Hi, I run the 80,000 Hours job board, thanks for writing this out!
I agree that OpenAI has demonstrated a significant level of manipulativeness and have lost confidence in them prioritizing existential safety work. However, we don’t conceptualize the board as endorsing organisations. The point of the board is to give job-seekers access to opportunities where they can contribute to solving our top problems or build career capital to do so (as we write in our FAQ). Sometimes these roles are at organisations whose mission I disagree with, because the role nonetheless seems like an opportunity to do good work on a key problem.
For OpenAI in particular, we’ve tightened up our listings since the news stories a month ago, and are now only posting infosec roles and direct safety work – a small percentage of jobs they advertise. See here for the OAI roles we currently list. We used to list roles that seemed more tangentially safety-related, but because of our reduced confidence in OpenAI, we limited the listings further to only roles that are very directly on safety or security work. I still expect these roles to be good opportunities to do important work. Two live examples:
Even if we were very sure that OpenAI was reckless and did not care about existential safety, I would still expect them to not want their model to leak out to competitors, and importantly, we think it’s still good for the world if their models don’t leak! So I would still expect people working on their infosec to be doing good work.
These still seem like potentially very strong roles with the opportunity to do very important work. We think it’s still good for the world if talented people work in roles like this!
This is true even if we expect them to lack political power and to play second fiddle to capabilities work and even if that makes them less good opportunities vs. other companies.
We also include a note on their ‘job cards’ on the job board (also DeepMind’s and Anthropic’s) linking to the Working at an AI company article you mentioned, to give context. We’re not opposed to giving more or different context on OpenAI’s cards and are happy to take suggestions!
From Conor’s response on EAForum, it sounds like the answer is “we trust OpenAI to tell us”. In light of what we already know (safety team exodus, punitive and hidden NDAs, lack of disclosure to OpenAI’s governing board), that level of trust seems completely unjustified to me.
I would be shocked if OpenAI employees who took the role with that job description were pushed into doing capabilities research they didn’t want to do. (Obviously it’s plausible that they’d choose to do capabilities research while they were already there.)
Huh, this doesn’t super match my model. I have heard of people at OpenAI being pressured a lot into making sure their safety work helps with productization. I would be surprised if they end up being pressured working directly on the scaling team, but I wouldn’t end up surprised with someone being pressured into doing some better AI censorship in a way that doesn’t have any relevance to AI safety and does indeed make OpenAI a lot of money.
I wouldn’t end up surprised with someone being pressured into doing some better AI censorship in a way that doesn’t have any relevance to AI safety and does indeed make OpenAI a lot of money.
I disagree for the role advertised, I would be surprised by that. (I’d be less surprised if they advised on some post-training stuff that you’d think of as capabilities; I think that the “AI censorship” work is mostly done by a different team that doesn’t talk to the superalignment people that much. But idk where the superoversight people have been moved in the org, maybe they’d more naturally talk more now.)
Can you clarify what you mean by “completely unjustified”? For example, if OpenAI says “This role is a safety role.”, then in your opinion, what is the probability that the role is a genuine safety role?
I’d define “genuine safety role” as “any qualified person will increase safety faster that capabilities in the role”. I put ~0 likelihood that OAI has such a position. The best you could hope for is being a marginal support for a safety-based coup (which has already been attempted, and failed).
There’s a different question of “could a strategic person advance net safety by working at OpenAI, more so than any other option?”. I believe people like that exist, but they don’t need 80k to tell them about OpenAI.
I’d define “genuine safety role” as “any qualified person will increase safety faster that capabilities in the role”. I put ~0 likelihood that OAI has such a position.
Which of the following claims are you making?
OpenAI doesn’t have any roles doing AI safety research aimed at reducing catastrophic risk from egregious AI misalignment; people who think they’re taking such a role will end up assigned to other tasks instead.
OpenAI does have roles where people do AI safety research aimed at reducing catastrophic risk from egregious AI misalignment, but all the research done by people in those roles sucks and the roles contribute to OpenAI having a good reputation, so taking those roles is net negative.
I find the first claim pretty implausible. E.g. I think that the recent SAE paper and the recent scalable oversight paper obviously count as an attempt at AI safety research. I think that people who take roles where they expect to work on research like that basically haven’t ended up unwillingly shifted to roles on e.g. safety systems, core capabilities research, or product stuff.
I’m not Elizabeth or Ray, but there’s a third option which I read the comment above to mean, and which I myself find plausible.
OpenAI does have roles that are obsessively aimed at reducing catastrophic risk from egregious AI misalignment. However, without more information, an outsider should not expect that those roles actually accelerate safety more than they accelerate capabilities.
Successfully increasing safety faster than capabilities requires that person to have a number of specific skills (eg political savvy, robustness to social pressure, a higher granularity strategic/technical model than most EAs have in practice, the etc.), over and above the skills that would be required to get hired for the role.
Lacking those skills, a hire for such a role is more likely to do harm than good, not primarily because they’ll be transitioned to other tasks, but because much of the work that the typical hire for such a role would end up doing either 1) doesn’t help or 2) will end up boosting OpenAI’s general capabilities more than it helps.
Furthermore, by working at OpenAI at all, they provide some legitimacy to the org as a whole, and to the existentially dangerous work happening in other parts of it, even if their work, does 0 direct harm. Someone working in such a role has to do sufficiently beneficial on-net work to overcome this baseline effect.
I’m not Elizabeth and probably wouldn’t have worded my thoughts quite the same, but my own position regarding your first bullet point is:
“When I see OpenAI list a ‘safety’ role, I’m like 55% confident that it has much to do with existential safety, and maybe 25% that it produces more existential safety than existential harm.”
