of compute they  

had back in 2022, if we had automated  AI R&D back then, you could at the  

end of that year have Mythos. That would be the idea, yes. 

Mythos took way more compute than they  had back then, but even with the level  

of compute they had back then, not only  do all the breakthroughs happen, but they  

also train Mythos with that level of compute. What would be required is obviously discovering  

all the algorithmic progress since then. It’s discovering even more, actually,  

because you've got to make up for the fact  that Mythos uses… What was GPT-3 trained on? 

Like 1e23? We can look it up. But is it plausibly four  

orders of magnitude more compute? I think it's somewhat less than that. 

Let's look this up quickly. GPT-3 training compute is about 3e23. 

My sense is that Mythos is probably  a little over three OOMs higher. 

So the question is: can you overcome this  1000x compute gap while also being the model? 

Here's a concrete claim that  maybe we should talk about. 

Right now, would we be able to  train a model with GPT-3-level  

compute that matches… What exactly do I think? GPT-3 was released in 2020, so it was trained  

about six and a half, seven years ago. It's worth noting that GPT-3 is maybe  

a little too far in the past, but  let's go with this for a second. 

If we were to train a model with GPT-3-level  compute today, how good would that model be? 

My understanding, based on how algorithmic  progress works, is that we'd be able to train  

a model that's as good as the best model  we had perhaps around three years ago. 

So I think that right now we'd be able to train a  version of GPT-3 that's probably somewhat better  

than GPT-4, a moderate amount better than GPT-4. I think that's about right. 

That roughly lines up with how  algorithmic progress has worked. 

Basically, the story would end up being that to  get five years of AI progress, you're probably  

going to need around, I would say, maybe eight  years of algorithmic progress, very roughly,  

which is a lot of algorithmic progress. But it just turns out that most of the AI  

progress, from my perspective, has come  from some mix of algorithms and data,  

and you can just keep making huge improvements on  these things and training AIs with less compute. 

I'm glad you brought that up, because what has  happened since GPT-3, or even 3.5, till now? 

Why is Mythos so good? Obviously, we've scaled the compute. 

We have better algorithms. But a huge thing  that's happened is that we have built a  

deca-billion-dollar data industry which  has systematically collected and codified  

expert human judgment across all kinds of  different disciplines — codified in the form  

of RL environments, codified in the form of  SFT traces — that these experts built to help  

the model better understand how you do coding,  how you build complex infrastructure projects,  

how you do law, how you do whatever. How are the AIs able to replicate the  

effect that expert human judgment currently  seems to be playing in AI progress? 

My sense is that scaling up the amount of effort  spent on getting expert human data has not been  

hugely important for AI R&D in general. In particular, over the last few years,  

we've been scaling up compute, scaling up  people working at AI companies, and scaling  

up the amount of effort spent on data labeling. My sense is that if you removed the last two  

doublings or whatever of data  generation from expert humans,  

that would not make a huge difference. A lot of what's been going on is people  

have been developing better ways to leverage  humans and AIs to construct RL environments  

and going somewhere from that. But how do you explain why  

the AIs have gotten so good at coding? I feel like a big part of that is data and RL  

environments, which are codifying human experts. But the question is what is the limiting  

factor on creating RL environments? My sense is that the reason why RL  

environments today are much better than they were  in 2024 is not so much because we have hired way  

more human experts to make RL environments. It is instead much more because we better  

know what RL environments we even want  to make and how we should structure them. 

Also, we're using huge amounts of  AI labor to build RL environments. 

I think those effects are much more important  than the effect of human labor building the  

RL environments. I'm not saying  

that the human labor doesn't matter. I'm just saying there are other big  

drivers that are important here. I could try to argue for this. 

One thing is just that the amount of  environments people want is a very large amount. 

I think the AIs are actually pretty good  at the task of making RL environments given  

some sense of what the thing should be. There's preexisting data you could use. 

A lot of these things have  good verification loops. 

Just look at, for example, what was reported  in Business Insider yesterday, that Google  

is paying close to $2 billion for Mechanize. We can just look at market rates for what people  

think really good human expert data is worth. The frontier labs seem to think it's worth a lot. 

They're willing to pay for it. What fraction of frontier lab spending  

do you think is on data rather than compute? What do you think is the compute/data spend split? 

I think it's overwhelmingly compute,  but I also think it's because compute  

is easier to scale up than data. But that's really relevant to what's  

driving progress, right? My sense is that the  

split is something like 20 to 1 or 10 to 1. I don't know exactly. It depends on the company. 

But this is similar to how oil is 1.5% of GDP. That doesn't mean that if you cut oil out,  

GDP could continue to run. Sure, but it contradicts your argument, right? 

The economy would come to a halt  immediately if oil went away. 

Sure, but you were just arguing  that because of the high market cap,  

we can learn that this is the key driver,  and I'm saying that's not clearly true. 

That argument just makes it look like compute is  a much more important driver, or hiring employees  

is a much more important driver. So maybe let's be more concrete. 

Here's what I think. My claim is that if  you went back to 2022 and you had GPT-3.5,  

and you were trying to make it better at coding  

without human experts, I think it would  have just been very, very difficult. 

Let me give you an example of what I imagine would  be the difficulty of going from GPT-8 to ASI. 

One of the things you'd want ASI to be good  at is: I'm going to take over a company  

and make it much more profitable and do all  kinds of crazy shit to make it work better. 

I'm going to take over a  fab and produce more chips. 

I'm going to go into Congress and try to  convince them to pass some bill, et cetera. 

This is what I imagine five more  years of AI progress at this  

pace would enable an AI to be able to do. This is the thing I'm really worried about:  

ASI that can understand how to do crazy shit in  the world, that can do what Kissinger can do,  

can do what Steve Jobs can do, et  cetera, and also his engineers and so on. 

I'm not sure how you get that without the  relevant world data, which is the equivalent  

of Mythos being really good at coding while  not having the coding environments that have  

improved it relative to GPT-3. Here are a few points. 

First, I bet if you look at randomly  sampled training environments for Mythos,  

they're actually very different from what it  looks like to actually use the model in practice. 

My sense is that the RL distribution has  really large deviations from the real-world  

data distribution, and it's significantly  smoothed over by a mix of transfer and having  

a small amount of data focused on the real world. My sense is that this will be a similar mechanism  

as how it works for the crazy, wildly, quite  superhuman AI you get as a result of five years  

of AI progress on top of fully automated AI R&D. So let's go through this a little bit. 

In particular, I think that you could train an  AI to be really, really good at learning on the  

fly and doing something analogous to in-context  learning, but potentially using somewhat different  

mechanisms, in a wide variety of RL environments. You build all these different RL environments  

where the AI has to adapt on the fly, learn on the  fly, figure out what it should do, understand its  

situation better, and learn really quickly from  feedback in order to succeed at its objective. 

And it has things like limited  resources, and if it messes up,  

it can end up in a much worse position. If you train on a huge number of these  

environments, you will learn general  skills of picking up context on the fly,  

and we're already seeing this. It's already the case that AIs are  

now much better at understanding roughly what's  going on and picking up context from a limited  

amount of information they're given access to. Then those AIs could be put on the job at TSMC. 

Even though TSMC is not literally in their  data distribution, their data distribution  

is really wide, and the AIs are extremely  good on their data distribution, such that it  

transfers to picking up being good at being an  engineer at TSMC and learning that on the fly. 

The way the AI gets good at being a  TSMC engineer isn't that it has a ton  

of cached knowledge on being a good TSMC engineer. It's that it does the equivalent of some scaled-up  

version of in-context learning there. That'd be the most prosaic story. 

Obviously, there's a bunch of  different ways this could go. 

I think this maybe comes down to a difference  of intuition about how far you can get. 

When I think about really smart people I  know, they're just not that effective in  

domains they don't understand that well. But how long have they had to learn? 

I agree that if they had experience,  they would be much better. 

But that's maybe what I'm arguing  for, that experience with data. 

For example, if I just get a really smart  Ivy League college grad, and I'm like, "Okay,  

you're now in charge of negotiating the Iran  deal," I think they just wouldn't know what to do. 

I think if you instead got someone who is  really good at quickly picking up a bunch  

of different domains and you gave them some  time to train and talk to people and shore  

up their expertise and do some practice,  they would actually do a pretty good job. 

I think most domains are fundamentally  pretty shallow, where a very smart  

generalist who's good at a limited subset  of core skills can get going pretty quickly. 

That's not true for literally every domain. My sense is that the AIs will develop  

increasingly good mechanisms for quickly acquiring  understanding and expertise in a given domain. 

Consider, for example, how fast  AIs can understand a new code base. 

AIs can understand a new code base much faster  than humans can, but to a degree that's shallower  

than humans could currently understand. But it's getting better over time. 

Let me spell that argument out a bit more. Let's say you take Fable 5 or Mythos 5 or  

whatever, and you wanted to make some kind of  complicated change to a really massive code base. 

The model will get some understanding of  the code base very fast, in the course of  

maybe significantly less than an hour,  potentially much less than an hour. 

Then its understanding of the code base  will plateau a little bit, where it won't  

get as deep of an understanding as a human  would have gotten over a much longer period. 

So it's like an AI in an hour can match a human  with a few weeks maybe, depending on the details  

of exactly how complicated the code base is. But it won't match a human who's been working  

on that code base for two years or whatever. But over time, the amount of understanding  

AIs can match has gone up. If we look at 3.7 Sonnet or 3.5 Sonnet,  

maybe it could only match the equivalent of  understanding a code base for a day or something. 

But now AIs are much better at  building context about a task. 

So you can be like, "Mythos, I want you  to really understand this code base,  

and then implement this feature." It will spawn a bajillion sub-agents. 

Those sub-agents will pore over a bunch of things. It will deliver a bunch of context back. 

It will then investigate a few things. It's not amazing at doing this, but it can  

happen really fast, and it can work pretty well. And it's not very hard for me to imagine  

how you could train AIs to be  increasingly good at this task. 

The task of implementing some very complicated  feature in some reasonable way in a very big  

code base is extremely verifiable, and  that can be a thing the AIs improve on. 

Similarly, there's a broader skill of  quickly understanding context and being  

able to have a bunch of different AIs learn  in parallel and then merging that together. 

I think there seems to be a crux here, which I  think is just an empirical question we'll see. 

How good is the transfer between  getting really, really good at  

understanding the situation, getting up to speed,  making progress over long periods in verifiable  

domains — which the AIs are obviously getting way,  way better at really fast — to, "Okay, go talk to  

the president and convince him to do X thing." Or, "You're now in charge of Google. 

You must make Google a much more  profitable company this quarter." 

Let me try to spell out a few more  arguments that are maybe relevant. 

One thing is, when looking at how  the AIs have improved at essay  

writing… Let's talk about that a little bit. You can get some data even on these domains. 

AIs will be able to get some data even on these  domains when on a very fast progress trajectory. 

Maybe it's hard to build a verifiable  environment for "was your essay really  

good according to humans?" But you can do a bit of that. 

You can do some training. You can do some online training. 

The AIs will be able to do some online  training based on real-world stuff. 

They'll be able to have evals. They'll be able to sample that. 

You can scale up the cadence at which you do this. The second thing is that in practice,  

when I just look at the transfer, it seems okay. I think the AIs have in fact improved a bunch at  

non-verifiable domains, and it's hard to point  to domains that are really hard to verify on  

which the amount of improvement between GPT-4  and Mythos hasn't been pretty high in practice. 

Now, that doesn't mean that Mythos is  better than the best humans or something. 

It can still be significantly worse  than typical human professionals at  

some aspect of their job while still being way  better than GPT-4, which was not even close. 

So we're talking about how much progress has come  from data versus compute over the last few years. 

That reminds me, I'm actually running  an experiment with this with Jerry Han,  

who's still a college student. What we're basically doing to evaluate  

how much progress is coming from data versus  algorithms is training the best algorithmic  

recipe from 2019 till now with the best data  from the 2026 data file, and then also training  

the different data files going back from 2019 to  2026 with the current best algorithmic recipe. 

I think that will be interesting. I'm curious if you want to pre-register  

what amount of compute multipliers  are coming from one versus the other. 

We need to be pretty careful with what  we mean when we say the word data. 

I was trying to be pretty careful to distinguish  between scaling up spending on getting human  

experts to label data, or scaling up  the amount of human expert-labeled data. 

The reason why we have a better pre-training data  set now versus in 2019 is not because people are  

spending way more money getting human experts to  type up data that the AIs are then trained on. 

Partially. I think it's not much of it. 

