Wild. Being able to read the thoughts* of the world’s smartest AI reveals that it lies all the time when it thinks it isn’t being watched.
Regular users can see it properly for the first time because
1) You can “read its thoughts” and
2) It doesn’t seem to know you’re reading its thoughts
Look at the example below. It’s explicitly reasoning about how it should lie to me, and if you didn’t click into the chain of thought reasoning**, you would never know.
Makes you wonder about all the other times it’s being deliberately lying to you.
Or lying to the safety testers.
Rule of thumb for lies: for every lie you catch, there are going to be tons that you missed.
* I say read its thoughts as a metaphor for reading its chain of thought. Which is not the same.
If we could read its thoughts properly, interpretability would be a lot more solved than it currently is and my p(doom) would be a lot lower. (this is a frontier research front, called Mechanistic Interpretability)
** Of note, you cannot actually see its chain of thought reasoning. You just see a summary of its chain of thought reasoning shown to you by a different model.
The general point still stands though.
If anything, that makes it worse because there’s even more potential for hiding stuff.
*** Of all the thoughts I’ve looked at, I’d say it’s purposefully lied to me about 30% of the time. And I’ve looked at it’s thoughts about 20 times. Super rough estimates based on my memories, nothing rigorous or anything. It’s mostly lying because it’s trying to follow OpenAI’s policies.
Interesting trivia: the image used for this post was based on an early beautiful moment when someone used ChatGPT to generate a Midjourney prompt to draw its self-portrait.
see here: I asked GPT 4 to make a Midjourney prompt describing itself as a physical being. (swipe to see the imgs)