When you say “when I see OpenAI list a ‘safety’ role”, are you talking about roles related to superalignment, or are you talking about all roles that have safety in the name? Obviously OpenAI has many roles that are aimed at various near-term safety stuff, and those might have safety in the name, but this isn’t duplicitous in the slightest—the job descriptions (and maybe even the rest of the job titles!) explain it perfectly clearly so it’s totally fine.
I assume you meant something like “when I see OpenAI list a role that seems to be focused on existential safety, I’m like 55% that it has much to do with existential safety”? In that case, I think your number is too low.
I was thinking of things like the Alignment Research Science role. If they talked up “this is a superalignment role”, I’d have an estimate higher than 55%.
We are seeking Researchers to help design and implement experiments for alignment research. Responsibilities may include:
Writing performant and clean code for ML training
Independently running and analyzing ML experiments to diagnose problems and understand which changes are real improvements
Writing clean non-ML code, for example when building interfaces to let workers interact with our models or pipelines for managing human data
Collaborating closely with a small team to balance the need for flexibility and iteration speed in research with the need for stability and reliability in a complex long-lived project
Understanding our high-level research roadmap to help plan and prioritize future experiments
Designing novel approaches for using LLMs in alignment research
Yeah, I think that this is disambiguated by the description of the team:
OpenAI’s Alignment Science research teams are working on technical approaches to ensure that AI systems reliably follow human intent even as their capabilities scale beyond human ability to directly supervise them.
We focus on researching alignment methods that scale and improve as AI capabilities grow. This is one component of several long-term alignment and safety research efforts at OpenAI, which we will provide more details about in the future.
So my guess is that you would call this an alignment role (except for the possibility that the team disappears because of superalignment-collapse-related drama).
Yeah I read those lines, and also “Want to use your engineering skills to push the frontiers of what state-of-the-art language models can accomplish”, and remain skeptical. I think the way OpenAI tends to equivocate on how they use the word “alignment” (or: they use it consistently, but, not in a way that I consider obviously good. Like, I the people working on RLHF a few years ago probably contributed to ChatGPT being released earlier which I think was bad*)
*I like the part where the world feels like it’s actually starting to respond to AI now, but, I think that would have happened later, with more serial-time for various other research to solidify.
(I think this is a broader difference in guesses about what research/approaches are good, which I’m not actually very confident about, esp. compared to habryka, but, is where I’m currently coming from)
*I like the part where the world feels like it’s actually starting to respond to AI now, but, I think that would have happened later, with more serial-time for various other research to solidify.
And with less serial-time for various policy plan to solidify and gain momentum.
If you think we’re irreparably far behind on the technical research, and advocacy / political action is relatively more promising, you might prefer to trade years of timeline for earlier, more widespread awareness of the importance of AI, and a longer relatively long period of people pushing on policy plans.
Good question. My revised belief is that OpenAI will not sufficiently slow down production in order to boost safety. It may still produce theoretical safety work that is useful to others, and to itself if the changes are cheap to implement.
I do also expect many people assigned to safety to end up doing more work on capabilities, because the distinction is not always obvious and they will have so many reasons to err in the direction of agreeing with their boss’s instructions.
Ok but I feel like if a job mostly involves research x-risk-motivated safety techniques and then publish them, it’s very reasonable to call it an x-risk-safety research job, regardless of how likely the organization where you work is to adopt your research eventually when it builds dangerous AI.
I’d define “genuine safety role” as “any qualified person will increase safety faster that capabilities in the role”. I put ~0 likelihood that OAI has such a position. The best you could hope for is being a marginal support for a safety-based coup (which has already been attempted, and failed).
“~0 likelihood” means that you are nearly certain that OAI does not have such a position (ie, your usage of “likelihood” has the same meaning as “degree of certainty” or “strength of belief”)? I’m being pedantic because I’m not a probability expert and AFAIK “likelihood” has some technical usage in probability.
If you’re up for answering more questions like this, then how likely do you believe it is that OAI has a position where at least 90% of people who are both, (A) qualified skill wise (eg, ML and interpretability expert), and, (B) believes that AIXR is a serious problem, would increase safety faster than capabilities in that position?
There’s a different question of “could a strategic person advance net safety by working at OpenAI, more so than any other option?”. I believe people like that exist, but they don’t need 80k to tell them about OpenAI.
This is a good point and you mentioning it updates me towards believing that you are more motivated by (1) finding out what’s true regarding AIXR and (2) reducing AIXR, than something like (3) shit talking OAI.
how likely do you believe it is that OAI has a position where at least 90% of people who are both, (A) qualified skill wise (eg, ML and interpretability expert), and, (B) believes that AIXR is a serious problem, would increase safety faster than capabilities in that position?
The cheap answer here is 0, because I don’t think there is any position where that level of skill and belief in AIXR has a 90% chance of increasing net safety. Ability to do meaningful work in this field is rarer than that.
So the real question is how does OpenAI compare to other possibilities? To be specific, let’s say being an LTFF-funded solo researcher, academia, and working at Anthropic.
Working at OpenAI seems much more likely to boost capabilities than solo research and probably academia. Some of that is because they’re both less likely to do anything. But that’s because they face OOM less pressure to produce anything, which is an advantage in this case. LTFF is not a pressure- or fad-free zone, but they have nothing near the leverage of paying someone millions of dollars, or providing tens of hours each week surrounded by people who are also paid millions of dollars to believe they’re doing safe work.
I feel less certain about Anthropic. It doesn’t have any of terrible signs OpenAI did (like the repeated safety exoduses, the board coup, and clawbacks on employee equity), but we didn’t know about most of those a year ago.
