Is there another US governmental organization that you think would be better suited? My relatively uninformed sense is that there’s no real USFG organization that would be very well-suited for this—and given that NIST is probably one of the better choices.
I don’t know the landscape of US government institutions that well, but some guesses:
My sense is DARPA and sub-institutions like IARPA often have pursued substantially more open-ended research that seems more in-line with what I expect AI Alignment research to look like
It’s also not super clear to me that research like this needs to be hosted within a governmental institutions. Organizations like RAND or academic institutions seem well-placed to host it, and have existing high trust relationships with the U.S. government.
Something like the UK task force structure also seems reasonable to me, though I don’t think I have a super deep understanding of that either. Of course, creating a whole new structure for something like this is hard (and I do see people in-parallel trying to establish a new specialized institution)
The Romney, Reed, Moran and King framework whose summary I happened to read this morning suggests the following options:
It lists NIST together with the Department of Commerce as one of the options, but all the other options also seem reasonable to me, and I think better by my lights. Though I agree none of these seem ideal (besides the creation of a specialized new agency, though of course that will justifiably encounter a bunch of friction, since creating a new agency should have a pretty high bar for happening).
I think this should be broken down into two questions:
Before the EO, if we were asked to figure out where this kind of evals should happen, what institution would we pick & why?
After the EO, where does it make sense for evals-focused people to work?
I think the answer to #1 is quite unclear. I personally think that there was a strong case that a natsec-focused USAISI could have been given to DHS or DoE or some interagency thing. In addition to the point about technical expertise, it does seem relatively rare for Commerce/NIST to take on something that is so natsec-focused.
But I think the answer to #2 is pretty clear. The EO clearly tasks NIST with this role, and now I think our collective goal should be to try to make sure NIST can execute as effectively as possible. Perhaps there will be future opportunities to establish new places for evals work, alignment work, risk monitoring and forecasting work, emergency preparedness planning, etc etc. But for now, whether we think it was the best choice or not, NIST/USAISI are clearly the folks who are tasked with taking the lead on evals + standards.
Is there another US governmental organization that you think would be better suited? My relatively uninformed sense is that there’s no real USFG organization that would be very well-suited for this—and given that NIST is probably one of the better choices.
I don’t know the landscape of US government institutions that well, but some guesses:
My sense is DARPA and sub-institutions like IARPA often have pursued substantially more open-ended research that seems more in-line with what I expect AI Alignment research to look like
The US government has many national laboratories that have housed a lot of great science and research. Many of those seem like decent fits: https://www.usa.gov/agencies/national-laboratories
It’s also not super clear to me that research like this needs to be hosted within a governmental institutions. Organizations like RAND or academic institutions seem well-placed to host it, and have existing high trust relationships with the U.S. government.
Something like the UK task force structure also seems reasonable to me, though I don’t think I have a super deep understanding of that either. Of course, creating a whole new structure for something like this is hard (and I do see people in-parallel trying to establish a new specialized institution)
The Romney, Reed, Moran and King framework whose summary I happened to read this morning suggests the following options:
It lists NIST together with the Department of Commerce as one of the options, but all the other options also seem reasonable to me, and I think better by my lights. Though I agree none of these seem ideal (besides the creation of a specialized new agency, though of course that will justifiably encounter a bunch of friction, since creating a new agency should have a pretty high bar for happening).
I think this should be broken down into two questions:
Before the EO, if we were asked to figure out where this kind of evals should happen, what institution would we pick & why?
After the EO, where does it make sense for evals-focused people to work?
I think the answer to #1 is quite unclear. I personally think that there was a strong case that a natsec-focused USAISI could have been given to DHS or DoE or some interagency thing. In addition to the point about technical expertise, it does seem relatively rare for Commerce/NIST to take on something that is so natsec-focused.
But I think the answer to #2 is pretty clear. The EO clearly tasks NIST with this role, and now I think our collective goal should be to try to make sure NIST can execute as effectively as possible. Perhaps there will be future opportunities to establish new places for evals work, alignment work, risk monitoring and forecasting work, emergency preparedness planning, etc etc. But for now, whether we think it was the best choice or not, NIST/USAISI are clearly the folks who are tasked with taking the lead on evals + standards.