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43 simulations of contemporary AI development tells us that coordination is hard:
…Meta-analysis of 40+ games of "Intelligence Rising" sheds light on how people expect the industry to develop…
Intelligence Rising is a scenario-based game that lets players pretend to be AI developers competing with one another to build and deploy AGI. The game was developed by Cambridge researchers to help them structure discussions around AI development and its associated dynamics. Now, after overseeing 43 games over a four year period, researchers have published a paper outlining the common things that come up in these games. 

What tends to come up when people pretend they're developing AI systems: The paper is a quick read and not too surprising - the sorts of challenges that get surfaced in these games are very similar to the ones that AI labs encounter on a day-to-day basis (or at least, it certainly matches experiences I've had at both OpenAI and Anthropic). 

• "Even prior to the development of radically transformative AI, AI technologies can have

• dramatically destabilising effects as they rapidly advance and reshape society. 

• "Outcomes leading to positive futures almost always require coordination between actors who by default have strong incentives to compete — this applies both to companies and to nations"

• "The power to steer the future of AI development is very unequally distributed due to several

• drivers for concentration, including the enormous compute requirements of the latest frontier AI models. 

• "Technology development does not happen in isolation — it affects, and is affected by, geopolitics, economical factors, social factors, and state actions. Actors should consider the broader consequences of their policies, including on trust between powerful actors, and impacts on social stability. There is no predetermined path that AI technology is bound to follow."

• "The best chances for optimal outcomes are achieved through early recognition of the magnitude of the challenge, trust building over years, and eventually international treaties or agreements that include rigorous and robust verification protocols for the involved states and firms." 

Why this matters - coordination is required and coordination is difficult: The game shows something everyone working in AI policy knows to be true - getting to a good outcome will require coordination beyond what the AI ecosystem currently incentivizes. And even if we succeed at coordination, success isn't guaranteed: "Even with an agreement in place to slow development until safe [AGI] is verifiable at a very high level of confidence and with no successful attempts to violate the agreement by any parties, a dice roll is typically still required to inform the end-of-game narrative," the authors write. 
   Read more: Strategic Insights from Simulation Gaming of AI Race Dynamics (arXiv).

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Chinese researchers introduce Omni-Math, a (for now) challenging math benchmark:
…OpenAI o1 gets ~60%, most other models get 30% or less…
Chinese researchers have built Omni-Math, a dataset and benchmark of 4428 mathematical olympiad competition-level problems. Omni-Math is designed to provide a competitive test of how well LLMs understand math, superseding existing (and mostly saturated) benchmarks like GSM8K and MATH. 

Extremely hard for most models: Omni-Math is hard - most models get ~30% or less accuracy (e.g, Claude 3.5 Sonnet gets 26.23%, and DeepSeek-Coder-V2 gets 25.78%), though there are two outliers - OpenAI o1-preview and OpenAI o1-mini which get 52.5% and 60.5%, respectively. This suggests Omni-Math is, for now, a hard benchmark, though we should expect new models that wrap in RL (like the o1 series) to do substantially better. The open question is how long it will remain hard for - will the best models be getting ~90%+ next year, or more like 70%?

Why this matters - knowing where we're going is getting increasingly difficult: Omni-Math is a hard benchmark to evaluate as a human unless you're also quite good at math. Many modern hard benchmarks (e.g, GPQA) now exhibit this property - AI systems have got sufficiently good that our own ability to build evals for them is now limited by deep subject-matter expertise rather than generic highschool human expertise. This is significant - in a real sense, many AI systems are now way above average human competence on some tasks. 
   Read more: Round and Round We Go! What makes Rotary Positional Encodings useful? (arXiv).

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Tech Tales:

Operationalization of the Sentience Accords
[Extract from an implementation guide document developed by one of the Sentience Accords working groups, 2030]

Per the implementation guide from the Sentience Accords, we must define five levels of "Consciousness" with associated tests. AI systems are permitted to be released openly and at scale if they are at Consciousness Level 2 or below (CL1 or CL2). CL3 systems require pre-deployment testing by a named safety authority (for a full list of these authorities within the G20 please refer to the 'Authorities' section of the appendix). CL4 systems require pre-deployment testing by safety authorities as well as ongoing monitoring for both usage and 'System Welfare'. CL5 systems are not permitted to be released and their analysis and operation is restricted to a small set of government entities and their private sector partners. 

Things that inspired this story: The sentience accords; moral patienthood and AI systems; dreams I have of windowless rooms and coffee in styrofoam cups and people hammering out the policy around the near future.

Thanks for reading!