If we’re talking about a generic skilled and concerned person, probably the most valuable thing they can do is support someone with good research vision. My impression is that these people are more abundant at Anthropic than OpenAI, especially after the latest exodus, but I could be wrong. This isn’t a crux for me for the 80k board[1] but it is a crux for how much good could be done in the role.
Some additional bits of my model:
I doubt OpenAI is going to tell a dedicated safetyist they’re off the safety team and on direct capabilities. But the distinction is not always obvious, and employees will be very motivated to not fight OpenAI on marginal cases.
You know those people who stand too close, so you back away, and then they move closer? Your choices in that situation are to steel yourself for an intense battle, accept the distance they want, or leave. Employers can easily pull that off at scale. They make the question become “am I sure this will never be helpful to safety?” rather than “what is the expected safety value of this research?”
Alternate frame: How many times will an entry level engineer get to say no before he’s fired?
I have a friend who worked at OAI. They’d done all the right soul searching and concluded they were doing good alignment work. Then they quit, and a few months later were aghast at concerns they’d previous dismissed. Once you are in the situation is is very hard to maintain accurate perceptions.
Something @Buck said made me realize I was conflating “produce useful theoretical safety work” with “improve the safety of OpenAI’s products.” I don’t think OpenAI will stop production for safety reasons[2], but they might fund theoretical work that is useful to others, or that is cheap to follow themselves (perhaps because it boosts capabilities as well...).
This is a good point and you mentioning it updates me towards believing that you are more motivated by (1) finding out what’s true regarding AIXR and (2) reducing AIXR, than something like (3) shit talking OAI.
Thank you. My internal experience is that my concerns stem from around x-risk (and belatedly the wage theft). But OpenAI has enough signs of harm and enough signs of hiding harm that I’m fine shit talking as a side effect, where normally I’d try for something more cooperative and with lines of retreat.
I think the clawbacks are disqualifying on their own, even if they had no safety implications. They stole money from employees! That’s one of the top 5 signs you’re in a bad workplace. 80k doesn’t even mention this.
to ballpark quantify: I think there is <5% chance that OpenAI slows production by 20% or more, in order to reduce AIXR. And I believe frontier AI companies need to be prepared to slow by more than that.
IMO “this role is a safety role” isn’t that strong evidence of the role involving research aimed at catastrophic AI risk, but the rest of the description of a particular role probably does provide pretty strong evidence.
Hm. Can I request tabooing the phrase “genuine safety role” in favor of more detailed description of the work that’s done? There’s broad disagreement about which kinds of research are (or should count as) “AI safety”, and what’s required for that to succeed.
However, we don’t conceptualize the board as endorsing organisations.
It don’t matter how you conceptualize it. It matters how it looks, and it looks like an endorsement. This is not an optics concern. The problem is that people who trust you will see this and think OpenAI is a good place to work.
These still seem like potentially very strong roles with the opportunity to do very important work. We think it’s still good for the world if talented people work in roles like this!
How can you still think this after the whole safety team quit? They clearly did not think these roles where any good for doing safety work.
Edit: I was wrong about the whole team quitting. But given everything, I still stand by that these jobs should not be there with out at leas a warning sign.
As a AI safety community builder, I’m considering boycotting 80k (i.e. not link to you and reccomend people not to trust your advise) until you at least put warning labels on your job board. And I’ll reccomend other community builders to do the same.
I do think 80k means well, but I just can’t reccomend any org with this level of lack of judgment. Sorry.
As a AI safety community builder, I’m considering boycotting 80k (i.e. not link to you and reccomend people not to trust your advise) until you at least put warning labels on your job board.
Hm. I have mixed feelings about this. I’m not sure where I land overall.
I do think it is completely appropriate for Linda to recommend whichever resources she feels are appropriate, and if her integrity calls her, to boycott resources that otherwise have (in her estimation) good content.
I feel a little sad that I, at least, perceived that sentence as an escalation. There’s a version of this conversation where we all discuss considerations, in public and in private, and 80k is a participant in that conversation. There’s a different version where 80k immediately feels the need to be on the defensive, in something like PR mode, or where the outcome is mostly determined by the equilibrium of social-power rather than anything else.That seems overall worse, and I’m afraid that sentences like the quoted one, push in that direction.
On the other hand, I also feel some resonance with the escalation. I think “we”, broadly construed, have been far to warm with OpenAI, and it seems maybe good that there’s common knowledge building that a lot of people think that was a mistake, and momentum building towards doing something different going forward, including people “voting with their voices”, instead of being live-and-let-live to the point of having no real position at all.
it may be too much to ask, but in my ideal world, 80k folks would feel comfy ignoring the potential escalatory emotional valence and would treat that purely as evidence about the importance of it to others. in other words, if people are demanding something, that’s a time to get less defensive and more analytical, not more defensive and less analytical. It would be good PR to me for them to just think out loud about it.
I agree that it would be better if 80k had the capacity to easily navigate this kind of thing. But given that they (like all of us) have fixed capacity, I think it still makes sense to complain about Linda making it harder for them to respond.
But whether an organization can easily respond is pretty orthogonal to whether they’ve done something wrong. Like, if 80k is indeed doing something that merits a boycott, then saying so seems appropriate. There might be some debate about whether this is warranted given the facts, or even whether the facts are right, but it seems misguided to me to make the strength of an objection proportional to someone’s capacity to respond rather than to the badness of the thing they did.