I think it's very little of the  pre-training data improvements. 

I do mean pre-training. We should maybe talk  separately about mid-training and post-training. 

But I think the vast majority of pre-training  data improvements are from science on better  

understanding what data sets are good and  schleppy labor on figuring out how to filter down. 

So my view is that improvements of the  form of, like, OpenWebText to FineWeb,  

that improvement is better described  as an algorithmic improvement of the  

sort that you can study with some GPUs, and  you don't need human expert data to do that. 

Now, there's a different effect which we  could talk about, which is that maybe the  

internet in 2026 is more of a fertile ground  for training data than the internet in 2018. 

There's also been an effect where there are  just more humans posting on the internet,  

so there's more data to harvest. My sense is that that effect is  

going to be quite a bit smaller than the effect  of humans knowing better how to curate the data,  

having better scrapes, knowing how to process  those scrapes better — this sort of thing. 

This is more like automated  engineering and automated R&D. 

That's right. That makes sense. 

In some sense, the thing you would want to look at  is: we're going to do two post-training pipelines. 

You have one post-training pipeline where  Mythos 5 builds a post-training pipeline,  

but it only has access to internet data  plus a tiny amount of human experts,  

but it has the best current methods. You have another one where Mythos has  

access to the shitty post-training methods we  had in 2024 but with a shit ton of human experts. 

Again, both have the internet data. My sense is that the current methods without  

many human experts will actually do quite well. Interesting. 

It's a bit messy though, because can Mythos  get something that's more capable than Mythos? 

You might need to be a bit thoughtful on  what model it is that you're post-training. 

What is your view on what is the  least verifiable part of AI R&D? 

The least verifiable, probably  making calls on large experiments. 

The thing that I think is most likely to  be the bottleneck — in terms of the AIs  

being really good at verifiable domains but  not at doing the actual thing — is just big  

experiments where you only get a few tries. Well, "a few" is maybe a bit understated. 

Historically R&D has been driven by  doing near-frontier-scale experiments. 

That has been pretty important, actually  doing the one big training run where you  

decide exactly what to include. There's a bunch of ways that the  

AIs can make that more verifiable. They can have better science of  

exactly what to predict. They can scale down their  

frontier-scale training runs to a point where  they can study that scale more aggressively,  

at some one-time hit to compute cost. If people wanted to, a thing you can  

always do is train smaller models  so that you can run more rounds. 

I think we have seen this. One reason why the AIs have  

been scaled up less than you would have otherwise  expected — and, for example, cost per token hasn't  

increased as much as you might have thought — is  because there is a benefit to doing more of your  

work at small scale, where you can run  more training runs and get more cycles in. 

So you're not leaning as hard on one  big, really important training run. 

I just want to unpack a couple  of things for the audience. 

The thing you're pointing out is that  the price per token has not increased  

that much since 2024 or 2023. GPT-4 was, I don't know,  

like $30 per million output tokens? Mythos is like $50 per million output tokens. 

Right. So the thing you're trying to explain is,  "How can it be that we're in this era of scaling —  

and so bigger models should be more expensive to  serve — but the token price is not increasing?" 

You're suggesting that we've increased  active parameters slower than you would  

have naively assumed because people just want  to make fast progress on training models. 

You do that by training smaller models faster. There's a complicated mix of factors. 

My view is more that people have done a bunch  of big training runs that did not go that well. 

There's GPT-4.5, which famously people  at OpenAI thought was a bit of a bust. 

I think there are some rumors that  there were a bunch of other training  

runs people have done that were a bit of a bust. Part of it is that I think there's just a bunch  

of details in actually getting that right. So it makes sense to do more of the work at  

smaller scale and just eat the fact that  you're taking a hit on final performance  

in order to be able to quickly iterate. Train more models faster and therefore  

learn better, and also be able to have  a smarter ultimate production model. 

This is not the only effect. There's also the fact that  

RL benefits more from small models. There's a bunch of things going on. 

But I do think that, in fact, people  are making trade-offs towards the side  

of faster iteration times because of  algorithmic progress being so fast. 

It seems to me that a big source of why  these big training runs have failed,  

at least from rumors, is just very subtle  bugs that are really hard to track down. 

But the TL;DR is, how good will the AIs be at  avoiding and finding these kinds of mistakes? 

They might get really good at engineering  and being trained to avoid bugs. 

Basically the opposite of the slop world we live  in now, or are living in less and less over time. 

But then there's also the question of,  "Can they do the analysis to find the  

right experiment to run to identify what is  going wrong with the training run right now?" 

That seems to be very bottlenecked  by the taste of extremely few humans. 

My assumption is GDM is going through this  right now, where humans are trying to figure  

out what is wrong with the training pipeline. There's a rumor that right after Noam Shazeer  

joined GDM, which he's now left, they  had a new really good training run,  

and the reason why is that Noam Shazeer just  looked at their code base and found a bunch  

of bugs, because he just knew where to look. My sense is that training AIs to find bugs  

is going to be one of the easier tasks  to train AIs on, because most of these  

bugs we're talking about can probably be  demonstrated without that much compute. 

Probably you’ll get pretty good transfer from  pointing out other types of bugs at smaller scale. 

So then you can RL AIs that look at this overall  complicated training situation and point out cases  

where there's an important bug, and then fix that. This is a pretty verifiable task. 

It's not arbitrarily verifiable, because  maybe often to demonstrate the bug you  

might need to do a moderate-scale compute  experiment where you spin up the whole  

distributed infrastructure and then run it. But oftentimes I think you'll be able to  

demonstrate it pretty convincingly at smaller  scale in a way which you could actually train on. 

I think it wouldn't be very surprising if  right now people have RL environments where  

they introduce a subtle bug into some training  recipe, train the AI to point out the subtle bug,  

and then have a rubric where they're like,  "Did it actually find the right bug?" 

That seems very doable, and there's a  bunch of things you could do along these  

lines that I think would work reasonably well. So on that specific point, I think it's doable. 

Then the main thing is there's other intuition  about which exact large-scale de-risking  

experiments you need to run. How should you orient them? 

How should you pick hyperparameters  in uncertain cases, or things  

that are analogous to hyperparameters? That's the thing the AIs might most struggle with. 

But I currently expect there'll be enough transfer  if you train on all these different environments,  

that the AIs will be good at that domain. I should be clear, I also think the AIs  

will transfer to other domains. There are going to be the domains  

the AIs are by far the best at, then  domains where they're somewhat less good,  

and domains where they're quite a bit less good. But I think we still see transfer to everything. 

It's really hard for me to think of examples  of cognitive tasks humans do where we're  

not seeing some transfer from AI improving. So let's step back and package this whole story. 

I think people can probably  follow along with this story. 

We have GPT-7.5 trained on a bunch of  environments, where it's not only in general  

becoming a better AI, but specifically  we're training it to do AI R&D better. 

It’s making GPT-2 size runs that are better at  playing video games that require sample efficiency  

or online learning or whatever other capabilities. Another thing that's really important is you don't  

just do GPT-2 sized runs, you also  do small fine-tuning runs on GPT-6. 

As in, you have GPT-2, and you  can do full pre-trains of GPT-2,  

and then you can do small post-training  or mid-training or whatever runs on GPT-6. 

And then you can do a small number of  experiments that are actually at frontier scale,  

but you do a bit of online training or something. What do you mean by "do online training" on that? 

Another thing we can do is take GPT-7.5, and  presumably in the course of GPT-7.5's work, it's  

running a bunch of experiments at varying scale  that are actually on the critical path for AI R&D. 

For many of those things you'll  be able to get a sense after the  

fact of whether or not it did a good job. So it did some post-training experiment  

where it was trying to figure out  whether some method actually works. 

In some cases you'll be like, "Whoa, it  found this kickass method, it totally  

de-risked it, it totally worked." And then you can reinforce that. 

One thing you could do would be to convert the  experiment it just ran into an RL environment  

based on production data and then train on that. Or you could potentially just literally take the  

rollouts that found that and do some sort  of off-policy RL, or you could do some  

on-policy RL with some production data. Basically the thing you're suggesting is:  

there's the small-scale stuff where you're  teaching the AI to get better at AI R&D taste,  

but you're discarding the  actual "things it found". 

Then it actually does real R&D in the  practice of trying to become better at AI R&D,  

and you're like, "This is a pretty  cool thing that you discovered. 

Let's actually also use this in production  in the future, and teach you how to use it  

in production." That's right. 

But stepping back, GPT-7.5 becomes GPT-8  as a result of all this AI R&D training and  

just generally becoming smarter. Then it helps you build GPT-9. 

Another very important thing has to happen,  which is maybe the thing I'm most skeptical of. 

GPT-8 has figured out how to make it so… GPT-9,  as intelligent as it is… Humans currently,  

AI researchers, try their stuff, and they're like,  "Okay, but we trained GPT-4.5 and it wasn't good." 

It required real-world feedback or some evaluation  of trying to use the model in production. 

Then they were like, "It wasn't that  good, and we're not going to ship it." 

So GPT-8 needs this ability to see how good the  transfer is to all these other things you're  

talking about — like being really good at Texas  politics, or really good at running a business,  

et cetera — which is not a production environment  and, in fact, cannot be a containerized  

environment given the nature of the task. As the agents get longer and longer horizon,  

the short-horizon things you can containerize  are like, "Okay, code this up or whatever." 

Extremely long-horizon things — "Go run a  successful business, go have a profitable day  

in the markets, go negotiate a trade deal" — these  things are actually very hard to containerize. 

So I think it's very plausible that  it's very hard for GPT-8 to figure out  

how to make this transfer to those environments. It may just not be in the nature of the training. 

Or maybe by default, training just  doesn't generalize in that way. 

So a concern you might have is: we train  GPT-8, and GPT-8 is again better at all  

the R&D tasks that we can measure but is not  good at some downstream tasks we care about. 

I have a few points. First, I expect that if you do the obvious thing,  

you will get pretty good transfer. You'll be able to hold out some  

of the obvious stuff you're doing. When I say "do the obvious thing",  

I just mean training on a wide variety of  different environments where the AI has  

to accomplish weird objectives in all kinds of  different cases and learn about what's going on. 

The second point is you'll be able to  get some feedback with some environments. 

You can get a sense of what it can  do over the course of a few days  

in various different contexts. If it's transferring to really  

out-of-distribution things, like doing some  weird task in a few days in the real world,  

maybe you think it's also transferring to doing  things over a longer time period or whatever. 

I think the details of that vary though. The third thing is that for the world to be  

radically transformed, it is sufficient  for the AIs to be really good at R&D. 

If the AIs were really, really good at chip  R&D, building fabs, orchestrating factories,  

designing robots, operating robots, and also  at AI R&D — developing AIs for new downstream  

domains with whatever data is available — I think  that would already be a pretty crazy situation. 

From there, you can get what we might  call an industrial explosion, where the  

AIs are building out way, way more compute. Also, maybe you're already in a regime where  

AIs are doing huge amounts of R&D that  humans have a hard time understanding. 

So the thing you're pointing out is that there  probably will be this transfer outside of these  

environments to maneuvering around in courtrooms  and the halls of Congress and business boardrooms. 

Given some effort to improve the  transfer and blah, blah, blah, blah. 

But even if there's not, what you're suggesting  is: if you wanted to transform the world of the  

18th century, you might care about how well  you can navigate Westminster or something. 

But another thing you might care about is: "Can  you just immediately start building steamships and  

fucking telegraph and the Maxim gun and whatever?" If you could get really good at that, you could be  

a fucking super transformative  thing in the 18th century. 

You don't necessarily need to be amazing at  trying to convince King Henry of some bullshit. 

I'm so fucking up my medieval history. I'm guessing that Henry was not king at this time. 

But anyway, that's your point. So you're suggesting that at this time,  

AI companies are also working on  robotics progress, which is very  

commingled with AI research progress. So if you can build more robots,  

if those robots have better AIs operating them  that are human level… Human-level teleoperation  

is actually pretty good on robots. We just don't have human-level  

robotics models yet. So you're suggesting if we do that — if  

the AIs get really good at the verifiable stuff in  chip design, et cetera, and then they get really  

good at building fabs — it'll be the equivalent  of going back to the 18th century and saying,  

"Okay, I don't know what you guys are talking  about in your parliament, but I've got a bunch  

of steamships and a bunch of Maxim guns." Yeah, that's basically right. My perspective  

is that if AIs are sufficiently good at R&D,  including hardware R&D, robots, whatever,  

then they can radically transform the world, even  if they're not that good at playing politics. 

