AF - The Case for Predictive Models by Rubi Hudson

Link to original article

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Case for Predictive Models, published by Rubi Hudson on April 3, 2024 on The AI Alignment Forum.
I'm also posting this on my new blog, Crossing the Rubicon, where I'll be writing about ideas in alignment. Thanks to Johannes Treutlein and Paul Colognese for feedback on this post.
Just over a year ago, the
Conditioning Predictive Models paper was released. It laid out an argument and a plan for using powerful predictive models to reduce existential risk from AI, and outlined some foreseeable challenges to doing so. At the time, I saw the pieces of a plan for alignment start sliding together, and I was excited to get started on follow-up work.
Reactions to the paper were mostly positive, but discussion was minimal and the ideas largely failed to gain traction. I suspect that muted reception was in part due to the size of the paper, which tried to both establish the research area (predictive models) and develop a novel contribution (conditioning them). Now, despite retaining optimism about the approach, even the authors have mostly shifted their focus to other areas.
I was recently in a conversation with another alignment researcher who expressed surprise that I was still working on predictive models. Without a champion, predictive models might appear to be just another entry on the list of failed alignment approaches. To my mind, however, the arguments for working on them are as strong as they've ever been.
This post is my belated attempt at an accessible introduction to predictive models, but it's also a statement of confidence in their usefulness. I believe the world would be safer if we can reach the point where the alignment teams at major AI labs consider the predictive models approach among their options, and alignment researchers have made conscious decisions whether or not to work on them.
What is a predictive model?
Now the first question you might have about predictive models is: what the heck do I mean by "predictive model"? Is that just a model that makes predictions? And my answer to that question would be "basically, yeah".
The term predictive model is referring to the class of AI models that take in a snapshot of the world as input, and based on their understanding output a probability distribution over future snapshots. It can be helpful to think of these snapshots as represented by a series of tokens, since that's typical for current models.
As you are probably already aware, the world is fairly big. That makes it difficult to include all the information about the world in a model's input or output. Rather, predictive models need to work with more limited snapshots, such as the image recorded by a security camera or the text on a page, and combine that with their prior knowledge to fill in the relevant details.
Competitiveness
One reason to believe predictive models will be competitive with cutting edge AI systems is that, for the moment at least, predictive models are the cutting edge. If you think of pretrained LLMs as predicting text, then predictive models are a generalization that can include other types of data. Predicting audio and images are natural next steps, since we have abundant data for both, but anything that can be measured can be included.
This multimodal transition could come quite quickly and alongside a jump in capabilities. If language models already use internal world models, then incorporating multimodal information might well be just a matter of translating between data types. The search for translations between data types is already underway, with projects from major labs like
Sora and
Whisper. Finding a clean translation, either by gradient descent or manually, would unlock huge amounts of training data and blow past the current bottleneck. With that potential overhang in mind, I place a high value on anticipating and solvi...