“AI companies aren’t really using external evaluators” by Zach Stein-Perlman

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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Many AI safety folks think that METR is close to the labs, with ongoing relationships that grant it access to models before they are deployed. This is incorrect. METR (then called ARC Evals) did pre-deployment evaluation for GPT-4 and Claude 2 in the first half of 2023, but it seems to have had no special access since then.[1] Other model evaluators also seem to have little access before deployment.
Frontier AI labs' pre-deployment risk assessment should involve external model evals for dangerous capabilities.[2] External evals can improve a lab's risk assessment and—if the evaluator can publish its results—provide public accountability.
The evaluator should get deeper access than users will get.

• To evaluate threats from a particular deployment protocol, the evaluator should get somewhat deeper access than users will — then the evaluator's failure to elicit dangerous capabilities is stronger evidence [...]

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
May 24th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WjtnvndbsHxCnFNyc/ai-companies-aren-t-really-using-external-evaluators
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.