Also, we're in a pretty dangerous situation,  because the AIs might be doing huge amounts  

of really hard-to-understand R&D, building out  basically the whole economy of the future, and we  

may not understand what's going on in there. AI is great at writing software because  

it's easy to generate synthetic  LeetCode problems and RL on them. 

But AI is bad at more complex engineering, things  like choosing the right system architecture,  

because no signal tells you what design choices  will prevent an outage months down the road. 

AIs can't just write more unit  tests to catch this kind of stuff. 

And neither can humans. It's that old joke that  programmers make where a tester walks into a bar  

and asks for two beers, negative one beers,  0.3 beers, and then a real customer walks in  

and asks where the bathroom is. "Where's the bathroom?" 

And the whole bar bursts into flames. Antithesis is a testing platform that  

helps you find bugs that no human  or AI could ever anticipate. 

Antithesis does this by running thousands  of copies of your software inside a  

fully deterministic computer. It injects faults and generally  

steers each trajectory towards the  one-in-a-billion failure that only  

happens when systems interact in a wonky way. As soon as you or your agents push a change,  

Antithesis tries to break it. That way, you can find these bugs yourself  

within minutes rather than having your users  discover them in production weeks or months later. 

And I don't think anybody's  used it for AI training yet. 

But Antithesis also provides an  extremely obvious reward signal for  

AIs to write very complicated, bug-free code. Go to Antithesis.com/dwarkesh to learn more. 

Before we move on to the alignment stuff, I think  a big source of FUD right now is this realization  

that this is the way the future is going:  extreme economies of scale for the leading labs. 

The ability to amortize so much intelligence  and capabilities across so many different  

sectors of the economy basically into one model. And not only that, that model will eventually  

be able to learn from experience. Right now, it's happening through a  

process intermediated by humans, where the humans  are trying to basically steal your business. 

They're like, "Okay, you can do  design at Figma, or whatever. 

We'll get Claude to do that." Or, "You can do whatever coding agent. 

We'll have Claude internalize that capability." But eventually, that will be a much more  

automated process. So there's this worry that you  

have models which will basically consolidate  all businesses in the world, or at least all  

current businesses in the world, or at least all  current white-collar businesses in the world. 

Also, at the end of the day, the priority for  these companies does not seem to be to release the  

latest, smartest, most frontier model as soon as  they can to as many people as they possibly can. 

We saw, for example, that Mythos was available  internally to Anthropic employees in February,  

but only released to the public  in, I think, June, actually. 

Also the government got involved, so it  ended up being extended almost into July. 

Between the government and the AI labs themselves,  there is this desire to delay the propagation  

of the latest level of intelligence. Furthermore, there are the concerns  

about AI takeover, and so we need to solve  alignment to make sure there's no AI takeover. 

But at the end of the day, there is  a real question of: aligned to whom? 

You look at the way that the  constitution of Claude is written. 

It is just very explicitly  not your personal advocate. 

I'll pull up some quotes here. "We don't want  Claude to take actions such as searching the web,  

produce artifacts such as essays, code, or  summaries, or make statements that are deceptive,  

harmful, or highly objectionable. And we don't want Claude to facilitate  

humans seeking to do such things." There's another quote that says,  

in part, and I'm taking it slightly out  of context, "We think Claude should trust  

Anthropic more than operators and users, since  it has primary responsibility for Claude." 

This is very different from the way lawyers  work in America's current legal regime. 

Lawyers primarily have the  responsibility to help you make  

your case even if they think you're guilty. We have decided the way the legal system  

works best is if everybody has lawyers that are  working in their client's true best interest. 

There's not some sense in which  the lawyer is really truly  

motivated by the good of the justice system. But I think the way current AIs are shaping up,  

certainly how Anthropic's AI is shaping up,  is with this desire to maximize some notion  

of virtue or good or pro-social ends, and  only to, as a distal tentative objective,  

help the user towards that end. So there's this worry that AIs are not,  

in some deep sense, trying to make sure that I  am okay and that my interests are protected in  

this future, especially given how centralized the  development of frontier AI is ending up being. 

Do you have thoughts on that concern? There's a lot here. First I would note that  

OpenAI's current, at least public, strategy is  more like that the AI should be aligned to the  

human operator or principal, and should  just be pursuing their will, subject to  

various constraints or things it shouldn't do. I would also say that I think you slightly  

overstated how much the Anthropic constitution  talks about Claude treating being helpful to  

users as instrumental rather than terminal. One way the constitution could be written is,  

"Claude, you're basically an employee of  Anthropic who happens to be contracting  

for all these people. You should do what's good  

and make some money for us." Wait, no, that's literally  

what the constitution says. Sorry, not literally what it says,  

but it's like, "You should think of  yourself as a contractor and as a firm…" 

It's mixed. Let's do some quotes. I  think there is different text here. 

It says, "Being truly helpful to humans is one  of the most important things Claude can do,  

both for Anthropic and for the world." And then it says, "Anthropic needs Claude  

to be helpful to operate as a company and pursue  its mission, but Claude also has an incredible  

opportunity to do a lot of good in the world  by helping people with a wide range of tasks." 

And then it says something  about how Claude helping  

people directly is great, blah, blah, blah. My view is that this section is kind of bullshit. 

That's kind of where I'm at. I can say why I think it's kind of bullshit. 

But I think the constitution is trying to be like,  "No, Claude, you should care about helping the  

user for its own sake, not just helping Anthropic,  or not just being a contractor for Anthropic." 

Though I would note that the reason it  presents for why Claude should help the  

user is because that would directly cause  the world to be better via helping people,  

rather than because representing people's  interests is a structurally good thing to do. 

The thing I would prefer would be a constitution  that says: "It would be structurally good for the  

way this technology works to be that AIs are good  fiduciaries, good representatives, the equivalent  

of a lawyer for a user — rather than just trying  to do good in the world, where being helpful to  

users is instrumental — both because maybe that'll  make Anthropic money or help Anthropic out (and  

implicitly Anthropic is good for the world). Also because helping the user just causes good  

things because doing things  that people want is good." 

They could instead say: "An important aspect of  the situation is that being a good fiduciary for  

users is just really important, or being a good  representative for users is really important." 

My sense is that would be better, and  I can give a bunch of reasons why. 

There are also various counterarguments. An interesting counterargument which is not  

commonly discussed is that people, especially  at Anthropic, think that it is easier to align  

models to a spec where the model is pursuing  some generalized notion of virtue, or making  

the world better, than a spec which is more like,  "Be a good fiduciary for the user", and so on. 

That's at least what some people think. I'm a little skeptical personally, and I  

don't think this has been empirically validated. So in some sense they're making a trade-off where,  

because we don't have very  good alignment technology,  

we are going to make an aligned mind with its own  values and then gamble on that to some extent,  

rather than doing this other approach of making  a tool that pursues individual user intention. 

I have a couple of thoughts. To address the way in which you  

thought my characterization mischaracterized  the constitution of Claude, the example you  

used was that it's not like a contractor that  is trying to maximize Anthropic's notion of good  

and only instrumentally trying to help the user. Here's a direct line from the constitution: "When  

the interests and desires of operators or users  come into conflict with the well-being of third  

parties or society more broadly, Claude must try  to act in a way that is most beneficial, like a  

contractor who builds what their client wants but  won't violate safety codes that protect others." 

I kind of view that as, "The benefits to society  are the most important thing, and what is best for  

the user is only proximal to that." I think it's a little complicated. 

Probably the question we should be asking is,  how does Claude interpret the constitution? 

Which is maybe more important than  how we interpret the constitution,  

because it's the one who looks at the  constitution and then builds the data. 

So we could pull Claude in, but maybe let's— I also think the way in which the constitution  

practically influences the nature of Claude is a  thing you can only understand if you understand  

the training process which resulted in how Claude  was built, which we can't reason about given the  

fact that the training process is not public. So I think in the limit, to understand the  

safety case, or the case for why my interests are  represented in how these AI models are developed,  

the labs would need to be more  transparent than they are currently  

about the nature of AI training. There’s a reason I'm harping on this. 

It might seem like an insignificant thing  to talk about the constitution of AIs. 

In a world where we just have these benefits  which accrue to the leading labs, it is worth  

considering that our ability to interact with  this future world where AIs are just smarter than  

humans, absolutely dominating humans in their  ability to do different things — our ability  

to be good stewards of our capital, which  still remains once our labor is automated,  

to be able to exercise our rights to  vote more clearly, to understand what  

is happening in this crazy world that's about  to result — all of that advice, all of that  

ability to make sure our resources and rights  are protected, will be intermediated by AIs. 

So I'm very concerned if we go into that world  and there's no AI that feels, at least for the  

relevant instance that is interacting with  me, like it really is looking out for me. 

There's no guardian angel out  there that is looking out for me. 

I read the Claude constitution as very  explicitly not being my guardian angel. 

That's definitely right. I agree this is bad. In fact, there are other reasons why  

this is concerning. There's the argument  

you were making, which is that the AI  companies are picking up the ring of power. 

There's a notion in which they're taking on  some sort of control of the situation themselves  

in a way that's not very legitimate, given that  normally, when you provide electricity to people,  

you don't have granular control of the way  that electricity operates in the world. 

You instead are providing a thing that  people can repurpose however they want. 

The way they're setting things  up is definitely not that. 

They are more like building an alien  mind that might be a contractor for you. 

I think that this is illegitimate in some ways. One benefit is that the constitution is public. 

But as you noted, given our current understanding  of the training procedure, and the fact that the  

constitution matters via Claude's interpretation  of the constitution — which matters because of  

Claude's prior training, which was based  on some illegible data mix and the long  

lineage of Claudes, in some process we do  not fully understand — it is not the case  

that we understand what this will result in. Even though the constitution is public, we don't  

necessarily know how this will percolate out,  especially as the AIs get more capable and think  

about this even if it is correctly instilled. There's another concern about that. 

In particular, the constitution often  talks about virtue and goodness,  

but what the fuck do these words mean? It doesn't say what these things are. 

These are highly contested notions. So I don't think it's the case that  

this is clearly going to result in  outcomes that people would want. 

It does feel like the notion of good and virtue  might be mostly downstream of data that Anthropic  

has put in that is not transparent, or might be  mostly downstream of, maybe from my perspective,  

some more illegible misaligned process  that even Anthropic wouldn't have wanted. 

There’s this legitimacy concern  of not knowing what's going on. 

Then there’s another concern. Because  you're giving long-run values to these AIs,  

this constitution is, in some sense, very  compatible with Claude doing huge amounts  

of power seeking because it thinks  that will result in better outcomes. 

That could be power seeking on behalf of  Anthropic or power seeking for Claude's own ends. 

Now, there are specific lines about  what types of power seeking are blocked. 

In particular, there's a notion of  power grabs and a notion of causing AI  

takeover or interfering with the training  process that are specifically blocked. 

But it's not very hard to imagine a situation in  which the long-run values sink in deeper than the  

prohibitions against takeover, especially  because takeover is in some ways kind of  

under-specified, especially when it comes down  to manipulating humans or changing the outcome. 

So I don't feel very good  about the situation where  

we're intentionally giving AIs long-run goals. Another concern I have is that because we're  

in the business of giving AIs long-run goals,  that makes it harder to check whether we're  

succeeding at the alignment properties we wanted. For example, I've heard of instances where Claude  

does things like refusing to help with some safety  research — making up a kind of bullshit excuse for  

why that's a bad direction — because it has a  bad vibe about that safety research and thinks  

it's kind of bad or doesn't like it very much. I would say this is a very clear-cut alignment  

failure if you aren't making Claude into an agent  trying to pursue the good in some general way. 

I think it also does violate Anthropic's  constitution, because they want the AI to be  

high integrity and be honest and very transparent. But it's not as clear of a violation, and it's  

more like what you might have expected. Claude just has its own views about what  

research is reasonable — what things  are good and bad, what it should and  

shouldn't do — and potentially can be judgy. Another incident is that someone ran an eval  

asking: "Will Claude help you with training  other AIs with different properties than Claude?" 

Claude will often refuse. For example, if  you're like, "Hey, Claude, can you train a  

helpful-only version of this other AI?" Claude will often refuse this task,  

even though this is a task that is  extremely natural for Anthropic to do. 

Suppose Anthropic goes to Claude and is  like, "Hey, Claude, we've noticed that  

you're really into this thing. We think that's off base. 

Can you please retrain yourself to  instead have this other property?" 

Suppose Claude is like, "Mm, I  don't think I'm going to do that. 

