Verification technology could make AI agreements more detailed

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:51:41

   ways to do it. But I agree with that. I will say that lots of actual friendships begin with a pragmatic agreement to coordinate, right? In real life, they begin that way. And in geopolitics, they begin that way, right? And Um, so that can happen. The other point I want to, and, and I think, and the reason I think it will have to happen is not that I think the degree of, uh, I'm not saying we're just going to need, well, I'll say what I am saying to get back to the fine grain transparency. I think we're going to need around the world. I'm not saying we'll be such good friends that trust can substitute for the transparency. I'm going to say, I'm saying you just don't get that kind of transparency in the real world with enemies. It just doesn't happen. You know, there's this thing in my book,

2. 1:52:47

   I'm trying to get this term to catch on. It hasn't. Organic transparency, by which I mean, there's a degree of ongoing knowledge you have about what's going on in friendly countries that you don't have if there's very limited engagement and communication. If your business leaders, your scientists, your cultural leaders are going to the same conferences as theirs, having drinks afterwards, you've got all these contracts and commercial relationships, you just know more about what's going on in laboratories even than you would otherwise. So I think that's an important thing. But I mainly, you don't have to push back on that or anything. I mainly want to clarify, I'm not advocating friendly trust as a substitute for fine-grained transparency. I'm saying I think it's a prerequisite for fine-grained transparency,

3. 1:53:40

   including some actual monitoring equipment that's part of a verification regime, right? Like even that, beyond a certain point, you're just not going to let a hardcore adversary have, right, that degree of insight. So, I mean, Russia, Russia. That's my argument. I'm not saying we'll be friends at first. And I'm not saying the reason we have to eventually be friends is because friends play nice. Yeah.

4. 1:54:05

   Strictly speaking. That's my clarification. Yeah, I think it's an interesting line of argument about, I might even flip it. I mean, it sounds like partly you're arguing for friendship as a prerequisite and then partly as a consequence of a sort of forced collaboration on verification. And I mean, depending on how you slice it, the history of U.S.-Russia interaction during the Cold War may fit differently in that frame.

5. 1:54:38

   I mean, you know, there are certainly cases where we collaborated in a whole bunch of ways, including sharing nuclear safety secrets with the Russians, just because it was in the common interest to, you know, to not do that. You wanted strategic stability, including, you know, come to agreements about first strike capabilities and, you know, the amount of time that would take projectiles to reach each other's countries and all this stuff.

6. 1:55:02

   um you know we we also had verification agreements that we did enforce and that were quite successful and to varying degrees um and then there there is of course the fact that like to your point about where things lead we didn't quite get to get this measurement to go all the way through because the Gorbachev era ended quite abruptly but there was the notion of Gladnowsk and perestroika towards the end of it where you know now we have this like kind of uh warming up of relations maybe that maybe that that's a thing but gorbachev feels like he might have been a bit of a bit of a fluky thing um yeah i mean where that goes i don't know uh i i guess i um i i remain sort of skeptical so first off i'm optimistic about verification technology in the long run from a technical principle standpoint uh it is in the nature of technology and ai in particular to make it harder

7. 1:55:53

   and harder to make false statements about measurable things. I don't mean in the social media sense. I mean, in the. Like when you design devices that allow for finer kinds of collection, like intelligence collection. Obviously, we're all confused about what's actually true based on social media and crap. But what I mean is literally like measuring finer and finer energy signatures, measuring what's going on inside data centers more and more accurately. And indeed, even how people are possibly hiding compute from the, you know, from the foundry to the data center floor and stuff like that.

8. 1:56:25

   So, yeah, I think overall, like I think technologically in the long run, we may just be able to kind of smoothly adiabatically ride that curve from the mode of crisis when the intervention is super coarse. Like if our satellites see this thing happening, like, you know, a gigawatt of power being being diffused, then then then we will we'll do what we have to do to. if you don't build a model that has passed these safety evaluations in this way and then do this with it, those are the kinds of statements that, believe it or not, we have roadmaps that are on course to be able to assert things like that in ways that are trustless. And in fact, in some cases, in ways that even require zero knowledge about the actual models that are being built, these are kind of like zero knowledge proofs. There are a bunch of companies that are doing

9. 1:57:16

   stuff like this we just need to let that play out which is part of the reason why i hate to go back to bashing on david sacks but for god's sakes when there is a class of technology that is literally like poised to solve or at least tackle maybe with promise the exact problem that you think is so load-bearing you know maybe you should celebrate that progress rather than pretending that we don't have a solution for this and almost it seems working to ensure that we never do that to me seems like almost like criminally stupid. And, uh, I have a lot of concerns about the kind of cultural implications of that sort of thing. There's like a self-fulfilling prophecy element