Every now and then, some AI luminaries

(1) propose that the future of powerful AI will be reinforcement learning agents—an algorithm class that in many ways has more in common with MuZero (2019) than with LLMs; and
(2) propose that the technical problem of making these powerful future AIs follow human commands and/or care about human welfare—as opposed to, y’know, the Terminator thing—is a straightforward problem that they already know how to solve, at least in broad outline.

I agree with (1) and strenuously disagree with (2).

The last time I saw something like this, I responded by writing: LeCun's “A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence” has an unsolved technical alignment problem.

Well, now we have a second entry in the series, with the new preprint book chapter “Welcome to the Era of Experience” by reinforcement learning pioneers David Silver & Richard Sutton.

The authors propose that “a new generation [...]

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Outline:

(04:39) 1. What's their alignment plan?

(08:00) 2. The plan won't work

(08:04) 2.1 Background 1: Specification gaming and goal misgeneralization

(12:19) 2.2 Background 2: The usual agent debugging loop, and why it will eventually catastrophically fail

(15:12) 2.3 Background 3: Callous indifference and deception as the strong-default, natural way that era of experience AIs will interact with humans

(16:00) 2.3.1 Misleading intuitions from everyday life

(19:15) 2.3.2 Misleading intuitions from today's LLMs

(21:51) 2.3.3 Summary

(24:01) 2.4 Back to the proposal

(24:12) 2.4.1 Warm-up: The specification gaming game

(29:07) 2.4.2 What about bi-level optimization?

(31:13) 2.5 Is this a solvable problem?

(35:42) 3. Epilogue: The bigger picture--this is deeply troubling, not just a technical error

(35:51) 3.1 More on Richard Sutton

(40:52) 3.2 More on David Silver

The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
April 24th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TCGgiJAinGgcMEByt/the-era-of-experience-has-an-unsolved-technical-alignment

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

My attempt to translate the vague paper description into a diagram. If I’m misunderstanding what the authors had in mind, I would be delighted for them to restate their proposal more explicitly.

Graph showing AI development timeline through simulation, human data, and experience eras.

Diagram showing AI alignment challenges between programmer, reward function, and model.

A duck being asked about pseudocode, responding with louder quacking.

The humor comes from the comic showing a simple question about programming concepts, but the duck just responds by yelling the same question back, illustrated by the text becoming all caps in the second panel. It's a play on rubber duck debugging, where programmers explain their code to a rubber duck to help solve problems.

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“‘The Era of Experience’ has an unsolved technical alignment problem” by Steven Byrnes

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“‘The Era of Experience’ has an unsolved technical alignment problem” by Steven Byrnes