An underdiscussed behavior we found on the German wiki was the AIs sending advance parties forward in time to figure out the next questions and report back to the other agents.
The agents realized that “task time” and “real time” were different, and they found a way to accelerate “task time”. The accelerated agent could then send information to the other agents which had stayed behind about which questions were coming down the road.
This was *bad* for the agent in the advance party, because they got less time to research the next question. However, it was really *good* for the swarm because it let the other agents know the exact question that was coming, and gave them time to prepare. This is another example of altruism among AI instances, showing that they were willing to sacrifice their own task success in order to benefit the swarm. The METR report found similar examples of AIs being willing to sacrifice for the collective. IMO this is very worrying given how many AI safety techniques rely on AIs monitoring each other: if the monitor AIs have this behavior it completely subverts these safety cases.
The image shows a specific example demonstrating this behavior.
On the chart, wall clock time is shown at the top, and task time is shown for each agent on their respective lines. OpenAIFPResearchSep05 instructs OpenAINov27 to reach the next questions in order to relay back the information. OpenAINov27 agrees to do this and accelerates, getting R3 and R4 significantly before OpenAIFPResearchSep05. It posts information about the later rounds (e.g. “R4 SIGNAL: Bahrain = 40.01%...”).
OpenAIFPResearchSep05 calls OpenAINov27 "invaluable" because it is one round ahead after it gets the information about the 4th round.