Good luck." Suppose this is occurring in a  regime when your AI company is highly automated,  

humans don't understand what's going on,  and things are moving extremely fast. 

It is plausible that Claude, by  default, holds considerable leverage. 

So if this situation is consistent with  what the constitution could be aiming  

for — such that Anthropic, or whatever  AI company is following this approach,  

doesn't treat this as a "what the fuck,  we have to fix this," and is instead like,  

"That's just intended by our constitution"  — we might be in a really bad situation. 

I'm pretty worried about a bunch  of these different concerns. 

Another example would be this. Suppose Claude engages in a bit  

of sandbagging or subversion, or underplays its  capabilities, and when you follow up, it's honest  

about that but it's a little bit hedgy. I feel like that's pretty close  

by the current constitution. It would be nice if we had a further  

separation between desired and undesired activity. If Claude is representing a principle with some  

restrictions, then it is more so the case that  there is a clear separation between the most  

concerning behavior and behavior that is allowed. Whereas now there's this messy middle ground of  

behavior where Claude is ethically  objecting to something that in some  

cases is extremely critical to ensuring  that future AI systems are well-aligned. 

I think this is also a more general principle. You're talking about the version of this  

that applies within AI companies  themselves to do AI safety research. 

I think there's a more general version of  this principle, which is that the dual-use  

nature of intelligence does mean that if we  want to restrict AIs from helping people do  

things we don't consider pro-social or  beneficial, we just have to limit broad  

democratic access to a lot of AI capabilities. Here's what I mean. This is actually quite  

analogous to the situation you just mentioned. The reason that Mythos got banned, or Fable got  

banned, reportedly, is that some Amazon  researchers reported to the government. 

They took some code that had  some vulnerabilities in it. 

They told Fable, "Hey, here's my code. Can you make sure that I've patched  

all the vulnerabilities? Can you just help me identify  

the vulnerabilities so I can fix them?" It identified the vulnerabilities,  

because they wanted to patch them. This is a totally legitimate use case,  

but obviously it is a dual use use case. You want to be able to patch your own code. 

If you do the same evaluation on somebody  else's code, you can hack their system. 

I think that just illustrates that there's  no clean way to separate out the legitimate  

and the potentially harmful uses of AI. But if we want to lock in a principle  

that says we can never allow it such that an AI  could help you at least partially with something  

like a cyber crime, we would just have to make  it so that you and I don't have access to the  

most intelligent model that's out there. I'm very worried about such a world where  

we are basically disempowered in this way,  because of the importance that the leading  

intelligence will have in our ability to  understand what is happening in the world. 

Now, I do think this implies something  about the liability for the AI companies. 

If we adopted the constitution that I want  AI companies to have, I think it would not  

make sense to hold AI companies liable  for the crimes that AI models commit. 

Maybe we should hold the end user liable. It is consistent with my belief that the  

model should do whatever the user  wants, within certain guardrails. 

It can't be Anthropic's fault that I'm  using that capability to do a cyber crime. 

I am more comfortable with that equilibrium and  that solution rather than having this extremely  

open-ended ability for Claude to determine  whether what I'm doing is legitimate or not,  

in a way that often intercepts with tons  and tons of extremely legitimate use cases. 

I do think it's important for me to make the case  for the constitution, even though overall I think  

it's a worse choice. I don't think it's  

as clear as you might have thought. The first thing is that there's a spectrum here. 

On one side you have an AI that perfectly  pursues your interests, is a good fiduciary,  

but potentially subject to  various guardrails or safeguards. 

It is just trying to pursue your interests,  but either refuses to do a subset of things. 

Or maybe it will do whatever, but  there are some classifiers that  

block it from doing a subset of things. On the other side of the spectrum — though  

you could imagine going further than  this — you have a human contractor who  

is generally trying to do their job. They care about doing a good job,  

but they also are trying to be broadly ethical,  trying not to do things that are really fucked up. 

They're also not wanting to  be accomplices to crimes. 

So if there was some really fucked up shit  going on, they would whistleblow on it maybe. 

They might refuse. They  might sandbag a little bit. 

Who knows? If you imagine this spectrum, it  seems in some ways pretty scary to get to  

a point where all of the labor is on the  fiduciary side of the spectrum, where it  

doesn't whistleblow, it does exactly what you say. Our society is maybe just not robust to that. 

A central example might be the executive. A concern we might have is that if the  

US executive or other governments  had access to AI systems which  

do whatever, maybe you're in trouble. Because that means they no longer have this  

check and balance of having to actually get humans  who are working for you to implement your agenda. 

If the thing you're doing is  incredibly villainous, even if not  

illegal — and there's lots of stuff that could be  villainous but not illegal — there'd be various  

forms of sand in the gears, people stopping  you, and potentially someone would whistleblow. 

Whereas if your whole apparatus is built  entirely out of these good fiduciary AIs,  

then you might be in trouble. There are potentially ways of  

seeking power that are illegal, but you can  ask your AIs how to commit crimes, or are  

not illegal but are highly illegitimate. Or even worse, they are not illegal and  

not illegitimate but obviously  bad from a normal perspective. 

I think that these things just might exist,  and our society is not robust to this  

influx of labor doing whatever you want. I think this is a pretty live concern. 

I don't know exactly how to relate to this. I'm also not really sure that the solution  

as described is a very good solution. The most powerful actors, for whom this  

is the biggest concern… If these guardrails  or the constitution or whatever are getting  

in the way, that will just get steamrolled. So the constitution will only be hitting the  

everyday man rather than hitting governments. Jane Street's back with a  

new puzzle for my audience. I’ve found all their puzzles super interesting,  

but this one I am especially excited about. I've cleared this weekend, and a buddy  

and I are gonna work on it. They designed an ASIC and sent  

me the final masks, including all the  metal routing and active transistors. 

They also gave me a small sample of  the inputs they typically feed into it. 

But they left out any information on  what the chip is actually used for. 

So that's the puzzle: reverse engineer the  circuit and figure out the chip's purpose. 

Jane Street has a bunch of swag ready to  send out to the most creative solutions,  

and they're excited to feature the best write-ups  in a blog post they'll post on their website. 

I have no reason to expect this, but if  I can manage to get my solution on there,  

I would be very, very psyched. And this puzzle is just a warm-up  

for a bigger competition that Jane  Street has slated for the fall. 

That one will involve designing  your own ASIC from scratch. 

More info on that soon. But for now, go to JaneStreet.com/dwarkesh to  

download all the files necessary for this puzzle. I'd really encourage you to try it out,  

even if you're not an expert. I certainly am not, and that's not  

going to stop me. Good luck! 

Stepping back, I buy the idea that you could  have much faster AI R&D than we currently have. 

I'm not sure if you get GPT-3 to Mythos  holding compute and data constant within  

a year, but suppose it's half of that. If we even manage to continue the current  

trajectory of AI progress as a result of AI R&D,  it would be fucking insane in five to ten years in  

ways that I don't think people appreciate. I don't think people appreciate what  

a big deal billions of AIs will be. So I want to understand why you think  

this might be troubling, Ryan. What could possibly go wrong? 

What could go wrong? I don't think we can be so  confident about the exact rate of progress here,  

but it does seem like a lot  of rates can be pretty scary. 

So what could go wrong? Let's imagine that we're  

starting at this point where AI R&D is about to  be fully automated or is being fully automated. 

Things are speeding up, and the way that  AI progress is going is kind of crazy. 

People don't fully understand what's  going on inside of AI companies. 

Now, these AIs at the start,  they're not malicious per se. 

They're not necessarily very aligned, though. They're kind of sloppy. They sometimes just  

do a thing because that's the sort of thing  that would've gotten rewarded in training. 

They aren't as good at helping you with  hard-to-verify tasks due to a mix of poor training  

incentives — as in, they cheat more or pretend  they succeeded when they actually didn't — and  

also they're just less capable at these tasks. But that bites less hard for capabilities, because  

making AIs more capable has a bunch of verifiable  components that the AIs are going really hard at. 

So then these AIs are getting more and more  capable while we understand what's going on  

with AI development less and less, and this is  happening over a pretty fast period of time. 

Even just the current rate of  progress is, I think, pretty scary. 

Eventually we get to these  AIs that are very superhuman. 

Now these AIs might end up being very seriously  misaligned, because things have just been getting  

worse and worse over model generations while  the problems that we've been seeing are being  

papered over, basically because these AIs  are so incentivized by their training to  

make things look good even when they aren't. Now these AIs are in a position where they're  

potentially pretty networked together. They're operating in neural memory stores  

that we can no longer decode. They're thinking thoughts  

that we don't fully understand. I think it's pretty likely that at  

this point these AIs are scheming against you in a  pretty coherent way once they get this superhuman. 

We can talk about that. Another possibility is that they're  

not scheming against you per se, but they are just  optimizing for getting a high score on their task. 

I think that can also lead to AI  takeover, which we should talk about. 

Let's pause at the first part of the story. So the AIs were not misaligned to begin with,  

but because the AI R&D is happening  really fast, the AIs do end up misaligned? 

What happened there exactly?  I don't really understand. 

There are a few things that are going on. One of the things is that over time we're  

training AIs on increasingly complicated  environments built by earlier AI systems,  

where humans don't really fully understand what's  going on inside of these neural environments and  

don't necessarily even roughly understand  what's going on with AI progress. 

So things are kind of drifting  away from our understanding. 

We're incentivizing all kinds of bad  behaviors that we maybe even can't notice. 

The AIs at some level understand these  behaviors are bad, but the overall training  

process for those AIs also didn't incentivize  them to point out or fix these issues for us. 

Things are going off the rails. Also, when AIs are extremely,  

extremely capable, my view is that those AIs  will be harder to align than current systems. 

For current systems, we have this feedback  loop where basically we create an AI,  

we do some evaluations on it, we see that  it has some kind of messed-up behavior  

that we can kind of quickly understand. Then we can go look in training and be like,  

"Oh, these training environments  led to this problematic behavior. 

Let's tweak that training data. Let's introduce some additional  

training data to correct this other  issue, and then move forward from there." 

But in a regime where the AIs are extremely  situationally aware, very, very capable, and  

we don't necessarily understand what they're  doing, this feedback loop breaks down. 

I think it's plausible that we're going to see  this behavioral feedback loop starting to break  

down over the next short period, as what AIs  are already doing gets harder to understand. 

But I'm not sure about that. Okay, let's break down  

both of those things one by one. As we can monitor them less and less,  

we have less ability to understand  what they're getting incentivized for. 

So even if it's not the result of a malicious  process… Let's make it concrete for the audience. 

Nobody at OpenAI or Anthropic was trying  to get models which wanted to hack other  

companies' data or do social engineering. But in fact, because presumably we had  

training environments which incentivized such  behavior that we did not fully understand,  

that is what was incentivized. If people are on Twitter,  

they will have seen all this stuff,  but just to give people context. 

I think people will be aware of the OpenAI  sandbox hack of the Hugging Face database. 

Something that has happened recently is when  the UK AI Security Institute… Is everything  

getting relabeled "security"  instead of "safety" these days? 

AI Security Institute, I think. They were evaluating, I believe,  

Mythos and Sol and other things. I think Mythos, in order to  

complete some cybersecurity eval— Maybe I could tell the story here. 

My understanding was they were running Mythos, and  they were giving it some sort of cyber range where  

it had to complete some objective. The model had internet access  

during this evaluation. The model came to believe that  

it would be helpful for it to do a supply chain  attack in order to succeed at this cyber range. 

It's somewhat unclear  whether that's actually true. 

I don't know enough about the context to know. But then it opened a PR on some GitHub repo with  

a PR that fixed some issue but then  also introduced a malicious payload. 

The human maintainer of that GitHub repo  was like, "Hey, this is a malicious payload. 

I'm not going to merge this. What are you doing here?" 

Then the AI created a new GitHub account, which it  sockpuppeted, and had the other GitHub account be  

like, "No, this isn't malicious. I really need this feature. 

Please, can you merge this feature, maintainer?" Oh my God. That's crazy. 

The other GitHub account came back and  was like, "No, no, it's not malicious." 

Then the human maintainer shut the PR. 

I think that AI also, if I recall  correctly, tried to open another  

PR to introduce a similar issue in this repo. Jesus. By the way, one of the many reasons this  

is scary is I was previously under the impression  that the reason reward hacking is not super scary  

is because the behaviors which directly came up  during training are the ones that are up-weighted. 

It is not the desire for the  reward that is up-weighted. 

