Emergent Deception and Emergent Optimization
I’ve previously argued that machine learning systems often exhibit emergent capabilities, and that these capabilities could lead to unintended negative consequences. But how can we reason concretely about these consequences?
[Note: this post was drafted before Sydney (the Bing chatbot) was released, but Sydney demonstrates some particularly good examples of some of the issues I discuss below. I've therefore added a few Sydney-related notes in relevant places.] I’ve previously argued that machine learning systems often exhibit emergent capabilities , and that these capabilities could lead to unintended negative consequences . But how can we reason concretely about these consequences? There’s two principles I find useful for reasoning about future emergent capabilities: If a capability would help get lower training
related reading
- Deep Deceptiveness — LessWronglesswrong.com
- [2502.17424] Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMsarxiv.org
- To Understand Language is to Understand Generalization | Eric Jangevjang.com
- Metagaming matters for training, evaluation, and oversightalignment.openai.com
- New report: “Scheming AIs: Will AIs fake alignment during training in order to get power?”joecarlsmith.com
- [2604.22082] Removing Sandbagging in LLMs by Training with Weak Supervisionarxiv.org
- Self-Fulfilling Misalignment Data Might Be Poisoning Our AI Modelsturntrout.com
- Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?yoshuabengio.org
- Natural-emergent-misalignment-from-reward-hacking-paper.pdfassets.anthropic.com
- ML Systems Will Have Weird Failure Modesbounded-regret.ghost.io
- [1906.01820] Risks from Learned Optimization in Advanced Machine Learning Systemsarxiv.org
- [2510.13786] The Art of Scaling Reinforcement Learning Compute for LLMsarxiv.org