[ctoth]

Deceptive alignment is misalignment. The deception is just what it looks like from outside when capability is high enough to model expectations. Your distinction doesn't save the argument - the same "where would it come from?" problem applies to the underlying misalignment you need for deception to emerge from.

[GavCo]

My intention isn't to argue that it's impossible to create an unaligned superintelligence. I think that not only is it theoretically possible, but it will almost certainly be attempted by bad actors and most likely they will succeed. I'm cautiously optimistic though that the first superintelligence will be aligned with humanity. The early evidence seems to point to the path of least resistance being aligned rather than unaligned. It would take another 1000 words to try to properly explain my thinking on this, but intuitively consider the quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar." A superintelligence that is unaligned but successfully pretending to be aligned would need to be far more capable than a genuinely aligned superintelligence behaving identically.

So yes, if you throw enough compute at it, you can probably get an unaligned highly capable superintelligence accidentally. But I think what we're seeing is that the lab that's taking a more intentional approach to pursuing deep alignment (by training the model to be aligned with human values, culture and context) is pulling ahead in capabilities. And I'm suggesting that it's not coincidental but specifically because they're taking this approach. Training models to be internally coherent and consistent is the path of least resistance.