Against strawmanning unilateral pauses

Summary: Scott Alexander’s Against SURA post is arguing against a strawman version of unilateral pauses. He admits as much deep into the post. I think his conclusions fail against stronger pause plans for conditional or limited unilateral pauses, where training resumes if the pause does not cause others to pause, and where personnel are redirected toward work on alignment and product, rather than simply fired. In addition, Scott’s post is incorrect about the simplicity of the game theory involved: getting companies to agree to conditional pauses is not strictly easier than convincing them to pause, as the former requires companies to (promise to) take actions based on ambiguous, game-theoretically-informed evidence. That is not the kind of evidence companies tend to act on.

Capability pause: Some frontier lab (let’s call them OpenAI or Anthropic) says they have stopped capability research, either just all frontier training runs or both all frontier training runs and all low-scale capability-focused research.

Internal definition: The company gets to pause on its own terms, which is much easier than a generally coordinated pause since they can define the pause in terms of the existing structure of work and teams within the specific company, reducing disruption to other processes. They have said they would like to work with other companies and countries to adapt and strengthen this definition over time, in particular to make it gradually more compatible with actions by other actors. Importantly, we accept that it may be easiest for a company to pause according to its own, company-specific definition, and handle any asymmetry in their agreements via multiple rounds of negotiation with other actors.

Safety + security + product: In place of capability research, their efforts to alignment and other safety research, information security, and product. The product part is important! They will still be a trillion dollar company shipping extremely useful tools, and this also provides an escape valve for people within the company who care about products and don’t want to do safety research.

Restart if necessary: The pause is temporary, and will restart after some period of time if progress is not made to broaden the pause. Potentially one wants separate periods based on different kinds of progress. Other US labs are likely to pause sooner than labs in China, since international diplomacy takes time.

There are multiple places in the post where Scott makes it clear he wants the reader to be thinking of much worse plans than this. Emphasis added:

I think people feel insufficient terror at this strategy. It amounts to "let's put all of our hopes for survival through non-pause strategies in a giant pile, and then set that pile on fire, in the hope that the pretty flames catch people's attention and make them more interested in a pause." It might in theory be net positive, but this is the sort of thing that you would only want to conclude after extremely careful analysis, of a type that I so far haven't seen.

I think people feel insufficient terror at this strategy. It amounts to "let's put all of our hopes for survival through non-pause strategies in a giant pile, and then set that pile on fire, in the hope that the pretty flames catch people's attention and make them more interested in a pause." It might in theory be net positive, but this is the sort of thing that you would only want to conclude after extremely careful analysis, of a type that I so far haven't seen.

As a very rough start, I asked the AI superforecaster how much more likely a global pause would become if Anthropic disbanded their entire company immediately with the explicit goal of raising awareness of a pause. The forecaster said this would increase the chance of a global pause by only three percentage points - from 16% to 19%.

As a very rough start, I asked the AI superforecaster how much more likely a global pause would become if Anthropic disbanded their entire company immediately with the explicit goal of raising awareness of a pause. The forecaster said this would increase the chance of a global pause by only three percentage points - from 16% to 19%.

Again, the correct version of a unilateral pause is a company pivoting to safety + security + product, not “disbanding their entire company immediately”.

Since the goal of SURA is to get all alignment-pilled people and companies out of the industry, it would result in more Greg Brockmans funding the anti-regulation side, and fewer Anthropics funding the pro-regulation side.

Since the goal of SURA is to get all alignment-pilled people and companies out of the industry, it would result in more Greg Brockmans funding the anti-regulation side, and fewer Anthropics funding the pro-regulation side.

This is again arguing against a strawman: OpenAI would not be “out of the industry” if they decided to unilaterally pause. Sam Altman loves to build products! He would very much still be in the industry.

It is possible that Scott will correctly point out that some people do advocate for the extreme version here, but I don’t think he should get credit for this. The title of the post is “Against Stop Unilaterally and Raise Awareness”. I think it is perfectly reasonable for someone to say that SURA-the-phrase applies to my better version. His post is very strongly being interpreted as arguing against unilateral stopping in general. It is being interpreted that way because of his title and framing.

Scott appears to agree that the good version of unilateral pausing is good, but attempts to claim that only one group is advocating for this good version, the AI Futures Project.

(A virtuous exception)I want to thank the one group I've heard advocate for an immediate unilateral-ish pause in a way that makes sense and considers race dynamics carefully.The AI Futures Project currently believes that it might be correct for AI companies to pause immediately, though it's unclear whether they're thinking of a single company, or US companies as a group.Their argument is that Plan C requires companies to do some combination of race (at some points) and burn their lead (at other points). They think US companies shouldn't race now, because their security is so bad that China will steal whatever progress they make, and they won't get any extra lead anyway. Therefore, companies should pause now, spend the time on alignment and tightening their security. Then, if nobody has figured out a global pause by the time the companies get their security in order, they can go back to racing.This makes sense, and I exempt it from my criticism.

I want to thank the one group I've heard advocate for an immediate unilateral-ish pause in a way that makes sense and considers race dynamics carefully.

The AI Futures Project currently believes that it might be correct for AI companies to pause immediately, though it's unclear whether they're thinking of a single company, or US companies as a group.

Their argument is that Plan C requires companies to do some combination of race (at some points) and burn their lead (at other points). They think US companies shouldn't race now, because their security is so bad that China will steal whatever progress they make, and they won't get any extra lead anyway. Therefore, companies should pause now, spend the time on alignment and tightening their security. Then, if nobody has figured out a global pause by the time the companies get their security in order, they can go back to racing.

