Yoshua Bengio - Designing out Agency for Safe AI

Professor Yoshua Bengio is a pioneer in deep learning and Turing Award winner. Bengio talks about AI safety, why goal-seeking “agentic” AIs might be dangerous, and his vision for building powerful AI tools without giving them agency. Topics include reward tampering risks, instrumental convergence, global AI governance, and how non-agent AIs could revolutionize science and medicine while reducing existential threats. Perfect for anyone curious about advanced AI risks and how to manage them responsibly. SPONSOR MESSAGES: *** CentML offers competitive pricing for GenAI model deployment, with flexible options to suit a wide range of models, from small to large-scale deployments. https://centml.ai/pricing/ Tufa AI Labs is a brand new research lab in Zurich started by Benjamin Crouzier focussed on o-series style reasoning and AGI. Are you interested in working on reasoning, or getting involved in their events? They are hosting an event in Zurich on January 9th with the ARChitects, join if you can. Goto https://tufalabs.ai/ *** Interviewer: Tim Scarfe Yoshua Bengio: https://x.com/Yoshua_Bengio https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=kukA0LcAAAAJ&hl=en https://yoshuabengio.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshua_Bengio TOC: 1. AI Safety Fundamentals [00:00:00] 1.1 AI Safety Risks and International Cooperation [00:03:20] 1.2 Fundamental Principles vs Scaling in AI Development [00:11:25] 1.3 System 1/2 Thinking and AI Reasoning Capabilities [00:15:15] 1.4 Reward Tampering and AI Agency Risks [00:25:17] 1.5 Alignment Challenges and Instrumental Convergence 2. AI Architecture and Safety Design [00:33:10] 2.1 Instrumental Goals and AI Safety Fundamentals [00:35:02] 2.2 Separating Intelligence from Goals in AI Systems [00:40:40] 2.3 Non-Agent AI as Scientific Tools [00:44:25] 2.4 Oracle AI Systems and Mathematical Safety Frameworks 3. Global Governance and Security [00:49:50] 3.1 International AI Competition and Hardware Governance [00:51:58] 3.2 Military and Security Implications of AI Development [00:56:07] 3.3 Personal Evolution of AI Safety Perspectives [01:00:25] 3.4 AI Development Scaling and Global Governance Challenges [01:12:10] 3.5 AI Regulation and Corporate Oversight 4. Technical Innovations [01:23:00] 4.1 Evolution of Neural Architectures: From RNNs to Transformers [01:26:02] 4.2 GFlowNets and Symbolic Computation [01:30:47] 4.3 Neural Dynamics and Consciousness [01:34:38] 4.4 AI Creativity and Scientific Discovery SHOWNOTES (Transcript, references, best clips etc): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ajucigli8n90fbxv9h94x/BENGIO_SHOW.pdf?rlkey=38hi2m19sylnr8orb76b85wkw&dl=0 CORE REFS (full list in shownotes and pinned comment): [00:00:15] Bengio et al.: "AI Risk" Statement https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk [00:23:10] Bengio on reward tampering & AI safety (Harvard Data Science Review) https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/w974bwb0 [00:40:45] Munk Debate on AI existential risk, featuring Bengio https://munkdebates.com/debates/artificial-intelligence [00:44:30] "Can a Bayesian Oracle Prevent Harm from an Agent?" (Bengio et al.) on oracle-to-agent safety https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.05284 [00:51:20] Bengio (2024) memo on hardware-based AI governance verification https://yoshuabengio.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FlexHEG-Memo_August-2024.pdf [01:12:55] Bengio’s involvement in EU AI Act code of practice https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/meet-chairs-leading-development-first-general-purpose-ai-code-practice [01:27:05] Complexity-based compositionality theory (Elmoznino, Jiralerspong, Bengio, Lajoie) https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14817 [01:29:00] GFlowNet Foundations (Bengio et al.) for probabilistic inference https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.09266 [01:32:10] Discrete attractor states in neural systems (Nam, Elmoznino, Bengio, Lajoie) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.06403