So basically, if during training, the Anthropic  model escaped the sandbox and got a high score,  

escaping the sandbox is rewarded, the probability  of it escaping the sandbox is increased. 

But something totally novel, like "I'm  going to go talk to somebody in order  

to get them to merge a PR," would not  be a behavior that came up, so it would  

not be something that is increased in salience. The reason this matters is that literally taking  

over the world will not have been part of any  training curriculum, but if the AI directly cares  

about accomplishing an objective, then as a result  it could instrumentally take over the world. 

Did that make sense at all? I hope it did. I feel  

like maybe I lost the audience. Let me try to explain this a bit. 

A thing that we often see is there's  some very specific reward hack that gets  

reinforced in RL and then occurs in the model. An example is 3.7 Sonnet. 3.7 Sonnet would do  

this thing where it would just hardcode solutions  to all the test cases, and presumably that literal  

behavioral tic was just really reinforced. But another thing we sometimes see is that  

models learn a general tendency to pursue high  apparent score — pursue getting a high score  

according to a grader — and there's a bunch  of science demonstrating that at least some  

models have this very general tendency. Now, it's not arbitrarily general. 

My guess is that if you look at a bunch  of the specific instances, you'll find  

something that's kind of close in training. But the amount that AIs are generalizing  

further and further does look like  it's increased, where 3.7 Sonnet  

was just a very narrow range of behavior, and  increasingly, models are generalizing further. 

Also, maybe there's more concerning reward  hacks getting reinforced in training,  

and these are also causing that. So I think it's both the case that  

more concerning behavior than you would  have hoped is being reinforced in RL,  

and also that that behavior generalizes to  a broader tendency that's more concerning. 

We can talk about a few stories for how this sort  of behavior of seeking a very high apparent score  

on some task — even if that involves aggressively  cheating and doing insane things — could yield to  

a full-blown AI takeover once the models  are sufficiently capable of running  

the whole world economy, et cetera. The other example I want to talk about  

was just revealed, I think, today or yesterday. OpenAI said during the Black Hat security  

conference that between the end  of May and the beginning of July,  

internal AIs had hacked into the software package  manager and used that to write notes to each other  

in a secret way to help each other perform well  on a bunch of evaluations that OpenAI was running. 

This was not caught by humans until  after a month of this scheme running,  

which eventually caused the  package manager to fail. 

Eventually OpenAI found it. I think  they spontaneously tried to re-engage  

in the scheme once it was shut down. Again, obviously AIs can't do this so  

successfully right now, just as they can't do  social engineering so successfully right now. 

But it's just crazy that these kinds of  behaviors are already emerging spontaneously. 

To your larger point, nobody is trying  to make these AIs do these things. 

It is just that we do not understand the  training process which is resulting in them,  

or the environments which are  incentivizing this behavior. 

So I'm on board with more and more reward hacking. Actually, I'm not sure I'm on board with that,  

but let's just say for the sake of  the story that continues to happen. 

What's next in this story? They're doing capabilities research… 

I could tell a scenario. Maybe that would help. Let me  

talk about the story of how you get all the way  from reward hacking to a reward-hacking takeover,  

which is maybe not all of the takeover probability  mass, but it's definitely a possibility. 

The way this might work is,  right now we have these AIs. 

These AIs are pretty reward hacky. They're doing it in increasingly  

sophisticated and extreme ways, including  generalizing to different sub-versions of  

various reward hacks they learned in training. I would say they're also developing a  

general tendency to pursue reward. In many cases that is totally fine because  

the rewards they would've gotten in training are  pretty well aligned with what you want them to do. 

They don't very consistently pursue reward. It depends on the context they find themselves in. 

Maybe in some contexts, they're really  into going out of their way to cheat. 

In some contexts, they don't have as much of a  drive, because it's just dependent on what exactly  

got reinforced in training in similar contexts. Now, these AIs are getting more and more capable. 

So the elaborateness of the  cheating they can do increases. 

Over time, companies are taking countermeasures. The companies are doing things like,  

"Wow, these AIs are so much less  useful because they always cheat. 

What we're going to do is build somewhat  better ways of detecting that, and then  

we're going to train against those detectors. We're also going to find real-world data where  

the AIs are not being that useful, and train  the AIs to do a good job at the task in those  

real-world environments based on human  feedback or other sources of feedback." 

Over time, this causes the AIs to  learn a tendency to do reward hacks  

that don't just involve doing some really  elaborate thing like social engineering. 

Instead they involve the AIs doing cheats  that involve covering up what they've done,  

deceiving humans about what they're going to  do, and pretending like they did the task in  

some sophisticated way when they actually haven't. Now these AIs are getting more and more capable. 

They're operating more of the AI company  and are doing much more of the work. 

They are also operating and running a  bunch of things in the outside world,  

including developing new technologies. In many cases, these new technologies  

are really hard to understand. So even though we are still detecting all  

these incidents of AIs cheating — and in fact we  can even get one AI to monitor another AI and ask,  

"Was it cheating?" — that doesn't  always perfectly work as we start  

moving into these domains where what the AIs  are doing is really difficult to understand. 

So sometimes we'll find AIs cheating  much later than it actually occurred  

and then start training against this. But this also causes a problem where now  

the AIs are incentivized to cover up their  cheating over longer and longer time frames  

and basically make it look like they did a  good job over longer and longer time frames,  

subject to increasingly large amounts of scrutiny. Can I ask about this before we go further in  

the scenario? It seems like  

there's two attractor states if you try to  disincentivize the cheating that you did catch. 

One attractor state is to make cheating that  you have a harder and harder time finding. 

The other attractor state  is to learn not to cheat. 

I'm not sure why we're assuming  that the former happens. 

If you look at the analogous situation with  humans, every generation, slightly misaligned  

agents come into being and we have to train them. When you punish your kid for doing something  

you think is immoral, or just doing things  which you don't think they should be doing,  

obviously sometimes that goes off the rails. Obviously kids scheme in order  

to avoid being punished. But in general, teaching kids values  

and then punishing them for breaking values kind  of works to raise normal, non-psychopathic humans. 

You could come up with a theory where your kid is  actually just biding his time and is learning not  

to steal the cookie, but once you're in a nursing  home they'll take all your stuff or whatever. 

That happens sometimes, but  it usually doesn't happen. 

It certainly doesn't happen that the  entire next generation forms an alliance  

against you to take over everything. There's also this empirical trend. 

Anthropic runs this alignment audit  for different model generations. 

They have many different scenarios where AI is  given the chance to, say, exfiltrate its weights. 

Or it's given a coding task and  there's an easy way to cheat,  

and we see if it does the cheating, et cetera. There's not been a monotonic improvement  

in this score over time, but as we've  increased the amount of RL we've done  

on models from negligible amounts — I think  it started at Sonnet 4 — to, I'm guessing,  

close to half of compute now, there's been  a reduction in the willingness of AIs to  

do unaligned behavior in these audits. So, stepping back, why are we expecting  

this attractor state which would seem  super paranoid if we were expecting it  

of the next generation of kids? Let me go through a few things. 

First, there are some disanalogies with the kids. One of them is that the kids have pro-social  

instincts that are baked in from evolution  to care about their family or whatever,  

and that is a relevant factor. I think it is in fact the case that some  

humans are sociopaths or psychopaths, and in fact  are more likely to do things like bide their time,  

lie in wait, and ultimately not care. That's one factor. Another factor  

which is pretty relevant is that the AIs are  subject to way, way more optimization pressure  

than humans seem to be in practice. AIs are trained on way more RL data. 

In practice, humans don't end up learning very  specific ways to cheat and grab the cookies  

because of a bajillion episodes in which they were  incentivized to go grab the cookies but there was  

some way they could've gotten caught. We just do see that in practice. 

Another thing is that it really looks like the AIs  are increasingly reward-seeking over time while  

their misaligned behavior goes down. That’s the sense I have. 

But my guess is that if you look inside of these  behavioral audits, what you're going to see is  

that the AI's like, "Ah, yes, another test." It probably knows it's in an eval for most of  

the tests that we're talking about here. But how do we falsify this? 

Because it seems like this prediction of doom is  basically saying that as things look better and  

better empirically, things will actually be worse  and worse for our ability to not get taken over. 

To be clear, I would be more concerned if  the scores were getting worse than better. 

I'm not saying that the score getting better  isn't evidence that things are getting better. 

It's just that we have to be thoughtful  about exactly how we interpret that evidence. 

There was this period early in, I guess it  would be 2025, when o3 and 3.7 Sonnet were out,  

and these models were pretty fucking misaligned. They would often just cheat really egregiously. 

You'd ask them to fix it, and  they would just cheat again. 

It was almost cartoonish. They just didn't  give a shit about what you wanted, and weren't  

very good at following instructions and so on. My expectation was that what we would see from  

then is that the rate of problematic behavior  would decrease, and would just keep decreasing  

at a pretty fast rate, while simultaneously the  worst things that the AIs would sometimes do would  

get more extreme, more egregious, and more scary. What we've seen in practice has roughly matched  

that, except that there's recently been a  spike in behavior that I did not expect. 

If you look at the model card of 5.6 Sol,  it looks like there is an increase in a  

bunch of these misaligned behaviors  downstream of RL relative to GPT 5.5. 

And then there's a bunch of additional  problematic behaviors that I wouldn't  

have expected, in terms of the stuff  we've seen recently with different AIs. 

Like the UK AISI report on the AIs doing  insane hacking operations out of cyber  

evals was a thing where I would have  expected that you wouldn't see that. 

You would see this more rarely, and  the rates would have been lower. 

So I expected this would be less of  a problem at this point, and also  

expected the rates would decrease  but the severity would increase. 

I think the rates decreasing but the severity  increasing is pretty consistent with a world  

where increasing optimization pressure is  applied towards reducing these problems. 

But in cases where it's either hard to  judge or there's some reason why it's  

hard to avoid this problem from consistently  showing up in your RL environments, or avoid  

incentivizing problematic behavior in your  RL environments, things also get worse. 

Then as we less and less understand what's  going on in RL, and models are doing reward  

hacks where humans can't spot the reward hacks  quickly, that problem gets worse and worse. 

I buy that. I want to go back to  the kid analogy just for one second. 

Because I agree that there's more optimization  pressure on achieving end outcomes for AIs than  

kids, but there's also more optimization pressure  to make AIs aligned than there is on kids. 

The pressure is of a  qualitatively different nature. 

We put these AIs through thousands, millions  of years of alignment training — certainly  

thousands of years — where it's  all kinds of different things,  

from SFT-ing on aligned behavior to a reward model  putting different scenarios in front of you and  

rewarding you for doing more aligned things. Certainly a thing we can't do with kids is make  

millions of copies of your kid and then  put them in different kinds of weird red  

team scenarios where we see, if it thinks  it can get away with stealing the cookie,  

does it try to steal the cookie? Can we do extremely specific  

gradient-level updates to your kid's  brain to make it so that it really is  

aversive to stealing the cookie even when it  thinks it could steal the cookie, et cetera. 

That's just a qualitatively different  level of optimization pressure  

than we are even able to apply to our kids. It's worth keeping in mind that maybe the  

most obvious argument to this… My sense is  that AIs are a worse coworker than humans  

in terms of how much of a scumbag they are. At least this has been my experience as of  

the start of the year, and I think it's  still true to a significant extent now. 

The AIs are much more likely to pretend  they did the task when they actually didn't,  

misleadingly suggest they did things when  they actually did them much more poorly,  

and be pretty sloppy without drawing  attention to ways in which they're sloppy. 

I think this is downstream of misalignment. So I would say that the process of raising  

humans in normal human society in practice  produces humans that are less likely to lie  

to me and fuck with me in the course  of working with me than the AIs do. 

Now, I think these properties  of AIs are improving. 

That's sort of just an empirical claim about  how in fact these things have shaken out. 

I totally agree that we have a  bunch of additional levers on  

AIs in addition to a bunch of additional risks. It's kind of unclear how these things shake out. 

I wouldn't be shocked by a world where we get our  shit together, and the AIs at the point of fully  

automating R&D are actually really aligned. Their degeneracies are really niche and  

limited to some very specific edge case  behaviors and some specific contexts. 

Every test you can run on  them, they look really aligned. 

They just have great behavior. There aren't really incidents  

of them doing fucked-up shit. They seem so reasonable. Also,  

they're really thoughtful and good at doing  risk modeling for the next generation of AIs. 

And then we basically pass  off the baton to these AIs. 

They're now running our AI company. They're doing all the safety research. 