Agreed. It’s reasonable to ask others eg Linda to make this easier where possible. Eg, when discussion group behavior in response to a state of affairs, instead of making it “suggestion/command” part of speech, make it “conditional prediction” part of speech. A statement I could truthfully say:
”As a AI safety community member, I predict I and others will be uncomfortable with 80k if this is where things end up settling, because of disagreeing. I could be convinced otherwise, but it would take extraordinary evidence at this point. If my opinions stay the same and 80k’s also are unchanged, I expect this make me hesitant to link to and recommend 80k, and I would be unsurprised to find others behaving similarly.”
Behaving like that is very similar to what Linda said she intends, but seems to me to leave more room for aumann. I would suggest to 80k that they attempt to simply reinterpret what Linda as equivalent to this, if possible. Of course, it is in fact a slightly different thing than what she said.
Edit: very odd that this, but neither its parent or grandparent comment, got downvoted. What i said here feels like a pretty similar thing to what I said in the grandparent, and agrees with buck and with linda; it’s my attempt to show there’s a way to merge these perspectives. What about my comment diverges?
”As a AI safety community member, I predict I and others will be uncomfortable with 80k if this is where things end up settling, because of disagreeing. I could be convinced otherwise, but it would take extraordinary evidence at this point. If my opinions stay the same and 80k’s also are unchanged, I expect this make me hesitant to link to and recommend 80k, and I would be unsurprised to find others behaving similarly.”
But you did not say it (other than as a response to me). Why not?
I’d be happy for you to take the discussion with 80k and try to change their behaviour. This is not the first time I told them that if they list a job, a lot of people will both take it as an endorsement, and trut 80k that this is a good job to apply for.
As far as I can tell 80k is in complete denial on the large influence they have on many EAs, especially local EA community builders. They have a lot of trust, mainly for being around for so long. So when ever they screw up like this, it causes enormous harm. Also since EA have such a large growth rate (at any given time most EAs are new EAs), the community is bad at tracking when 80k does screw up, so they don’t even loose that much trust.
On my side, I’ve pretty much given up on them caring at all about what I have to say. Which is why I’m putting so litle effort into how I word things. I agree my comment could have been worded better (with more effort), and I have tried harder in the past. But I also have to say that I find the level of extreme politeness, lot’s of EA show towards high status orgs, to be very off-putting, so I never been able to imitate that style.
Again, if you can do better, please do so. I’m serious about this.
Someone (not me) had some success at getting 80k to listen, over at the EA forum version of this post. But more work is needed.
Firstly, some form of visible disclaimer may be appropriate if you want to continue listing these jobs.
While the jobs board may not be “conceptualized” as endorsing organisations, I think some users will see jobs from OpenAI listed on the job board as at least a partial, implicit endorsement of OpenAI’s mission.
Secondly, I don’t think roles being directly related to safety or security should be a sufficient condition to list roles from an organisation, even if the roles are opportunities to do good work.
I think this is easier to see if we move away from the AI Safety space. Would it be appropriate for 80,000 Hours job board advertise an Environmental Manager job from British Petroleum?
I think this is easier to see if we move away from the AI Safety space. Would it be appropriate for 80,000 Hours job board advertise an Environmental Manager job from British Petroleum?
That doesn’t seem obviously absurd to me, at least.
I dislike when conversations about that are really about one topic get muddied by discussion about an analogy. For the sake of clarity, I’ll use italics relate statements when talking about the AI safety jobs at capabilities companies.
Interesting perspective. At least one other person also had a problem with that statement, so it is probably worth me expanding.
Assume, for the sake of the argument, that the Environmental Manager’s job is to assist with clean-ups after disasters, monitoring for excessive emissions and preventing environmental damage. In a vacuum these are all wonderful, somewhat-EA aligned tasks. Similarly the safety focused role, in a vacuum, is mitigating concrete harms from prosaic systems and, in the future, may be directly mitigating existential risk.
However, when we zoom out and look at these jobs in the context of the larger organisations goals, things are less obviously clear. The good you do helps fuel a machine whose overall goals are harmful.
The good that you do is profitable for the company that hires you. This isn’t always a bad thing, but by allowing BP to operate in a more environmentally friendly manner you improve BP’s public relations and help to soften or reduce regulation BP faces. Making contemporary AI systems safer, reducing harm in the short term, potentially reduces the regulatory hurdles that these companies face. It is harder to push restrictive legislation governing the operation of AI capabilities companies if they have good PR.
More explicitly, the short-term, environmental management that you do on may hide more long-term, disastrous damage. Programs to protect workers and locals from toxic chemical exposure around an exploration site help keep the overall business viable. While the techniques you develop shield the local environment from direct harm, you are not shielding the globe from the harmful impact of pollution. Alignment and safety research at capabilities companies focuses on today’s models, which are not generally intelligent. You are forced to assume that the techniques you develop will extend to systems that are generally intelligent, deployed in the real world and capable of being an existential threat. Meanwhile the techniques used to align contemporary systems absolutely improve their economic viability and indirectly mean more money is funnelled towards AGI research.
Yep. I agree with all of that. Which is to say that that there are considerations in both directions, and it isn’t obvious which ones dominate, in both the AI and petroleum case. My overall guess is that in both cases it isn’t a good policy to recommend roles like these, but don’t think that either case is particularly more of a slam dunk than the other. So referencing the oil case doesn’t make the AI one particularly more clear to me.
