38.3 - Erik Jenner on Learned Look-Ahead

Lots of people in the AI safety space worry about models being able to make deliberate, multi-step plans. But can we already see this in existing neural nets? In this episode, I talk with Erik Jenner about his work looking at internal look-ahead within chess-playing neural networks. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/axrpodcast Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/axrpodcast The transcript: https://axrp.net/episode/2024/12/12/episode-38_3-erik-jenner-learned-look-ahead.html FAR.AI: https://far.ai/ FAR.AI on X (aka Twitter): https://x.com/farairesearch FAR.AI on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FARAIResearch The Alignment Workshop: https://www.alignment-workshop.com/   Topics we discuss, and timestamps: 00:57 - How chess neural nets look into the future 04:29 - The dataset and basic methodology 05:23 - Testing for branching futures? 07:57 - Which experiments demonstrate what 10:43 - How the ablation experiments work 12:38 - Effect sizes 15:23 - X-risk relevance 18:08 - Follow-up work 21:29 - How much planning does the network do?   Research we mention: Evidence of Learned Look-Ahead in a Chess-Playing Neural Network: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.00877 Understanding the learned look-ahead behavior of chess neural networks (a development of the follow-up research Erik mentioned): https://openreview.net/forum?id=Tl8EzmgsEp Linear Latent World Models in Simple Transformers: A Case Study on Othello-GPT: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07582   Episode art by Hamish Doodles: hamishdoodles.com