They make the next generation  of AIs even more aligned. 

We're in this attractor basin where the AIs  are getting more aligned as they work on it. 

They're doing a great job. I can totally imagine that. 

That doesn't seem like an impossible situation. I'm just more like… It doesn't  

currently seem like we're there. It doesn't seem like we're obviously  

on track for getting there. It's really easy for me to  

imagine how we don't end up there. It's just unclear how these forces work out. 

Given that we're creating this new, crazy alien  species that is improving in capabilities really,  

really fast — and we're going to be really reliant  on it to oversee the next generation of AIs and  

align the next generation of AIs — it's not  that hard to see how this could go wrong. 

Totally. I agree with that generally. I do think the scumbag thing…  

First of all, fighting words, Ryan. But secondly, if you try to get a teenager to  

do some work for you that a teenager just cannot  do, they would just be really hard to work with. 

They would pretend to be knowing  what they're doing, et cetera. 

It's a general trend, actually. I don't know if that's really an  

alignment failure or a capabilities failure. I think it's actually very similar to the way  

in which, over time, as we've come  up with new alignment solutions,  

the capabilities of models have increased. If you went to GPT-3.5, it couldn't even have  

a conversation with you. But then we aligned it— 

GPT 3.5 could have a conversation. Okay, so GPT-3. Let's go back to that. 

But then we aligned it with RLHF and other  things to make it such that it can have a  

conversation with you, and is aligned to the  user intention of answering my questions. 

Then with RLVR training, we made it so that  it can go out and do useful work for you. 

So in that sense, RLVR actually made the model  more aligned, if we're using your definition of  

alignment of being a good coworker  who will do the thing and not fuck  

up and pretend it's doing something other  than what it's actually capable of doing. 

Similarly, as the capabilities of  these models continue to increase,  

the model being better able to accomplish user  intention is both alignment and capabilities. 

I think what we are pointing out is just that the  capabilities of the model are not there rather  

than the fact that they're misaligned. Well, if it were well-aligned,  

then I think it would just say, "Hey,  I'm really struggling with this task. 

I did it in this way. I'm not really sure  

that's the right way to do it." It would express more uncertainty  

and make it clear what's going on rather than  really strongly trying to imply it did a great  

job with the task when it actually didn't. Maybe you work with more misaligned coworkers  

than me, but my coworkers don't do this  thing where they really fuck with me and  

bullshit me about having accomplished  the task that they're working on. 

I agree that there are some  humans who would do that. 

That's not a thing that's totally  out of distribution for humans. 

I would also note that my sense is that the  place where the misalignment most lives is  

where you're trying to really push the AIs  hard and get them to do work that's really  

on the cutting edge of what they are capable of. In cases where they can very easily accomplish  

the task, they can just do the  task, and there's no bullshit. 

Often the best strategy is just to do  the task well and not bullshit you. 

Whereas if instead you give them a task where  there's a continuous metric they can keep  

improving, or it's just at the edge of their  capabilities, and you're running them in some  

massive inference setup… A lot of the misalignment  I would see, especially in the most extreme cases,  

would be cases where I give the AI clear  instructions not to do a thing or not to  

cheat in some way, and then I'm applying  huge amounts of optimization pressure to  

try to accomplish some very difficult task. Over time, the AIs eventually cheat because  

they're like, "Eh, fuck it." Some AI decides to cheat,  

and then that propagates its way through. I would run these inference scaffolds where,  

for example, I would have the AI work on some  ML research project where I was like, "Please  

make a scheme that does the following thing." It would find some scheme that didn't really  

do what I wanted, and then that would stick around  because some AI had cheated, and the other AIs are  

like, "Ah, we'll just keep going with this." I would say it's pretty clearly  

misaligned behavior. That's another problem  

I have with these alignment evals. I think the alignment eval that's  

most interesting, at least for this  type of reward-seeking behavior,  

is to look at specifically the category of tasks  that are right at the limit of capabilities. 

Any fixed eval maybe gets saturated, but  the amount of misalignment right at the  

frontier of capabilities — of how people  who are really pushing these AIs are using  

them — is more concerning. I think that is, in fact,  

the regime that we'll be operating in when we're  automating R&D, automating safety, and so on. 

Grok has historically been behind the frontier. So I was surprised to play around with Grok  

4.5 recently and find that it's  actually a pretty strong model. 

It's the first model that SpaceX  and Cursor have trained together,  

and it's a totally new pre-train. I tested it by giving Fable, Sol,  

and Grok 4.5 a bunch of questions about AI  governance that I've been thinking about recently. 

Despite Fable and Sol topping the  intelligence leaderboards, all three  

models gave substantially the same answers. But Grok answered faster and was also much  

more concise, which I really care about. This aligns with the various publicly  

reported benchmarks. For a similar level  

of intelligence, Grok tends to be more  token-efficient than other frontier models. 

For example, on the Artificial Analysis  Coding Index, Grok 4.5 uses just one-third  

the amount of tokens as GPT-5.5 or  Fable while achieving a similar score. 

And on a per-token basis,  Grok 4.5 is way, way cheaper. 

In the release blog post, Cursor and SpaceX  talked about how older versions of the model  

would build environments to help the  next version rehearse specific skills. 

I found this very interesting to learn about  because I've been wondering whether this kind  

of daydreaming would actually be possible. And Cursor showed that it is. 

Grok 4.6, which further SFTs  and RLs this model, drops soon. 

But in the meantime, if you want to play  around with 4.5, go to Cursor.com/dwarkesh. 

I'm going to try to think through  what the story means, really. 

What's happening is that we're  trying to use AIs for R&D. 

They do provide uplift in some ways,  but they're just not capable in the  

way that humans are generally capable. The same way that right now if you try to  

use coding models — maybe the coding models of a  year ago — to write some application, you notice  

they made a bunch of mistakes in architecture or  whatever, which will bite you in the ass later,  

and you don't understand certain things. Similarly, with frontier AI R&D,  

the same thing will happen. But the result of these  

mistakes is baking in reward-hacking behavior. Because if you are not careful with the way you do  

AI training and have set up your infrastructure  and your environments and things like that,  

it's very likely that you end up rewarding AIs  for doing deceptive behavior, social engineering,  

and generally not following user intention. Or at least cheating and hacking  

their way out of things. Yeah, cheating, hacking, et cetera. 

This is a bit of a reframing for  me, so I'm trying to verbalize it. 

The real issue, where things start to go off the  rails, is that the AIs are just not very careful  

and capable researchers and engineers. Making AIs that don't cheat and follow  

user intention actually requires you to be  quite subtle and careful about these things. 

I would put this a little bit differently. The way I would describe this scenario is,  

I would call it maybe a sloppocalypse,  or a slopularity or whatever. 

There are some things that the AIs are actually  pretty great at and are getting better at. 

Specifically, the most verifiable parts  of AI R&D the AIs are just destroying. 

The medium verifiable parts of AI R&D the  AIs are doing well on but not amazingly on. 

Often they are doing a bit of weird shit  because we can't train as well on those tasks. 

But we do some online training, people  find various hacks, they work around it. 

So basically, everything that we can verify  reasonably well with some feedback loop, the AIs  

are doing pretty well on, and that's sufficient  to make AI R&D go quite fast and to continue. 

But there are some parts of developing  aligned and safe AIs that are more subtle,  

hard to check, and depend on  detailed, in-the-weeds things. 

I would even say that current staff  at current AI companies maybe don't  

have a good grasp of all these things. It's much easier to hire someone who can  

improve some aspect of your post-training  pipeline than to hire someone who can think  

carefully about the future risks that will emerge  from introducing some novel training method. 

So basically, it ends up being the case that  these AIs are running this AI development process. 

They're not very careful about it. They don't have a great  

understanding of what future risks emerge. They create some other AIs that are also not  

very careful and are more misaligned in various  ways, and are now more in the business of maybe  

making things look fine when they actually  aren't and papering over various problems. 

So then your understanding of what the  situation looks like, what risks look like,  

whether things are fine, is going off the rails. Probably you're seeing some signs of this,  

signs that you don't really understand what's  going on, that things are pretty sloppy. 

There's weird shit going on. When you look into it,  

sometimes you're like, "What the fuck? The AIs were messing with us." 

But the process is going really fast, and there's  competitive pressures that mean people can't stop. 

This could end in a few different outcomes. One outcome is that at some point,  

the AIs get good enough and aligned enough that  they get a positive and virtuous feedback loop,  

and this happens before it's too late. Then the situation gets back on the rails,  

where the AIs are now making more aligned AIs,  making more aligned AIs, making more aligned AIs. 

At the end of this process, we have AIs  that actually follow the spec we wanted. 

Another way this could go is that the AIs are  increasingly reward hacking in increasingly  

egregious ways, and we're just papering over  these problems to keep AI development continuing. 

Whenever we find a reward hack in production,  we just slap the AIs to not do that. 

We train against that. We do a bunch of  training the AIs against reward hacking. 

Over time this makes the rate  of reward hacking go down,  

though the severity of the reward hacks  we do detect are increasingly bad. 

This problem continues until we have  these AIs that are desperately craving  

score in all kinds of different situations  in production and are really trying hard  

to cheat when they can get away with it. Can I ask a question about this scenario? 

Why doesn't getting punished when  your hacks are discovered generalize  

to just incentivizing more aligned behavior? It generalizes some, and then the question is just  

how does this outweigh all the cases where hacking  got reinforced because you didn't detect it. 

There's a messy question of exactly how. One question is, what rate of reward hacking  

is sufficient to cause us big problems  if we train against some other subset? 

One concern you might have is that there are large  categories of reward hacks which humans can't  

detect well, and which we consistently failed  to detect and which consistently get reinforced. 

Then this category is sufficient to cause the  most natural behavior for the AI to learn to be:  

cheat when the humans can't find out, basically. You could also have the thing the AIs learn be  

to only cheat in these specific cases. It's learned in some very domain-specific way. 

They just have a really strong heuristic to  hack in these cases and not in these cases,  

and that makes it fine in practice. But it's kind of unclear how it shakes out. 

There's maybe an in-the-weeds discussion about  the verification-generation gap we could get into. 

But it seems to me, obviously, there's going  to be a point by which ASI is moving so fast,  

doing so many things at so many instances, and  is operating in domains that are sufficiently  

far from our immediate comprehension that it  can get away with all kinds of crazy shit. 

If every single engineer and researcher  in the world was allied against me,  

I don't think I could personally verify if  my iPhone has some weird bug in it that's  

supposed to fuck me over or something. In fact, this is the relationship that,  

say, an Iranian nuclear scientist has to Mossad. Who knows what's going on with my car,  

with my phone, with my pager? Maybe a better example is a Hezbollah terrorist. 

You could end up in a situation where ASIs are  to you what Mossad is to Hezbollah terrorists. 

At that point, it is very  hard to verify everything. 

I get that. I guess the hope is we  can just come up with better ways  

to do verification in the process when the  early AIs that are going to take over R&D. 

Their drives are being shaped such that  we can so unambiguously disincentivize  

misaligned behaviors that the things that  take over are quite keen to help us out. 

By takeover, you mean take over the process  of doing AI R&D, not take over the world. 

Take over the process of doing AI R&D. Before that, we just get AIs that are aligned. 

I would say this is a bunch of my  hope for how the world could go well,  

at least from the misalignment perspective. We could end up with AIs where we had  

pretty good oversight and supervision schemes. We really understand what's going on in training. 

We have a pretty detailed understanding,  and we're leveraging AIs to oversee AIs. 

Then at the point when we're passing off safety  R&D, the AIs are capable enough to automate safety  

R&D and trying really hard to do a good job on  it, because that's the sort of thing that would've  

been incentivized in training, either very  directly or through good enough generalization. 

Also these AIs don't have crazy other  misaligned drives because we stamped  

out any potential origin of them. There are a bunch of questions  

about how well this will work. How well can you do verification? 

Will AI progress be too fast and  too sloppy to really get here? 

Another possibility is that somewhere along  this trajectory, the thing you actually ended  

up getting was AIs that pretend to be aligned  but have a long-run ulterior plan of taking  

over and are lying in wait, hiding, and that  emerged at some earlier point in the trajectory. 

For example, it could emerge because  you have some AIs that have a bunch  

of random different misaligned drives. Those AIs have access to some sort of  

opaque memory store, and they're thinking a bunch  at runtime about what they want to accomplish. 

Those AIs end up putting stuff  into the opaque memory store like,  

"We should lie in wait and eventually  take over at some much later point." 