We used to list roles that seemed more tangentially safety-related, but because of our reduced confidence in OpenAI
This misses aspects of what used to be 80k’s position:
❝ In fact, we think it can be the best career step for some of our readers to work in labs, even in non-safety roles. That’s the core reason why we list these roles on our job board. – Benjamin Hilton, February 2024
❝ Top AI labs are high-performing, rapidly growing organisations. In general, one of the best ways to gain career capital is to go and work with any high-performing team — you can just learn a huge amount about getting stuff done. They also have excellent reputations more widely. So you get the credential of saying you’ve worked in a leading lab, and you’ll also gain lots of dynamic, impressive connections. – Benjamin Hilton, June 2023 - still on website
80k was listing some non-safety related jobs: – From my email on May 2023:
I do think 80k should have more context on OpenAI but also any other organization that seems bad with maybe useful roles. I think people can fail to realize the organizational context if it isn’t pointed out and they only read the company’s PR.
I think there may be merit in pointing EAs toward OpenAI safety-related work, because those positions will presumably be filled by someone and I would prefer it be filled by someone (i) very competent (ii) who is familiar with (and cares about) a wide range of AGI risks, and EA groups often discuss such risks. However, anyone applying at OpenAI should be aware of the previous drama before applying. The current job listings don’t communicate the gravity or nuance of the issue before job-seekers push the blue button leading to OpenAI’s job listing:
I guess the card should be guarded, so that instead of just having a normal blue button, the user should expand some sort of ‘additional details’ subcard first. The user then sees some bullet points about the OpenAI drama and (preferably) expert concerns about working for OpenAI, each bullet point including a link to more details, followed by a secondary-styled button for the job application (typically, that would be a button with a white background and blue border). And of course you can do the same for any other job where the employer’s interests don’t seem well-aligned with humanity or otherwise don’t have a good reputation.
Edit: actually, for cases this important, I’d to replace ‘View Job Details’ with a “View Details” button that goes to a full page on 80000 Hours in order to highlight the relevant details more strongly, again with the real job link at the bottom.
(Cross-posted from the EA forum)
Hi, I run the 80,000 Hours job board, thanks for writing this out!
I agree that OpenAI has demonstrated a significant level of manipulativeness and have lost confidence in them prioritizing existential safety work. However, we don’t conceptualize the board as endorsing organisations. The point of the board is to give job-seekers access to opportunities where they can contribute to solving our top problems or build career capital to do so (as we write in our FAQ). Sometimes these roles are at organisations whose mission I disagree with, because the role nonetheless seems like an opportunity to do good work on a key problem.
For OpenAI in particular, we’ve tightened up our listings since the news stories a month ago, and are now only posting infosec roles and direct safety work – a small percentage of jobs they advertise. See here for the OAI roles we currently list. We used to list roles that seemed more tangentially safety-related, but because of our reduced confidence in OpenAI, we limited the listings further to only roles that are very directly on safety or security work. I still expect these roles to be good opportunities to do important work. Two live examples:
Infosec
Even if we were very sure that OpenAI was reckless and did not care about existential safety, I would still expect them to not want their model to leak out to competitors, and importantly, we think it’s still good for the world if their models don’t leak! So I would still expect people working on their infosec to be doing good work.
Non-infosec safety work
These still seem like potentially very strong roles with the opportunity to do very important work. We think it’s still good for the world if talented people work in roles like this!
This is true even if we expect them to lack political power and to play second fiddle to capabilities work and even if that makes them less good opportunities vs. other companies.
We also include a note on their ‘job cards’ on the job board (also DeepMind’s and Anthropic’s) linking to the Working at an AI company article you mentioned, to give context. We’re not opposed to giving more or different context on OpenAI’s cards and are happy to take suggestions!
How does 80k identify actual safety roles, vs. safety-washed capabilities roles?
From Conor’s response on EAForum, it sounds like the answer is “we trust OpenAI to tell us”. In light of what we already know (safety team exodus, punitive and hidden NDAs, lack of disclosure to OpenAI’s governing board), that level of trust seems completely unjustified to me.
I would be shocked if OpenAI employees who took the role with that job description were pushed into doing capabilities research they didn’t want to do. (Obviously it’s plausible that they’d choose to do capabilities research while they were already there.)
Huh, this doesn’t super match my model. I have heard of people at OpenAI being pressured a lot into making sure their safety work helps with productization. I would be surprised if they end up being pressured working directly on the scaling team, but I wouldn’t end up surprised with someone being pressured into doing some better AI censorship in a way that doesn’t have any relevance to AI safety and does indeed make OpenAI a lot of money.
I disagree for the role advertised, I would be surprised by that. (I’d be less surprised if they advised on some post-training stuff that you’d think of as capabilities; I think that the “AI censorship” work is mostly done by a different team that doesn’t talk to the superalignment people that much. But idk where the superoversight people have been moved in the org, maybe they’d more naturally talk more now.)
Can you clarify what you mean by “completely unjustified”? For example, if OpenAI says “This role is a safety role.”, then in your opinion, what is the probability that the role is a genuine safety role?
I’d define “genuine safety role” as “any qualified person will increase safety faster that capabilities in the role”. I put ~0 likelihood that OAI has such a position. The best you could hope for is being a marginal support for a safety-based coup (which has already been attempted, and failed).
There’s a different question of “could a strategic person advance net safety by working at OpenAI, more so than any other option?”. I believe people like that exist, but they don’t need 80k to tell them about OpenAI.
Which of the following claims are you making?
OpenAI doesn’t have any roles doing AI safety research aimed at reducing catastrophic risk from egregious AI misalignment; people who think they’re taking such a role will end up assigned to other tasks instead.
OpenAI does have roles where people do AI safety research aimed at reducing catastrophic risk from egregious AI misalignment, but all the research done by people in those roles sucks and the roles contribute to OpenAI having a good reputation, so taking those roles is net negative.
