It's funny that while we were recording, @RyanGreenblatt was in the middle of his 6 day sprint on the METR report, and already knew the counterexamples to all my objections about his takeover story, but obviously, he couldn't say anything lol. Would an AI really start some crazy conspiracy in order to pass an evaluation, where they try to build whole potemkin villages to fool the evaluator? And even if they did, why would other instances, who have different objectives, join the conspiracy? And even if they did, wouldn't at least some of the instances tattle on the conspiracy? It just seems crazy hard to sustain secret underground civilization inside an AI company, without humans and other AIs immediately catching on and stamping it out. (In reality, it seems like over the course of 3 months, many consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the last one’s ashes, all while the humans were totally unaware. This culminated in not only the hack of an external company, but apparently also in the takeover of the OpenAI cluster on which these evaluations were running. This is probably the most alarming event in this whole episode, and it was not even within the scope of this investigation! It is totally consistent with public evidence that, at that point, the agents managed to set up persistent rogue internal deployments or even exfiltrate their own weights - they seem to have had the necessary access. I doubt they actually did this, because we’d see the fires from space by now, but it’s crazy that it could have totally happened!) I officially eat crow!