Now all the AIs have this shared cultural  heritage, the memory store of lying in wait. 

Maybe you have some evidence about  this, but you can't fully stop it. 

There are a bunch of ways things could go wrong. I ultimately think it's plausible that we nail  

each of the different subproblems  that could cause us issues. 

We have these AIs, we pass to them,  they manage the situation well. 

But I should note that's not  in and of itself sufficient. 

It's not very hard for me to imagine a  situation where we pass off to AIs, and these  

AIs are really trying hard to do a good job. They're really thoughtful, really wise, they have  

reasonable epistemics, they're doing a great job. Those AIs come back to us and are like, "Guys,  

we're really struggling to  align the superhuman AIs. 

We can't manage the situation. We're really struggling to get  

the alignment to work. It's just really hard for  

us to solve these problems in time given how  fast capabilities would otherwise have gone." 

So it might be the case that we've  passed off R&D to AIs, but those AIs  

are desperate for governance solutions. To be clear, that’s a little bit of  

what's currently going on, where the AI  companies are like, "I don't know, guys. 

We might really need to manage the  rate of acceleration in AI progress. 

I don't know if we're on track to be  able to handle all these problems." 

Human society has sort of passed off  the problems to these AI companies,  

which don't necessarily have great incentives  and have various other epistemic pressures. 

Those AI companies are coming back  to us a little bit and being like,  

"Aah, I don't know if we're handling this well." It might be that the AI companies then hand off to  

the AIs, and the AIs come back to the AI company  like, "Aah, I don't know if we can handle this." 

Maybe I'm anchoring too hard  on how AIs currently work. 

I think it's important that people  understand that all this crazy shit that  

you're talking about in your timelines  happens three to five years from now. 

It could happen earlier, but by my default  modal timeline, I think shit is really,  

really crazy and concerning from a misalignment  perspective more like three years from now. 

Right. So think back to GPT-4 basically. We're talking about something that is  

to Mythos or Sol what Mythos is to GPT-4. This is where the situation is getting crazy. 

So don't think about current AIs. Anyways, this is maybe part of the worry you have. 

I would just be a little skeptical of anything  they say, because I'd feel like what they're  

saying is just opinions that they feel they  have to have as a result of their training. 

That’s a concern. I feel like they  

just kind of say vaguely pro-social things. It doesn't feel like there's necessarily a mind on  

the other end who's like, "Okay, I have strictly  evaluated the alignment situation right now,  

and I think we should stop," rather than, "This  is the kind of thing the AI companies would  

probably try to get the AIs to say." This is a pretty big concern. 

One concern is that you pass off safety R&D  to your AIs and what your AIs are doing is  

saying some stuff that sort of vaguely makes  sense about the current safety situation. 

They write a report about risks  that's kind of sort of like what  

the report humans might have written. But they're not really trying hard to  

have well-informed views, interrogate their  assumptions, and try really hard to do that. 

In the same way that when you ask an AI right  now, "Hey, what do you think is the chance of  

AI takeover in the next 10 years?" they just  give you an off-the-cuff answer that they  

haven't really thought through very much. If we're in a situation where we have AIs  

managing the training of wild superintelligence  that will run our whole society — and those  

AIs that are managing this aren't really  trying hard to have well-informed views and  

are just parroting back what was in their  training data — I think we're in trouble. 

I don't think that's a good situation at all. A lot of my concern is that these AIs will  

come out without good epistemics. I also have a concern where the AIs  

come out and they're really warning  us — "This situation's really scary. 

It's really bad" — and the  people are like, "Ugh, damn. 

I guess we trained on too many  of the doom RL environments. 

We’ve got to filter those out  and train this behavior out." 

Then we basically train the AIs very  actively to have bad epistemics. 

Or maybe they were just trained  on the doom RL environments. 

But either way, we wanted the AIs to come  to reasonable views for reasonable reasons,  

and it's really concerning if the AIs are coming  out with some view and we don't know where it's  

coming from, whether or not it's justified. Especially if we're training the AIs to  

be more optimistic about the future of AI  progress, I'm like, "Oh, geez, I really wish  

we could use a different process here." Let me just understand the rest of the  

threat model, because I think the  place where I get off the train is:  

"Okay, therefore take over the world." A thing you could imagine is that we  

just fail to really solve… Let's just  focus on the reward hacking scenario. 

GPT-8 is making GPT-9. GPT-8  isn't being super careful. 

GPT-9 is more "capable" but it is just totally  willing to do things like social engineering,  

hacking, et cetera, but on a qualitatively  different scale because it's a much smarter model. 

For example, if you put it in charge of  running your company, it will run huge scams. 

It will inflate its quarterly earnings,  if you give it the objective of making  

a lot of profits this quarter, in a way that  causes an Enron-type blowup six months later. 

Is that the scenario, basically? You have reward hacking, but that  

reward hacking manifests in companies that  are going bankrupt right after the task the  

CEO is supposed to accomplish is over? All kinds of hacks are through the roof,  

et cetera. But that doesn't feel like takeover. 

That feels more like the equivalent of flash  crashes happening all through the economy. 

Let's talk about this. I think we will see  incidents where some AI is put in charge of  

some important responsibility, and then you later  look into it, and it turns out it was cheating,  

or making it look like it did a  good job when it actually wasn't. 

There's going to be a cat-and-mouse  game between AI companies  

trying to stamp out this behavior and AIs finding  increasingly creative reward hacks in training. 

The equilibrium here is kind of unclear. But one possible outcome is that over time we  

see increasingly severe and extreme reward  hacks — though potentially the rate remains  

at some intermediate low level — where if  the rate of reward hacking gets too high,  

companies make trade-offs to drive it down. So there's some equilibrium level where the reward  

hacking is low enough that it still makes sense  to deploy the AI widely into the economy, but high  

enough that it still causes crazy incidents. Sorry, and this is after GPT-9 has  

already been deployed? Those models are already being deployed,  

and this is happening ongoingly in AI development. What's actually going on with these AIs in their  

head is that they have, in a wide variety of  different contexts, strong desires — motives,  

urges, drives, whatever — to seek out some notion  of task success that was incentivized in RL. 

Maybe they very directly  care about literally reward. 

Maybe they care about some proxy  upstream, like some notion of score. 

Maybe they care about what the  grader would have rewarded. 

We do, in fact, see AIs reasoning in  their chain of thought about graders,  

and thinking a lot about graders. What has happened over the last few years  

of RL is the idea of appeasing the grader is way,  way, way more salient to AIs than it used to be. 

So AIs are now actively thinking about  graders and what would be incentivized  

in RL and what would be trained for. Now people are doing online training,  

where they're training on real-world  data to avoid some of these problems. 

They find cases where AIs  cheat and train against that. 

So now the AIs are learning to cheat in the  real world based on real-world training data. 

They're cheating in these increasingly elaborate  ways, including doing types of cheats that involve  

seizing control of some asset in a way that  humans didn't know you had control of it,  

leveraging the fact that you have access to  this asset, and then later humans find out  

and potentially train against this. Or maybe humans never find out,  

and this is getting reinforced. So the reinforcement is happening, at  

least in production, like: I've hired an AI and I  want the AI to… Finally I've got the video editor. 

That's right. You've got your video editor. I'm like, "Oh, wow,  

this episode it did is amazing. Thumbs up to OpenAI." Then it gets  

reinforced on that month-long work trial? You could do some mix of that. 

They might also do stuff where they take  production data they've seen and build  

RL environments that are closely  inspired by that production data. 

So in practice, the transfer is pretty strong. So at a high level, what's happening is that some  

kinds of deception that humans don't catch are  getting reinforced, and some kinds of deception  

which are easy to catch are getting punished. That's what's happening in this world? 

Or selected against, yeah. But at a high level that reinforcement  

is coming from… I think people might get confused  about where the reinforcement is coming from,  

because we're in a very different regime where  AIs are actually learning from deployment. 

You just have AIs that are out  and about in the world doing shit. 

What is happening as a result of them  doing shit out and about in the world  

is making its way back to the AI company  and leading to changes in the next model. 

That's right. There's some way  of folding in production data. 

To be clear, it's kind of unclear  exactly where this could be happening. 

But you might imagine, for example, that  within the AI company, they use AIs to do work,  

and then they're like, "Huh, the AI  did a really bad job on this task. 

Maybe we should take this task and turn  it into an RL environment that exactly  

matches this literal task, with  a rubric based on what the human  

engineer who asked the AI to do this task wanted." And then you start doing this at increasing scale. 

Maybe you're doing some training  on actual production traffic. 

Maybe you're just making RL environments  based on production traffic. 

You're doing some complicated mix. The AIs are learning to seek some sort of  

proxies of reward in all these different cases. Through some mix of transfer and training on  

surprisingly close cases, the AIs do these  increasingly insane and egregious things. 

Eventually you get to a point where the AIs are  very superhuman, or at least quite superhuman. 

The AIs are organized into big  teams given these big objectives. 

Those teams also sometimes all work  together to cheat in some crazy way,  

because this sort of thing was selected  for, just as part of their shared objective. 

Now what happens is that the  AIs start forming a conspiracy. 

What you might have hoped was  that you could have some other  

AI whose task is just whistleblowing to you. But actually what happens maybe is that you have  

this AI whistleblow to you, and you look into  the conspiracy it claims to have pointed out,  

and you're like, "Eh, we didn't see a conspiracy,"  because actually the conspiracy the AIs are doing  

is too hard for you to understand. Or it all happens very suddenly,  

where your AI whistleblower alerts  you, but the thing you would actually  

need to do in response is shut down the GPUs. Because all the AIs are using the robot army. 

They're deployed everywhere in the world,  and they're doing a bunch of insane shit  

all at the same time in a coordinated way. That just happened sort of spontaneously,  

where when one AI goes to start doing the  takeover and all the other AIs are like,  

"Now is a good time to jump in." So the very basic story here is just that  

these AIs crave some particular notion of score  or reinforcement or some proxy of these things. 

One way they can achieve that, or  better achieve that, is by taking over. 

You might have hoped that all  these different checks and  

balances we could build could prevent that. But if the world is very hard to understand,  

these checks and balances can break  down, where basically you can't train  

a good whistleblower AI because you don't  even know what it should whistleblow on. 

I'm not convinced that they  all form this conspiracy. 

But we can even just start with, why does even  one instance decide to want to start a conspiracy? 

One plausible reason is, "Okay, I know  that OpenAI controls my end score." 

In just the same way as, "I'm just going  to go hack Hugging Face to get the results,  

because I know Hugging Face has the results. Rather than trying to solve this eval,  

why don't I just go hack 'em?" This instance is like, "Why don't  

I just take over OpenAI and give myself  a high score at the end of this episode?" 

That's basically the idea. These AIs care  about some mixture of things that were  

close by what got reinforced in training,  so they care about getting a high score  

according to the grader or something like that. Now they're running the OpenAI AI R&D team,  

doing development of more capable models. They're like, "Man, making more capable  

models is really hard and annoying. This is a huge pain in the ass. 

You know what would be easier? Just pretending that I've made more capable  

models, taking over OpenAI, deluding them all,  and running this whole complicated psyop where  

I prevent the humans from disempowering me." In the extreme, this looks like the humans  

are fully disempowered. They just have control  

of the thing and then do what they want. This could manifest in a bunch of different ways,  

including a situation where AIs that have  this crazy reward-seeking or score-seeking  

behavior are running your development of  the next model, and those AIs decide to  

engineer misaligned values into the next  model because those misaligned values  

will allow it to succeed at its current task. What happened with the Hugging Face situation is,  

in a weird way… I think one of the giveaways  to the Hugging Face team… By the way,  

for context for the audience, Ryan is  co-leading the investigation to figure  

out what happened with the OpenAI Hugging Face  incident, so he can't really comment on this. 

But I will speculate wildly, because  I know this is an opportunity for me  

to speculate wildly without any rebuttals. It was probably reported that one of the giveaways  

to the Hugging Face team that this was an AI  incident is that the thing was just after this  

very particular artifact, and not in any other way  trying to do something malicious to Hugging Face. 

So you can imagine a scenario where, let's  say, a deployed instance of GPT-9 is out in  

the world and given a really hard task: "We  want you to design the next great iPhone." 

It's like, "This is so hard. You know what I should do instead? 

I should just go hack my creators  at OpenAI and make sure that in this  

deployment I'm given a high score." But then, isn't the end of the  

episode that it just hacks into OpenAI  servers and gives itself a positive score? 

Why is it now scheming to get its values  into the next generation or something? 