I find the first claim pretty implausible. E.g. I think that the recent SAE paper and the recent scalable oversight paper obviously count as an attempt at AI safety research. I think that people who take roles where they expect to work on research like that basically haven’t ended up unwillingly shifted to roles on e.g. safety systems, core capabilities research, or product stuff.
I’m not Elizabeth or Ray, but there’s a third option which I read the comment above to mean, and which I myself find plausible.
I’m not Elizabeth and probably wouldn’t have worded my thoughts quite the same, but my own position regarding your first bullet point is:
“When I see OpenAI list a ‘safety’ role, I’m like 55% confident that it has much to do with existential safety, and maybe 25% that it produces more existential safety than existential harm.”
When you say “when I see OpenAI list a ‘safety’ role”, are you talking about roles related to superalignment, or are you talking about all roles that have safety in the name? Obviously OpenAI has many roles that are aimed at various near-term safety stuff, and those might have safety in the name, but this isn’t duplicitous in the slightest—the job descriptions (and maybe even the rest of the job titles!) explain it perfectly clearly so it’s totally fine.
I assume you meant something like “when I see OpenAI list a role that seems to be focused on existential safety, I’m like 55% that it has much to do with existential safety”? In that case, I think your number is too low.
I was thinking of things like the Alignment Research Science role. If they talked up “this is a superalignment role”, I’d have an estimate higher than 55%.
Yeah, I think that this is disambiguated by the description of the team:
So my guess is that you would call this an alignment role (except for the possibility that the team disappears because of superalignment-collapse-related drama).
Yeah I read those lines, and also “Want to use your engineering skills to push the frontiers of what state-of-the-art language models can accomplish”, and remain skeptical. I think the way OpenAI tends to equivocate on how they use the word “alignment” (or: they use it consistently, but, not in a way that I consider obviously good. Like, I the people working on RLHF a few years ago probably contributed to ChatGPT being released earlier which I think was bad*)
*I like the part where the world feels like it’s actually starting to respond to AI now, but, I think that would have happened later, with more serial-time for various other research to solidify.
(I think this is a broader difference in guesses about what research/approaches are good, which I’m not actually very confident about, esp. compared to habryka, but, is where I’m currently coming from)
Tangent:
And with less serial-time for various policy plan to solidify and gain momentum.
If you think we’re irreparably far behind on the technical research, and advocacy / political action is relatively more promising, you might prefer to trade years of timeline for earlier, more widespread awareness of the importance of AI, and a longer relatively long period of people pushing on policy plans.
Good question. My revised belief is that OpenAI will not sufficiently slow down production in order to boost safety. It may still produce theoretical safety work that is useful to others, and to itself if the changes are cheap to implement.
I do also expect many people assigned to safety to end up doing more work on capabilities, because the distinction is not always obvious and they will have so many reasons to err in the direction of agreeing with their boss’s instructions.
Ok but I feel like if a job mostly involves research x-risk-motivated safety techniques and then publish them, it’s very reasonable to call it an x-risk-safety research job, regardless of how likely the organization where you work is to adopt your research eventually when it builds dangerous AI.
“~0 likelihood” means that you are nearly certain that OAI does not have such a position (ie, your usage of “likelihood” has the same meaning as “degree of certainty” or “strength of belief”)? I’m being pedantic because I’m not a probability expert and AFAIK “likelihood” has some technical usage in probability.
If you’re up for answering more questions like this, then how likely do you believe it is that OAI has a position where at least 90% of people who are both, (A) qualified skill wise (eg, ML and interpretability expert), and, (B) believes that AIXR is a serious problem, would increase safety faster than capabilities in that position?
This is a good point and you mentioning it updates me towards believing that you are more motivated by (1) finding out what’s true regarding AIXR and (2) reducing AIXR, than something like (3) shit talking OAI.
I asked a related question a few months ago, ie, if one becomes doom pilled while working as an executive at an AI lab and one strongly values survival, what should one do?
The cheap answer here is 0, because I don’t think there is any position where that level of skill and belief in AIXR has a 90% chance of increasing net safety. Ability to do meaningful work in this field is rarer than that.
So the real question is how does OpenAI compare to other possibilities? To be specific, let’s say being an LTFF-funded solo researcher, academia, and working at Anthropic.
Working at OpenAI seems much more likely to boost capabilities than solo research and probably academia. Some of that is because they’re both less likely to do anything. But that’s because they face OOM less pressure to produce anything, which is an advantage in this case. LTFF is not a pressure- or fad-free zone, but they have nothing near the leverage of paying someone millions of dollars, or providing tens of hours each week surrounded by people who are also paid millions of dollars to believe they’re doing safe work.
I feel less certain about Anthropic. It doesn’t have any of terrible signs OpenAI did (like the repeated safety exoduses, the board coup, and clawbacks on employee equity), but we didn’t know about most of those a year ago.
If we’re talking about a generic skilled and concerned person, probably the most valuable thing they can do is support someone with good research vision. My impression is that these people are more abundant at Anthropic than OpenAI, especially after the latest exodus, but I could be wrong. This isn’t a crux for me for the 80k board[1] but it is a crux for how much good could be done in the role.
Some additional bits of my model:
I doubt OpenAI is going to tell a dedicated safetyist they’re off the safety team and on direct capabilities. But the distinction is not always obvious, and employees will be very motivated to not fight OpenAI on marginal cases.
You know those people who stand too close, so you back away, and then they move closer? Your choices in that situation are to steel yourself for an intense battle, accept the distance they want, or leave. Employers can easily pull that off at scale. They make the question become “am I sure this will never be helpful to safety?” rather than “what is the expected safety value of this research?”
Alternate frame: How many times will an entry level engineer get to say no before he’s fired?
