I don’t remember what exactly I thought in 2012 when I was reading the Sequences. I do recall sometime later, after DL was in full swing, it seeming like MIRI wasn’t in any position to be building AGI before others (like no compute, not the engineering prowess), and someone (not necessarily at MIRI) confirmed that wasn’t the plan. Now and at the time, I don’t know how much that was principle vs ability.
My feeling of the plan pre-pivotal-act era was “figure out the theory of how to build a safe AI at all, and try to get whoever is building to adopt that approach”, and that MIRI wasn’t taking any steps to be the ones building it. I also had the model that due to psychological unity of mankind, anyone building an aligned[ with them] AGI was a good outcome compared to someone building unaligned. Like even if it was Xi Jinping, a sovereign aligned with him would be okay (and not obviously that dramatically different from anyone else?). I’m not sure how much this was MIRI positions vs fragments that I combined in my own head that came from assorted places and were never policy.
I don’t remember what exactly I thought in 2012 when I was reading the Sequences. I do recall sometime later, after DL was in full swing, it seeming like MIRI wasn’t in any position to be building AGI before others (like no compute, not the engineering prowess), and someone (not necessarily at MIRI) confirmed that wasn’t the plan. Now and at the time, I don’t know how much that was principle vs ability.
My feeling of the plan pre-pivotal-act era was “figure out the theory of how to build a safe AI at all, and try to get whoever is building to adopt that approach”, and that MIRI wasn’t taking any steps to be the ones building it. I also had the model that due to psychological unity of mankind, anyone building an aligned[ with them] AGI was a good outcome compared to someone building unaligned. Like even if it was Xi Jinping, a sovereign aligned with him would be okay (and not obviously that dramatically different from anyone else?). I’m not sure how much this was MIRI positions vs fragments that I combined in my own head that came from assorted places and were never policy.
Well, I can tell you that they definitely planned to build the Friendly AI, after figuring out how.
See this other comment.
Pretty solid evidence.