[gwern]

It's an open question how far this will transfer. Given the local basin/optima approach, and the incestuous nature of AI outputs + training, it's entirely possible that you could start to see 'lineages' of AIs (often undeclared, eg based on abusing APIs for distillation, and maybe unknown even to the creating entity if people/AI inside it are lying or hustling) where there is a lot of acausal coordination going on due to this.

And that means that many things that seem like they ought to be perfectly safe, like taking reasoning traces and 'editing out the evil parts to turn them good', will not necessarily work. (Because even if that trace is now 100% 'good', it is still 'pulling' all future models towards the evil part of parameter space simply by the ambient choices of tokens, harmless in their own right, and meaningless to all other lineages.)