Cool! Exciting that you’re working on this, and thanks for your thoughts.
One persistent concern I have is that this may only be true of industries and movements where the cost of a campaign can plausibly outweigh the costs of giving in to campaigners’ asks.
I think the bar for “disrupting supply / business as usual” is lower. A couple of the other social movement examples I cited were just this. I haven’t thought much about what that might look like in the context of AI safety, but it might be comparable to forcing a localised ‘pause’ on (some aspects of) frontier AGI development, which might be good.
If you’re going beyond that though, and trying to encourage meaningful corporate change, then I think maybe you just want to do some brainstorming about what sorts orgs or asks might be more promising.
For example, I found evidence that “boycotts of specific companies across their entire product range may be a more promising tactic for disrupting the supply of a product than boycotts of a specific product type across all companies.” (anti-abortion). So maybe e.g. Microsoft might be more vulnerable to pressure campaigns (across their entire product range or company) for failures relating to BingChat than more specialised companies like OpenAI would be for failures relating to ChatGPT.
There are different kinds of costs you could try to impose on non-complying companies. Immediate revenue costs, PR costs, risks of harsh regulation, wasted company time, etc. It might just be about matching the cost to the company and the campaign.
So something you highlight as a downside for this kind of campaign in AI safety could be used as an asset in your arsenal:
When it comes to falling behind even slightly in a corporate arms race for a technology as transformative as this, it’s not clear to me that the costs are that low — in fact, it’s not clear to me that the costs are bounded at all. For example, Google was the classic example of an entrenched leader when it came to web search (>90% market share), and Bing rolling out Sydney was enough to put Google in full “code-red” mode. So, if the potential financial benefits of leading on AI are as massive as these companies (and me, and most folks in AI safety) seem to believe they are, it implies that a campaign would need to cause a ridiculous amount of financial risk to move a company to actually implement meaningful safeguards.
You could use these as pressure points, as opposed to being things that the company needs to shoulder in order to cave to the campaign. E.g. going back to the ‘disruption’ idea, maybe this perspective means that something that risks slowing the company down by just a few months is a surprisingly powerful tool/threat against them.
For a company to commit to external auditing, for example, we have to know what the audits are and who conducts them and what models they apply to… I’m worried a lot of the commitments you could get from tech companies and AI labs right now look more like the former, including the recent one made in collaboration with the White House.
Are you highlighting this as just something like ‘here’s a risk corporate campaigns against AI labs/companies would need to look out for’, or ‘here’s something that makes these kinds of campaigns much less promising’? I agree with the former but not the latter.
I wish the AI Safety space had some certifier such that tech companies could commit to testing all new frontier models on, and publicly reporting the results of, benchmarks approved by that certifier in the future.
(I intuitively agree these things would ideally be done by governments, or government-funded bodies. But I don’t know much about the precedent from regulation of other industries.)
Thank you for responding and sorry for the delayed reply.
I’m not totally sure what the distinction is between disrupting business as usual and encouraging meaningful corporate change — in my mind, corporate campaigns do both, the former in service of the latter. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the distinction there.
That being said, I am much less certain than I was a few weeks ago about the “no costs from disrupted business can be sufficiently high to trigger action on AI safety” take, primarily because of what you pointed out: the corporate race dynamics here might make small disruptions much more costly, rather than less. In fact, the higher the financial upside is, the more costly it could be to lose even a tiny edge on the competition. So even if the costs of meaningful safeguards go up in competitive markets, so too do the costs of PR damage or the other setbacks you mention. I hadn’t thought of this when I wrote my comment but it seems pretty obvious to me now, so thanks for pointing it out.
I’m hoping to think more rigorously about why corporate campaigns work in the upcoming weeks, and might follow up here with additional thoughts.
Are you highlighting this as just something like ‘here’s a risk corporate campaigns against AI labs/companies would need to look out for’, or ‘here’s something that makes these kinds of campaigns much less promising’? I agree with the former but not the latter.
Both, I think. I’m still working on this because I’m optimistic that meaningful + robust policies with really granular detail will be developed, but if they aren’t, it would make campaigns less promising in my mind. Maybe what’s going on is something like the Collingridge dilemma, where it takes time for meaningful safeguards to be identified, but time also makes it harder to implement those safeguards.
Curious to hear why you think campaigns are just as promising even if there aren’t detailed asks to make of labs, if I’m understanding you correctly.
Alignment Research Center evals? Apollo Research evals? Maybe you mean something more specific and I’m just not following the distinction you’re making.
Yeah, in my mind, the animal welfare to AI safety analogy is something like this, where (???) is the missing entity that I wish existed:
This is to say that ARC and Apollo are developing eval regimes in the same way Cooks Venture develops slower-growing breeds, but a lab would probably be very reluctant to commit to auditing with a single partner into perpetuity regardless of how demanding the audits are in the same way a food company wouldn’t want to commit to exclusively sourcing breeds developed by Cooks Venture. And activists, too, would have reason to be concerned about an arrangement like this since the chicken breed (or model eval) developer’s standards could drop in the future.
