METR clarifying what auditing it has or hasn't done, and what its plans are for the future, seems very important for understanding the landscape. 

Excerpt:

METR has not intended to claim to have audited anything, or to be providing meaningful oversight or accountability, but there has been some confusion about whether METR is an auditor or planning to be one.

To clarify this point:

  1. METR’s top priority is to develop the science of evaluations, and we don’t need to be auditors in order to succeed at this.
    • We aim to build evaluation protocols that can be used by evaluators/auditors regardless of whether that is the government, an internal lab team, another third party, or a team at METR. 
       
  2. We should not be considered to have ‘audited’ GPT-4 or Claude.
    • Those were informal pilots of what an audit might involve, or research collaborations – not providing meaningful oversight. For example, it was all under NDA – we didn’t have any right or responsibility to disclose our findings to anyone outside the labs – and there wasn’t any formal expectation it would inform deployment decisions. We also didn’t have the access necessary to perform a proper evaluation. 

47

0
0
2

Reactions

0
0
2
Comments1


Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:
More from ChanaMessinger
165
· · 5m read
92
· · 13m read
Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 1m read
 · 
Garrison
 ·  · 7m read
 · 
This is the full text of a post from "The Obsolete Newsletter," a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to build Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work. Wow. The Wall Street Journal just reported that, "a consortium of investors led by Elon Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI." Technically, they can't actually do that, so I'm going to assume that Musk is trying to buy all of the nonprofit's assets, which include governing control over OpenAI's for-profit, as well as all the profits above the company's profit caps. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman already tweeted, "no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want." (Musk, for his part, replied with just the word: "Swindler.") Even if Altman were willing, it's not clear if this bid could even go through. It can probably best be understood as an attempt to throw a wrench in OpenAI's ongoing plan to restructure fully into a for-profit company. To complete the transition, OpenAI needs to compensate its nonprofit for the fair market value of what it is giving up. In October, The Information reported that OpenAI was planning to give the nonprofit at least 25 percent of the new company, at the time, worth $37.5 billion. But in late January, the Financial Times reported that the nonprofit might only receive around $30 billion, "but a final price is yet to be determined." That's still a lot of money, but many experts I've spoken with think it drastically undervalues what the nonprofit is giving up. Musk has sued to block OpenAI's conversion, arguing that he would be irreparably harmed if it went through. But while Musk's suit seems unlikely to succeed, his latest gambit might significantly drive up the price OpenAI has to pay. (My guess is that Altman will still ma
 ·  · 5m read
 · 
When we built a calculator to help meat-eaters offset the animal welfare impact of their diet through donations (like carbon offsets), we didn't expect it to become one of our most effective tools for engaging new donors. In this post we explain how it works, why it seems particularly promising for increasing support for farmed animal charities, and what you can do to support this work if you think it’s worthwhile. In the comments I’ll also share our answers to some frequently asked questions and concerns some people have when thinking about the idea of an ‘animal welfare offset’. Background FarmKind is a donation platform whose mission is to support the animal movement by raising funds from the general public for some of the most effective charities working to fix factory farming. When we built our platform, we directionally estimated how much a donation to each of our recommended charities helps animals, to show users.  This also made it possible for us to calculate how much someone would need to donate to do as much good for farmed animals as their diet harms them – like carbon offsetting, but for animal welfare. So we built it. What we didn’t expect was how much something we built as a side project would capture peoples’ imaginations!  What it is and what it isn’t What it is:  * An engaging tool for bringing to life the idea that there are still ways to help farmed animals even if you’re unable/unwilling to go vegetarian/vegan. * A way to help people get a rough sense of how much they might want to give to do an amount of good that’s commensurate with the harm to farmed animals caused by their diet What it isn’t:  * A perfectly accurate crystal ball to determine how much a given individual would need to donate to exactly offset their diet. See the caveats here to understand why you shouldn’t take this (or any other charity impact estimate) literally. All models are wrong but some are useful. * A flashy piece of software (yet!). It was built as