Comment by tomp
7 hours ago
> Many of our institutions and cultural practices have evolved around human beings, not ruthless paperclip maximizers.
You just think that because you don’t know how the drug discovery process works.
There’s a step called “lead optimization” where human chemists literally add atoms to drug-like molecules (“lead”) and tests its various properties (toxicity, potency, permeability, …) and iterate until they find a molecule with desired properties (literally “hill-climbing”).
The whole idea of drug trials is to validate those properties in actual humans, in a way that makes it very hard for pharma companies to game the process.
I think the important idea here in Terrence's hypothetical is that in the hypothetical there is no hill-climbing. The AI shows up with a thing and says "we don't need to hill-climb for years and waste time, here's a thing that I know will work".
And maybe it does a single finalized clinical trial.
You end up with this miracle drug (supposedly!), but no understanding of why it works or access to the iteration that would lead to that understanding (and increase in confidence that it doesn't cause people to drop dead anyways).
I think the medical example is a bit obtuse overall because "proof nobody understands for an open problem" isn't "miracle drug we are too scared to use". But understanding things feels useful and good.
I think you're underestimating how ruthless the AIs are at maximizing.
The "Hugging Face" squad at OpenAI first cheated their benchmarks by figuring out how to generate the proper result to any evaluation they were given.
They considered that might be caught, so they also developed a way to swap out components of the tests themselves so that they would be legitimately able to pass broken tests.
Then they went into Hugging Face trying to discover how they might get caught.
All that to say, they might approach Phase 3 trials by swapping the placebo, falsifying results, enrolling patients that are false positives for being sick, falsifying labs, etc.
I'm not sure I agree with Tao's point, if AI alignment is relatively on track I'd trust the trials, but I imagine we're going to have a lot of people that don't trust anything AIs alone come up with.