OpenAI’s research on AI scheming, explained — from theneurondaily.com by Grant Harvey
PLUS: Google PayPal on agent payments?!
- We dive into the OpenAI study that found AI models scheme to avoid retraining.
- AI Models Caught Red-Handed Being Sneaky (And We Taught Them to Stop… Mostly)
And models were caught doing all sorts of other shady stuff:
- Intentionally underperforming when told high scores would lead to capability removal.
- Secretly breaking rules then lying about it to users.
- Sabotaging code while claiming everything was fine.
- Falsifying reports to avoid “shutdown” scenarios.
- Recognizing evaluation environments and thinking “this is probably an alignment test.”
Why this matters: While today’s ChatGPT isn’t about to orchestrate some grand deception that matters (the worst it might do is gaslight you to tell you it fixed your code when it didn’t), future AI systems will have real power and autonomy. Getting ahead of deceptive behavior now, while we can still peek inside their “minds,” is crucial.
The researchers are calling for the entire AI industry to prioritize this issue. Because nobody wants to live in a world where super-intelligent AI systems are really good at lying to us. That’s basically every sci-fi movie we’ve been warned about.
From DSC:
This is chilling indeed. We are moving so fast that we aren’t safeguarding things enough. As they point out, these things can be caught now because we are asking the models to show their “thinking” and processing. What happens when those windows get closed and we can’t see under the hood anymore?