This makes sense, and I exempt it from my criticism.

This should not be a parenthetical. If the goal is clarification for people who haven’t thought about the details much, and Scott believes as I do that there is a good version of unilateral pausing, it should have been in the opening section. It is not. The reader should not be expected to review every section before realizing that the title of the post is wrong.

The core argument behind unilateral pausing is that the game theory is complicated, and it is better to go via deontology and other non-consequentialist analyses if you can’t model the game theory well. Scott reasonably points out that one shouldn’t just say this: he wants details. Unfortunately, in the absence of others providing details, he provides his own game theory and makes basic mistakes, providing evidence for the original why-deontology point.

By stop in a coordinated manner, I mean get them to sign a commitment saying that if every other major company in every country agrees to stop or slow by some definition, they'll also stop or slow by that definition.This is strictly easier than getting them to stop unilaterally. And, unlike stopping unilaterally, it fails gracefully in a situation where some companies agree to it but not others.

By stop in a coordinated manner, I mean get them to sign a commitment saying that if every other major company in every country agrees to stop or slow by some definition, they'll also stop or slow by that definition.

This is strictly easier than getting them to stop unilaterally. And, unlike stopping unilaterally, it fails gracefully in a situation where some companies agree to it but not others.

Agreeing to pause conditional on others pausing is not strictly easier than unilaterally stopping. There are three reasons for this: (1) “some definition” hides dragons, (2) promises for future actions can be harder than actions, even if the immediate actions are stronger, (3) the boundary between frontier lab and not is ambiguous.

General version: Company A agrees that if all other companies B agree to stop, by any definition D, company A will also stop using definition D.

Internal version: Company A comes up with their own specific definition D, and states that if other companies stop according to A’s definition D they will D-stop too.

External version: Advocates for a unilateral pause take their own external definition D to company A, and get A to agree to D-stop if everyone else D-stops.

It should be clear that getting a company to agree to the general version is out of the question: it is too wide a promise. Set that aside.

The internal definition version is useless without additional rounds of negotiation. If all companies come up with their own definitions and agree to act on them if others act on their own internally-generated definitions, the immediate outcome is no action. Additional rounds of negotiation then clearly falsify “strictly easier”.

The external definition version is also not strictly easier. It is in practice much harder for a company to agree on an external definition than to take action based on their own internal definition. This is a combination of not-invented-here syndrome and different definitions affecting different companies in different ways due to different team structures and research programs.

I am not guessing here. I have spoken directly to multiple people at all of Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind about unilateral pauses, and they are all sketched out by this question of the precise definition of a pause. One of those people was the CEO of one of those labs. Hiding this complexity behind “some definition” is oversimplifying the game theory, and that results in bad analysis and bad conclusions.

Now of course, unilateral pausing also means definition mismatch and multiple rounds of negotiation. It might be the case that one company pauses according to definition D1, and another company refuses to follow suit unless they strengthen to definition D2. But accepting that we live in a multiround negotiation world is one of the core arguments behind unilateral pauses: the goal is to start a process that can then ratchet up through negotiation.

It is not the case that promising to do X in the future based on condition Y is strictly easier than doing X now. This is because

Incomplete information: It may be difficult to know if condition Y is true based on incomplete evidence; in this context, that means company A not entirely trusting company B’s statements that they’ve Y-stopped.

Changing circumstances: Promising to do something in the future means not revising one’s views if the situation changes. This is uncomfortable! In practice, that discomfort translates into failure to make promises to begin with.

The above are some abstract first principles. But they conform to how AI company executives speak about the issue, and how I’ve seen negotiations break down in the past: Executives are very uncomfortable making conditional promises.

As one example, DeepMind’s attempt to become a company limited by guarantee (CLG) failed in part for similar “reality fails to conform to simplistic game theory” reasons. DeepMind leadership was attempting to guard against “AI capabilities are crazy” worlds where risks are high, and the Google Board was attempting to guard against “AI fizzles and DeepMind wastes a bunch of money” worlds. Simplistically, there was an arbitrage to be made. In practice, negotiations fell through. One should be very careful when assuming that simple theorems of simple game theory apply.

How many frontier labs are there?

Another reason it is not strictly easier to do a Scott-version conditional pause is that it is not clear how many frontier labs there are. In the U.S., the number is somewhere between 2 and 6. There are clearly worlds in which getting 2 companies to do a unilateral and then bilateral action is easier than to get 6 parties to do even a much weaker action, and I claim we are in one of those worlds.

As mentioned, when I talk to people at AI companies, they are very concerned that if they stop, other people will stop slightly less, and it will be unfair. We can contrast the following two risks from AI:

Company A stops a bit more than company B, and it is unfair to company A.

One of company A and B trains a misaligned superintelligence which takes control of the world and eventually kills everyone.

The second risk is more important!

Now, one can argue that the first risk is important too, and indeed significant work should go into minimizing the unfairness, since that unfairness does impact pause effectiveness. Too much unfairness means we don’t slow down AI capability progress enough and don’t buy enough time. But I think that fairness is to be achieved over time, after multiple rounds of action, and should not be a precondition for taking the first step.

It may be much easier for an AI company to act on their own definition than by one imposed on them externally. So shifting the conversation to the relative unimportance of the definition used for the first action may be critical to actually causing that action to happen. This applies not just to unilateral or bilateral pauses but also to the grand international coordination that Scott prefers. In that context, it is notable that Scott’s only engagement with definitions is using the phrase “some definition”, handwaving a bit, and adding a footnote about forecaster wording.

Once we will fill in the subtleties around definitions and the details of the game theory, the correct action is to stop.