I have a friend who worked at OAI. They’d done all the right soul searching and concluded they were doing good alignment work. Then they quit, and a few months later were aghast at concerns they’d previous dismissed. Once you are in the situation is is very hard to maintain accurate perceptions.
Something @Buck said made me realize I was conflating “produce useful theoretical safety work” with “improve the safety of OpenAI’s products.” I don’t think OpenAI will stop production for safety reasons[2], but they might fund theoretical work that is useful to others, or that is cheap to follow themselves (perhaps because it boosts capabilities as well...).
Thank you. My internal experience is that my concerns stem from around x-risk (and belatedly the wage theft). But OpenAI has enough signs of harm and enough signs of hiding harm that I’m fine shit talking as a side effect, where normally I’d try for something more cooperative and with lines of retreat.
I think the clawbacks are disqualifying on their own, even if they had no safety implications. They stole money from employees! That’s one of the top 5 signs you’re in a bad workplace. 80k doesn’t even mention this.
to ballpark quantify: I think there is <5% chance that OpenAI slows production by 20% or more, in order to reduce AIXR. And I believe frontier AI companies need to be prepared to slow by more than that.
IMO “this role is a safety role” isn’t that strong evidence of the role involving research aimed at catastrophic AI risk, but the rest of the description of a particular role probably does provide pretty strong evidence.
Hm. Can I request tabooing the phrase “genuine safety role” in favor of more detailed description of the work that’s done? There’s broad disagreement about which kinds of research are (or should count as) “AI safety”, and what’s required for that to succeed.
I suspect that would provide some value, but did you mean to respond to @Elizabeth?
I was just trying to use the term as a synonym for “actual safety role” as @Elizabeth used it in her original comment.
This part of your comment seems accurate to me, but I’m not a domain expert.
It don’t matter how you conceptualize it. It matters how it looks, and it looks like an endorsement. This is not an optics concern. The problem is that people who trust you will see this and think OpenAI is a good place to work.
How can you still think this after the
wholesafety team quit? They clearly did not think these roles where any good for doing safety work.Edit: I was wrong about the whole team quitting. But given everything, I still stand by that these jobs should not be there with out at leas a warning sign.
As a AI safety community builder, I’m considering boycotting 80k (i.e. not link to you and reccomend people not to trust your advise) until you at least put warning labels on your job board. And I’ll reccomend other community builders to do the same.
I do think 80k means well, but I just can’t reccomend any org with this level of lack of judgment. Sorry.
Hm. I have mixed feelings about this. I’m not sure where I land overall.
I do think it is completely appropriate for Linda to recommend whichever resources she feels are appropriate, and if her integrity calls her, to boycott resources that otherwise have (in her estimation) good content.
I feel a little sad that I, at least, perceived that sentence as an escalation. There’s a version of this conversation where we all discuss considerations, in public and in private, and 80k is a participant in that conversation. There’s a different version where 80k immediately feels the need to be on the defensive, in something like PR mode, or where the outcome is mostly determined by the equilibrium of social-power rather than anything else.That seems overall worse, and I’m afraid that sentences like the quoted one, push in that direction.
On the other hand, I also feel some resonance with the escalation. I think “we”, broadly construed, have been far to warm with OpenAI, and it seems maybe good that there’s common knowledge building that a lot of people think that was a mistake, and momentum building towards doing something different going forward, including people “voting with their voices”, instead of being live-and-let-live to the point of having no real position at all.
it may be too much to ask, but in my ideal world, 80k folks would feel comfy ignoring the potential escalatory emotional valence and would treat that purely as evidence about the importance of it to others. in other words, if people are demanding something, that’s a time to get less defensive and more analytical, not more defensive and less analytical. It would be good PR to me for them to just think out loud about it.
I agree that it would be better if 80k had the capacity to easily navigate this kind of thing. But given that they (like all of us) have fixed capacity, I think it still makes sense to complain about Linda making it harder for them to respond.
I also have limited capacity.
But whether an organization can easily respond is pretty orthogonal to whether they’ve done something wrong. Like, if 80k is indeed doing something that merits a boycott, then saying so seems appropriate. There might be some debate about whether this is warranted given the facts, or even whether the facts are right, but it seems misguided to me to make the strength of an objection proportional to someone’s capacity to respond rather than to the badness of the thing they did.
Agreed. It’s reasonable to ask others eg Linda to make this easier where possible. Eg, when discussion group behavior in response to a state of affairs, instead of making it “suggestion/command” part of speech, make it “conditional prediction” part of speech. A statement I could truthfully say:
”As a AI safety community member, I predict I and others will be uncomfortable with 80k if this is where things end up settling, because of disagreeing. I could be convinced otherwise, but it would take extraordinary evidence at this point. If my opinions stay the same and 80k’s also are unchanged, I expect this make me hesitant to link to and recommend 80k, and I would be unsurprised to find others behaving similarly.”
Behaving like that is very similar to what Linda said she intends, but seems to me to leave more room for aumann. I would suggest to 80k that they attempt to simply reinterpret what Linda as equivalent to this, if possible. Of course, it is in fact a slightly different thing than what she said.
Edit: very odd that this, but neither its parent or grandparent comment, got downvoted. What i said here feels like a pretty similar thing to what I said in the grandparent, and agrees with buck and with linda; it’s my attempt to show there’s a way to merge these perspectives. What about my comment diverges?
But you did not say it (other than as a response to me). Why not?
I’d be happy for you to take the discussion with 80k and try to change their behaviour. This is not the first time I told them that if they list a job, a lot of people will both take it as an endorsement, and trut 80k that this is a good job to apply for.
