Listen to Episode Here
Show Notes
"To make AI systems broadly useful for challenging real-world tasks, we need them to learn complex human goals and preferences. One approach to specifying complex goals asks humans to judge during training which agent behaviors are safe and useful, but this approach can fail if the task is too complicated for a human to directly judge. To help address this concern, we propose training agents via self play on a zero sum debate game. Given a question or proposed action, two agents take turns making short statements up to a limit, then a human judges which of the agents gave the most true, useful information... In practice, whether debate works involves empirical questions about humans and the tasks we want AIs to perform, plus theoretical questions about the meaning of AI alignment." AI safety via debate
Debate is something that we are all familiar with. Usually it involves two or more persons giving arguments and counter arguments over some question in order to prove a conclusion. At OpenAI, debate is being explored as an AI alignment methodology for reward learning (learning what humans want) and is a part of their scalability efforts (how to train/evolve systems to safely solve questions of increasing complexity). Debate might sometimes seem like a fruitless process, but when optimized and framed as a two-player zero-sum perfect-information game, we can see properties of debate and synergies with machine learning that may make it a powerful truth seeking process on the path to beneficial AGI.
On today's episode, we are joined by Geoffrey Irving. Geoffrey is a member of the AI safety team at OpenAI. He has a PhD in computer science from Stanford University, and has worked at Google Brain on neural network theorem proving, cofounded Eddy Systems to autocorrect code as you type, and has worked on computational physics and geometry at Otherlab, D. E. Shaw Research, Pixar, and Weta Digital. He has screen credits on Tintin, Wall-E, Up, and Ratatouille.
We hope that you will join in the conversations by following us or subscribing to our podcasts on Youtube, SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast site/application. You can find all the AI Alignment Podcasts here.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
- What debate is and how it works
- Experiments on debate in both machine learning and social science
- Optimism and pessimism about debate
- What amplification is and how it fits in
- How Geoffrey took inspiration from amplification and AlphaGo
- The importance of interpretability in debate
- How debate works for normative questions
- Why AI safety needs social scientists
You can find out more about Geoffrey Irving at his website. Here you can find the debate game mentioned in the podcast. Here you can find Geoffrey Irving, Paul Christiano, and Dario Amodei's paper on debate. Here you can find an Open AI blog post on AI Safety via Debate.
