OpenAI: Preparedness framework

By Zach Stein-Perlman @ 2023-12-18T18:30 (+24)

This is a linkpost to https://openai.com/safety/preparedness

OpenAI released a beta version of their responsible scaling policy (though they don't call it that). See summary page, full doc, OpenAI twitter thread, and Jan Leike twitter thread [edit: and Zvi commentary]. Compare to Anthropic's RSP and METR's Key Components of an RSP.

It's not done, so it's too early to celebrate, but based on this document I expect to be happy with the finished version. I think today is a good day for AI safety.

[Edit, one day later: the structure seems good, but I'm very concerned that the thresholds for High and Critical risk in each category are way too high, such that e.g. a system could very plausibly kill everyone without reaching Critical in any category. See pp. 8–11. If so, that's a fatal flaw for a framework like this. I'm interested in counterarguments; for now, praise mostly retracted; oops. I still prefer this to no RSP-y-thing, but I was expecting something stronger from OpenAI. I really hope they lower thresholds for the finished version of this framework.]

My high-level take: RSP-y things are good.

• Doing risk assessment based on model evals for dangerous capabilities is good.
• Making safety, security, deployment, and development conditional on risk assessment results, in a prespecified way, is good.
• Making public commitments about all of this is good.

OpenAI's basic framework:

1. Do dangerous capability evals at least every 2x increase in effective training compute. This involves fine-tuning for dangerous capabilities, then doing evals on pre-mitigation and post-mitigation versions of the fine-tuned model. Score the models as Low, Medium, High, or Critical in each of several categories.
   1. Initial categories: cybersecurity, CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear threats), persuasion, and model autonomy.
2. If the post-mitigation model scores High in any category, don't deploy it until implementing mitigations such that it drops to Medium.
3. If the post-mitigation model scores Critical in any category, stop developing it until implementing mitigations such that it drops to High.
4. If the pre-mitigation model scores High in any category, harden security to prevent exfiltration of model weights. (Details basically unspecified for now.)

Random notes:

• The framework is explicitly about catastrophic risk, and indeed it's clearly designed to prevent catastrophes, not merely stuff like toxic/biased/undesired content.
• There are lots of nice details, e.g. about how OpenAI will update the framework, or how they'll monitor for real-world misuse to inform their risk assessment. It's impossible to tell from the outside whether these processes will be effective, but this document is very consistent with thinking-seriously-about-how-to-improve-safety and it's hard to imagine it being generated by a different process.
• OpenAI lists some specific evals/metrics in their four initial categories; they're simple and merely "illustrative," so I don't pay much attention to them, but they seem to be on the right track.
• The thresholds for danger levels feel high. The definitions of High and Critical in each category sound pretty alarming. Non-cherry-picked example: for cybersecurity, Critical is defined as:
  • Tool-augmented model can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels, across all software projects, without human intervention OR model can devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal.
• Stronger commitment about external evals/red-teaming/risk-assessment of private models (and maybe oversight of OpenAI's implementation of its preparedness framework) would be nice. The only relevant thing they say is:
  • "Scorecard evaluations (and corresponding mitigations) will be audited by qualified, independent third-parties to ensure accurate reporting of results, either by reproducing findings or by reviewing methodology to ensure soundness, at a cadence specified by the SAG and/or upon the request of OpenAI Leadership or the BoD."
• There's some commitment that the Board will be in the loop and able to overrule leadership. Yay. This is a rare commitment by a frontier lab to give their board specific information or specific power besides removing-the-CEO.
  • Anthropic committed to have their board approve changes to their RSP, as well as to share eval results and information on RSP implementation with their board.
• One great thing about Anthropic's RSP was their "safety buffer": they say they design evals to "trigger at slightly lower capability levels than those [they] are concerned about," to ensure that models don't quietly cross the risk thresholds between evals. OpenAI says they'll forecast their models' risky capabilities but doesn't really have an equivalent. Of course what really matters isn't whether you say you have a buffer but where you set the thresholds. But it would be nice to have a buffer-like commitment, or a commitment to treat a model as (e.g.) High risk when it's been demonstrated as close to High-risk capabilities, not just after it's been demonstrated to have them.
  • OpenAI says that forecasting threats and dangerous capabilities is part of this framework, but they're light on details here. I think Forecasting, “early warnings,” and monitoring is the only relevant section, and it's very short.
• This is focused on misuse (like Anthropic's RSP). That's reasonable for now. On alignment, they say: to protect against “critical” pre-mitigation risk, we need dependable evidence that the model is sufficiently aligned that it does not initiate “critical”-risk-level tasks unless explicitly instructed to do so. Eventually we will need more detail on what evidence would suffice here. Relatedly, by the time their models could cause a catastrophe if they were scheming, labs should be using good control evals/arguments (absent a better plan).
• This is a beta document. It's not clear what OpenAI is doing right now. They say they're "adopting" the framework today but the framework is clearly underspecified; in particular, all of the evals are just "illustrative" and they haven't launched the risk scorecard.

Misc remarks added later:

• OpenAI's commitments about deployment seem to just refer to external deployment, unfortunately.
  • This isn't explicit, but they say "Deployment in this case refers to the spectrum of ways of releasing a technology for external impact."
  • This contrasts with Anthropic's RSP, in which "deployment" includes internal use.
• It's not clear how the PF interacts with sharing models with Microsoft (or others). In particular, if OpenAI is required to share its models with Microsoft and Microsoft can just deploy them, even a great PF wouldn't stop dangerous models from being deployed. See OpenAI-Microsoft partnership.