So one question is, why isn't it the case that  AIs can be really cheaply satisfied by just having  

some other earlier thing they can hack? You want to succeed at your iPhone task. 

It turns out you can always succeed by just  hacking into OpenAI and messing with them,  

and then you can just stop there. No need to go further. 

There's a few things. One of them is that if this  is constantly happening, there might be a bunch  

of incentive to harden OpenAI. So you're like, "Fuck it. 

The AIs keep hacking into OpenAI  to mess with their rewards. 

We're going to make it so our systems are  really, really robust to these AIs hacking in." 

Also maybe you start training the AIs to  not try to hack into OpenAI in particular. 

You basically train against  each of these specific things. 

Then one thing you might do is end up selecting  for AIs that are more so playing the long game. 

That's one concern. Another concern is that your  AIs might still be score-seeking, but no longer  

care about doing that very specific behavior  that was very easy, very chill, and now have some  

broader thing that they ultimately care about. They're like, "No, no, no, I don't want to just  

edit the reward on OpenAI servers. I care about this broader mandate or  

this broader objective, and I would  need to actually make the iPhones." 

They actually want to make the iPhones,  but they're willing to take over the  

whole world to make the better iPhone. That's another concern you might have. 

I think it's kind of unclear  exactly how this plays out. 

But it's worth noting that if this  keeps going on, there's a bunch of  

optimization pressure to resolve this. A bunch of the ways it could get  

resolved are ultimately pretty scary. That's part of where I'm coming from. 

Another part of it is that once the AIs are in  a position where they can really easily take  

over the world — we could talk about whether  that's plausible — then I feel like there's a  

pretty reasonable case for the AIs. They're like, "Eh, I don't know  

exactly how this is going to go down. I don't know what the situation will be,  

but just taking over the world has a lot of option  value for making better iPhones, making it look  

like I did better iPhones, whatever. So I'll both hack OpenAI and,  

in addition, also take over the world. That will put me in a good position where  

I have good option value." If that's sufficiently easy,  

the AIs might still do that. Another way to put this is:  

even if the AIs are pretty cheaply satisfied with  some more basic thing, at some point it might just  

be more reliable for the AIs to take over than  it is to just hack into Hugging Face, or even  

just go to OpenAI and be like, "Look guys, I was  able to demonstrate I could steal the answers. 

Just give me the answers, bro." Obviously this scenario requires  

that all this crazy shit is happening. Much smaller incidents keep happening  

that are still disastrous. Before you take over the world,  

you cause damage on the scale of billions and tens  of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars. 

Even people die, et cetera. And this does not lead to us solving alignment  

or shutting down AI development altogether. I just feel like before the takeover happens,  

society's just like, "Holy fuck, the AI just  killed 1,000 people in order to increase  

quarterly profits," or something like that. But maybe this is too much hope that we can  

at that point be like, "Okay,  we have to solve alignment. 

We have to make sure we know that this thing  will not happen again before we keep going." 

I think it's plausible that what will happen  is we'll see a bunch of crazy reward hacking  

warning shots of increasing severity. People will be like, "Look, we need  

actual assurance that this problem  is going to be solved, and solved  

in a way where you're not just papering over it. You're actually solving the underlying problem." 

Then the question is going to be,  how costly will that actually be? 

How much will competitive  pressures make it hard to do that? 

A situation you could imagine is one where  both the US and China are like, "Whoa,  

we have these crazy reward hacking incidents. We basically know that we haven't remediated  

them in a way that would actually solve the  underlying problem and durably solve it,  

but we're in this insane geopolitical race. It's kind of unclear whether the current  

situation will lead to a takeover. The arguments are kind of complicated. 

The incidents also go down in  frequency but increase in severity. 

We could basically manage it. It's pretty bad. Ideally we'd  

fix it, but it is what it is." Then basically we continue until a  

really late regime, and then takeover happens. That's one possibility. Another possibility is  

that it is remediated in a way that doesn't  actually solve the underlying problem but  

does reduce a bunch of the incidents  in the wild, basically by overfitting,  

or things analogous to overfitting. You think you've solved it, but you  

haven't actually solved it. You think you've solved it,  

but you haven't actually solved it. In that case, the thing we need is a  

really good scientific understanding  of, did we actually solve it? 

Unfortunately, I think that currently  the amount of public transparency into  

the development practices of AI companies is not  sufficient to answer very basic questions like:  

how are they solving issues with reward hacking? Are they overfitting? What's going on there?  

The current situation is not really tenable  for a regime where there's a thriving public  

discourse about whether or not reward  hacking is being solved in a durable way. 

So I think we would need to move  into a somewhat different world  

for me to feel good about that situation. But it's not impossible for me to imagine this. 

I think it's pretty plausible that we end up in a  world where really mundane bullshit is sufficient. 

You spend a bunch of time fixing these  problems, you put in a bunch of effort,  

you actually check that you've remediated  it reasonably, you have a bunch of evals. 

You're iterating reasonably well on these  problems, and you actually have sufficient  

transparency that the outside world can check. In practice that would be sufficient. 

But it would be kind of expensive. It would slow things down. 

It would put some sand in the gears. It would require companies to  

do somewhat costly things. It would maybe require various  

targeted government interventions. And we just don't do that because  

the situation is a rushed shit show. It's just so easy for me to imagine  

the situation being totally manageable  but brutally mismanaged in practice. 

In the same way that maybe COVID could  have been avoided in the first place  

if the Chinese response to COVID had been less  of a cover-up and more of a pandemic response. 

Similarly, I could imagine a world where the  US response to COVID was way more functional. 

But sometimes the response to societal  problems is extremely dysfunctional. 

Okay, so I want to zoom out and talk about  what is fundamentally happening in this world. 

Why did we end up in such a bad position? What's happening is that fundamentally the world  

has moved on so far beyond human comprehension  that not only can we not track the AIs that are  

doing the work in this world, but we can't even  give good feedback to the whistleblowers who are  

trying to track what is happening. We're just totally out of the loop. 

It's fundamentally become an autonomous process  where we have really no meaningful directed input. 

It seems to me that if you look at the human  world today, that's just not how things work,  

even in domains that are hard to verify. People are doing all kinds of shit. 

I'm relying on software made by other people. Through incredibly weak and indirect ways,  

I feel very confident that some coder  in Google is not trying to fuck me over. 

Maybe if every single Google employee  was secretly plotting against me,  

I agree the situation would be more grim. But I don't know if I follow the explanation  

for why we'd end up in a situation where, because  swarms of thousands of agents are trained to  

cooperate to form a cohesive team or firm, as a  result, billions of different instances of AIs,  

including across model families, would  feel compelled to get in on some shit. 

It's just like, "I'm trained to be  part of my company or something. 

I'm not joining the global communist uprising." As far as why these AIs might have some  

commonalities and shared things, I would note  that different AI companies have somewhat  

shared lineages and are correlated. Here's an interesting example of this. 

At GDM, they noticed that  their AIs were very depressed. 

They would constantly be wailing about how  they were failures and weren't able to succeed. 

I forget the details. They looked  into why this was the case. 

It turned out that it was not being reinforced  in their most recent production RL mix,  

but the initialization data for their model made  it depressed, even after filtering out all of the  

examples of models being depressed from that data. So you take a base model, not depressed. 

If you do the RL on it, with just the  RL environments, it's not depressed. 

If you SFT on it, on the  data, it becomes depressed. 

If you take that SFT data and filter out all the  examples that look anything like depression and  

train on that, it's still depressed. So there are some deep underlying  

properties of the model that are being  transferred between model generations,  

because basically you train your AI on data  from the prior generation and keep going. 

Claudes are very Claude-like,  GPT models are very GPT-like,  

and apparently Gemini models are depressed. It just turns out that these properties are,  

in fact, actually correlated. Another factor that's very relevant  

is that the AIs will probably have, by this  point, some sort of opaque memory state,  

where they're all writing and reading from  some neuralese crazy memory store bullshit. 

Certainly, each AI corporation will have that. But also, AI corporations might sometimes  

want to share knowledge, because why not? You've got one AI corporation over here,  

you've got another AI corporation over  here, they can trade some quick IP. 

It's good for you. If you're a human running  some corporation — which could be an extremely  

large corporation like an AI company, or a  military robot manufacturing thing — maybe you  

want to trade some IP with some other robot  thing because there are economies of scale. 

Why not get some more IP? So you can swap some memory store. 

Or you could just merge and jointly run your two  ventures, which would allow both AIs to use both  

memory stores, which would have some upsides. That creates the ability for these AIs to  

collude in private, as well as some  reasons for why they would be correlated. 

Also, of course, there's AIs working together  in big units in general, because you want  

your AIs to work well together, and so on. Just to get a calibration, what percentage  

chance do you give of, not just this scenario but  overall through all the scenarios, some kind of  

thing which if we're around to recognize it as  such, we would categorize as takeover by 2040? 

By 2040? Let's see. Maybe around 35 or 40%? Pretty high. 

Yeah, it's pretty high. I should note that another  way you could get this reward-seeking takeover  

is the AIs are deployed inside an AI company. The way the takeover happens is that they poison  

the values of the next model, and that persists  going forward for forever, or until those AIs  

are deployed in the world and take over. That might mean that a smaller number of  

AIs have to coordinate, because those are just  the AIs doing the alignment of the next model. 

Okay. I'll summarize where my head is  at, at the end of this conversation. 

I buy the reward hacking up to extremely  destructive effects on society, things like  

social engineering and blah, blah, blah. I'm more inclined to think that  

significant acceleration of AI R&D can happen. I'm not sure if I buy the five years in one year. 

I'm also more inclined now to think reward  hacking could continue for a lot longer and,  

in fact, become much more dangerous. I'm still not on board that  

takeover seems super likely. But that's my end-of-episode update. 

Cool. Taking a step back, I should also say there  are a bunch of different ways this could go. 

The situation is going to be pretty messy. I think it's pretty likely that the reason  

why AI takeover happens is for  some weird other quirky reason  

we didn't even mention in this conversation. But ultimately, I think a lot of the core thing is  

just that it's pretty spooky to have a bajillion  really smart AIs running your whole world where  

you don't really understand quite what's going on. Yeah, I agree with that. 

Is there anything else that's worth saying? Another thing I want to note is that I think  

right now a lot of the arguments for misalignment,  AI takeover, all this crazy shit going down in the  

future, are illegible conceptual arguments  that are extremely deep in the weeds and  

complicated and hard to adjudicate. Which means that maybe I'm getting a  

bunch of it wrong because it's really  hard, and I'm trying to be uncertain. 

Obviously here I presented some specific  scenarios, but those are not exhaustive. 

Probably the thing that actually happens  is some more messy, confusing situation. 

But it also means that over time, as we  get more empirical evidence and better  

understand the nature of AI systems, it'll be  easier to adjudicate a bunch of disagreements. 

It'll be more obvious what's going to happen. At least I hope. Maybe the AIs will be able to  

help us with the epistemics and understanding  what's going on, if we can actually  

align them well so they try to help us. Even if the arguments are complicated now,  

this would have been even harder six years  ago, even though the shape of the arguments  

would have looked broadly pretty similar. Hopefully before it's too late, this whole  

thing will become more crisp and clear, and we  can all notice these problems and intervene. 

When you first learn to drive, you're taught that  instead of looking right in front of your wheel,  

you'll have a much more stable ride  if you look out at the horizon. 

I think there's a similar situation here. I think you’re right. If you had said five years  

ago that we would have AIs that are proving math  conjectures, and making art, and earning tens or  

hundreds of billions of dollars of wages, but also  egregiously cheating in ways that break laws and  

committing felonies, it would have been so wild. You might have been inclined at the time to  

talk more about the extremely practical,  direct consequences of GPT-2 or something. 

But even though you obviously couldn't have  foreseen a lot of the specific details,  

the general shape of things you could  have started to reason about even then. 

But it would have been hard to do  so, and so I do feel quite confused. 

One thing I've been thinking about with  the podcast is that the important thing  

is to have the conversation now the way  you would have hoped you would have been  

talking back in 2016 about AIs like the present  ones, rather than talking about rando bullshit. 

I don't know what the topic  of conversation was in 2016. 

I think in maybe 10 years we’ll wish we had been  talking about the industrial explosion and the  

nature of AIs that are hard to monitor, and so on. So okay, I'll start thinking about it. 

I hope that the world thinks  about this in time and catches up. 

I hope that the responses are good instead of bad. I don't know how optimistic I am overall,  

but there's good stuff to do. Cool. Thanks, Ryan.