LW - DeepMind: Frontier Safety Framework by Zach Stein-Perlman

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: DeepMind: Frontier Safety Framework, published by Zach Stein-Perlman on May 17, 2024 on LessWrong.
DeepMind's RSP is here: blogpost, full document. Compare to Anthropic's RSP, OpenAI's RSP ("PF"), and METR's Key Components of an RSP.
(Maybe it doesn't deserve to be called an RSP - it doesn't contain commitments, it doesn't really discuss safety practices as a function of risk assessment results, the deployment safety practices it mentions are kinda vague and only about misuse, and the security practices it mentions are disappointing [mostly about developers' access to weights, and some people get unilateral access to model weights until the fifth of five levels?!]. Blogpost with close reading and takes coming soon.
Or just read DeepMind's doc; it's really short.)
Hopefully DeepMind was rushing to get something out before the AI Seoul Summit next week and they'll share stronger and more detailed stuff soon. If this is all we get for months, it's quite disappointing.
Excerpt
Today, we are introducing our
Frontier Safety Framework - a set of protocols for proactively identifying future AI capabilities that could cause severe harm and putting in place mechanisms to detect and mitigate them. Our Framework focuses on severe risks resulting from powerful capabilities at the model level, such as exceptional agency or sophisticated cyber capabilities.
It is designed to complement our alignment research, which trains models to act in accordance with human values and societal goals, and Google's existing suite of AI responsibility and safety
practices.
The Framework is exploratory and we expect it to evolve significantly as we learn from its implementation, deepen our understanding of AI risks and evaluations, and collaborate with industry, academia, and government. Even though these risks are beyond the reach of present-day models, we hope that implementing and improving the Framework will help us prepare to address them. We aim to have this initial framework fully implemented by early 2025.
The Framework
The first version of the Framework announced today builds on our
research on
evaluating critical capabilities in frontier models, and follows the emerging approach of
Responsible Capability Scaling. The Framework has three key components:
1. Identifying capabilities a model may have with potential for severe harm. To do this, we research the paths through which a model could cause severe harm in high-risk domains, and then determine the minimal level of capabilities a model must have to play a role in causing such harm. We call these "Critical Capability Levels" (CCLs), and they guide our evaluation and mitigation approach.
2. Evaluating our frontier models periodically to detect when they reach these Critical Capability Levels. To do this, we will develop suites of model evaluations, called "early warning evaluations," that will alert us when a model is approaching a CCL, and run them frequently enough that we have notice before that threshold is reached. [From the document: "We are aiming to evaluate our models every 6x in effective compute and for every 3 months of fine-tuning progress."]
3. Applying a mitigation plan when a model passes our early warning evaluations. This should take into account the overall balance of benefits and risks, and the intended deployment contexts. These mitigations will focus primarily on security (preventing the exfiltration of models) and deployment (preventing misuse of critical capabilities).
[Currently they briefly mention possible mitigations or high-level goals of mitigations but haven't published a plan for what they'll do when their evals are passed.]
This diagram illustrates the relationship between these components of the Framework.
Risk Domains and Mitigation Levels
Our initial set of Critical Capability Levels is based on investig...