So I wish there was some nonprofit or govt committee with a high degree of trust and few COIs who was tasked with certifying the eval regimes developed by ARC and Apollo (or those developed by academics, or even by labs themselves) — hence why I refer to them as a sort of meta-certifier. Then a lab could commit to something like “all future models will undergo evaluation approved by (meta-certifying body) and the results will be publicly shared,” even if many of the specifics this would entail don’t exist today.
On reflection, though, I really don’t know enough about the AI safety landscape to say with confidence how useful this would be. So take it with a big grain of salt.
Cool! Exciting that you’re working on this, and thanks for your thoughts.
I think the bar for “disrupting supply / business as usual” is lower. A couple of the other social movement examples I cited were just this. I haven’t thought much about what that might look like in the context of AI safety, but it might be comparable to forcing a localised ‘pause’ on (some aspects of) frontier AGI development, which might be good.
If you’re going beyond that though, and trying to encourage meaningful corporate change, then I think maybe you just want to do some brainstorming about what sorts orgs or asks might be more promising.
For example, I found evidence that “boycotts of specific companies across their entire product range may be a more promising tactic for disrupting the supply of a product than boycotts of a specific product type across all companies.” (anti-abortion). So maybe e.g. Microsoft might be more vulnerable to pressure campaigns (across their entire product range or company) for failures relating to BingChat than more specialised companies like OpenAI would be for failures relating to ChatGPT.
There are different kinds of costs you could try to impose on non-complying companies. Immediate revenue costs, PR costs, risks of harsh regulation, wasted company time, etc. It might just be about matching the cost to the company and the campaign.
So something you highlight as a downside for this kind of campaign in AI safety could be used as an asset in your arsenal:
You could use these as pressure points, as opposed to being things that the company needs to shoulder in order to cave to the campaign. E.g. going back to the ‘disruption’ idea, maybe this perspective means that something that risks slowing the company down by just a few months is a surprisingly powerful tool/threat against them.
Are you highlighting this as just something like ‘here’s a risk corporate campaigns against AI labs/companies would need to look out for’, or ‘here’s something that makes these kinds of campaigns much less promising’? I agree with the former but not the latter.
Alignment Research Center evals? Apollo Research evals? Maybe you mean something more specific and I’m just not following the distinction you’re making.
(I intuitively agree these things would ideally be done by governments, or government-funded bodies. But I don’t know much about the precedent from regulation of other industries.)
Thank you for responding and sorry for the delayed reply.
I’m not totally sure what the distinction is between disrupting business as usual and encouraging meaningful corporate change — in my mind, corporate campaigns do both, the former in service of the latter. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the distinction there.
That being said, I am much less certain than I was a few weeks ago about the “no costs from disrupted business can be sufficiently high to trigger action on AI safety” take, primarily because of what you pointed out: the corporate race dynamics here might make small disruptions much more costly, rather than less. In fact, the higher the financial upside is, the more costly it could be to lose even a tiny edge on the competition. So even if the costs of meaningful safeguards go up in competitive markets, so too do the costs of PR damage or the other setbacks you mention. I hadn’t thought of this when I wrote my comment but it seems pretty obvious to me now, so thanks for pointing it out.
I’m hoping to think more rigorously about why corporate campaigns work in the upcoming weeks, and might follow up here with additional thoughts.
Both, I think. I’m still working on this because I’m optimistic that meaningful + robust policies with really granular detail will be developed, but if they aren’t, it would make campaigns less promising in my mind. Maybe what’s going on is something like the Collingridge dilemma, where it takes time for meaningful safeguards to be identified, but time also makes it harder to implement those safeguards.
Curious to hear why you think campaigns are just as promising even if there aren’t detailed asks to make of labs, if I’m understanding you correctly.
Yeah, in my mind, the animal welfare to AI safety analogy is something like this, where (???) is the missing entity that I wish existed:
G.A.P : Cooks Venture :: (???) : ARC/Apollo
This is to say that ARC and Apollo are developing eval regimes in the same way Cooks Venture develops slower-growing breeds, but a lab would probably be very reluctant to commit to auditing with a single partner into perpetuity regardless of how demanding the audits are in the same way a food company wouldn’t want to commit to exclusively sourcing breeds developed by Cooks Venture. And activists, too, would have reason to be concerned about an arrangement like this since the chicken breed (or model eval) developer’s standards could drop in the future.
So I wish there was some nonprofit or govt committee with a high degree of trust and few COIs who was tasked with certifying the eval regimes developed by ARC and Apollo (or those developed by academics, or even by labs themselves) — hence why I refer to them as a sort of meta-certifier. Then a lab could commit to something like “all future models will undergo evaluation approved by (meta-certifying body) and the results will be publicly shared,” even if many of the specifics this would entail don’t exist today.
On reflection, though, I really don’t know enough about the AI safety landscape to say with confidence how useful this would be. So take it with a big grain of salt.
Hello!
Did you ever do this research on why corporate campaigns work? And if so, would you share it? Thanks!