As far as I can tell 80k is in complete denial on the large influence they have on many EAs, especially local EA community builders. They have a lot of trust, mainly for being around for so long. So when ever they screw up like this, it causes enormous harm. Also since EA have such a large growth rate (at any given time most EAs are new EAs), the community is bad at tracking when 80k does screw up, so they don’t even loose that much trust.
On my side, I’ve pretty much given up on them caring at all about what I have to say. Which is why I’m putting so litle effort into how I word things. I agree my comment could have been worded better (with more effort), and I have tried harder in the past. But I also have to say that I find the level of extreme politeness, lot’s of EA show towards high status orgs, to be very off-putting, so I never been able to imitate that style.
Again, if you can do better, please do so. I’m serious about this.
Someone (not me) had some success at getting 80k to listen, over at the EA forum version of this post. But more work is needed.
(FWIW, I’m not the one who downvoted you)
Temporarily deleted since I misread Eli’s comment. I might re-post
Firstly, some form of visible disclaimer may be appropriate if you want to continue listing these jobs.
While the jobs board may not be “conceptualized” as endorsing organisations, I think some users will see jobs from OpenAI listed on the job board as at least a partial, implicit endorsement of OpenAI’s mission.
Secondly, I don’t think roles being directly related to safety or security should be a sufficient condition to list roles from an organisation, even if the roles are opportunities to do good work.
I think this is easier to see if we move away from the AI Safety space. Would it be appropriate for 80,000 Hours job board advertise an Environmental Manager job from British Petroleum?
That doesn’t seem obviously absurd to me, at least.
I dislike when conversations about that are really about one topic get muddied by discussion about an analogy. For the sake of clarity, I’ll use italics relate statements when talking about the AI safety jobs at capabilities companies.
Interesting perspective. At least one other person also had a problem with that statement, so it is probably worth me expanding.
Assume, for the sake of the argument, that the Environmental Manager’s job is to assist with clean-ups after disasters, monitoring for excessive emissions and preventing environmental damage. In a vacuum these are all wonderful, somewhat-EA aligned tasks.
Similarly the safety focused role, in a vacuum, is mitigating concrete harms from prosaic systems and, in the future, may be directly mitigating existential risk.
However, when we zoom out and look at these jobs in the context of the larger organisations goals, things are less obviously clear. The good you do helps fuel a machine whose overall goals are harmful.
The good that you do is profitable for the company that hires you. This isn’t always a bad thing, but by allowing BP to operate in a more environmentally friendly manner you improve BP’s public relations and help to soften or reduce regulation BP faces.
Making contemporary AI systems safer, reducing harm in the short term, potentially reduces the regulatory hurdles that these companies face. It is harder to push restrictive legislation governing the operation of AI capabilities companies if they have good PR.
More explicitly, the short-term, environmental management that you do on may hide more long-term, disastrous damage. Programs to protect workers and locals from toxic chemical exposure around an exploration site help keep the overall business viable. While the techniques you develop shield the local environment from direct harm, you are not shielding the globe from the harmful impact of pollution.
Alignment and safety research at capabilities companies focuses on today’s models, which are not generally intelligent. You are forced to assume that the techniques you develop will extend to systems that are generally intelligent, deployed in the real world and capable of being an existential threat.
Meanwhile the techniques used to align contemporary systems absolutely improve their economic viability and indirectly mean more money is funnelled towards AGI research.
Yep. I agree with all of that. Which is to say that that there are considerations in both directions, and it isn’t obvious which ones dominate, in both the AI and petroleum case. My overall guess is that in both cases it isn’t a good policy to recommend roles like these, but don’t think that either case is particularly more of a slam dunk than the other. So referencing the oil case doesn’t make the AI one particularly more clear to me.
This misses aspects of what used to be 80k’s position:
❝ In fact, we think it can be the best career step for some of our readers to work in labs, even in non-safety roles. That’s the core reason why we list these roles on our job board.
– Benjamin Hilton, February 2024
❝ Top AI labs are high-performing, rapidly growing organisations. In general, one of the best ways to gain career capital is to go and work with any high-performing team — you can just learn a huge amount about getting stuff done. They also have excellent reputations more widely. So you get the credential of saying you’ve worked in a leading lab, and you’ll also gain lots of dynamic, impressive connections.
– Benjamin Hilton, June 2023 - still on website
80k was listing some non-safety related jobs:
– From my email on May 2023:
– From my comment on February 2024:
I do think 80k should have more context on OpenAI but also any other organization that seems bad with maybe useful roles. I think people can fail to realize the organizational context if it isn’t pointed out and they only read the company’s PR.
I think there may be merit in pointing EAs toward OpenAI safety-related work, because those positions will presumably be filled by someone and I would prefer it be filled by someone (i) very competent (ii) who is familiar with (and cares about) a wide range of AGI risks, and EA groups often discuss such risks. However, anyone applying at OpenAI should be aware of the previous drama before applying. The current job listings don’t communicate the gravity or nuance of the issue before job-seekers push the blue button leading to OpenAI’s job listing:
I guess the card should be guarded, so that instead of just having a normal blue button, the user should expand some sort of ‘additional details’ subcard first. The user then sees some bullet points about the OpenAI drama and (preferably) expert concerns about working for OpenAI, each bullet point including a link to more details, followed by a secondary-styled button for the job application (typically, that would be a button with a white background and blue border). And of course you can do the same for any other job where the employer’s interests don’t seem well-aligned with humanity or otherwise don’t have a good reputation.
Edit: actually, for cases this important, I’d to replace ‘View Job Details’ with a “View Details” button that goes to a full page on 80000 Hours in order to highlight the relevant details more strongly, again with the real job link at the bottom.