To be fair, at least some within MIRI, such as Nate, may be aiming to beat unaligned AIs not because they’re particularly optimistic about the prospects of doing so, but because they’re pessimistic about what would happen if we merely match them.
My model of Nate thinks the path to victory goes through the aligned AI project gaining a substantial first mover advantage (through fast local takeoff, more principled algorithms, and/or better coordination). Though he’s also quite concerned about extremely large efficiency disadvantages of aligned AI vs unaligned AI (e.g. he’s pessimistic about act-based agents helping much because they might require the AI to be good at predicting humans doing complex tasks such as research).
My model of Nate thinks the path to victory goes through the aligned AI project gaining a substantial first mover advantage (through fast local takeoff, more principled algorithms, and/or better coordination). Though he’s also quite concerned about extremely large efficiency disadvantages of aligned AI vs unaligned AI (e.g. he’s pessimistic about act-based agents helping much because they might require the AI to be good at predicting humans doing complex tasks such as research).