Yep! At least, I’d say “as small as MIRI and as unsuccessful at alignment work thus far”. I think small groups and individual researchers might indeed crack open the problem, but no one of them is highly likely on priors to do so (at least from my perspective, having seen a few people try the really obvious approaches for a few years). So we want there to exist a much larger ecosystem of people taking a stab at it, in the hope that some of them will do surprisingly well.
It could have been that easy to pull off; it’s ultimately just a technical question, and it’s hard to say how difficult such questions are to solve in advance, when they’ve literally never been attempted before.
But it was obviously never wise for humanity to take a gamble on it being that easy (and specifically easy for the one org that happened to start talking about the problem first). And insofar as we did take that gamble, it hasn’t paid out in “we now have a clear path to solving alignment”.
Yep! At least, I’d say “as small as MIRI and as unsuccessful at alignment work thus far”. I think small groups and individual researchers might indeed crack open the problem, but no one of them is highly likely on priors to do so (at least from my perspective, having seen a few people try the really obvious approaches for a few years). So we want there to exist a much larger ecosystem of people taking a stab at it, in the hope that some of them will do surprisingly well.
It could have been that easy to pull off; it’s ultimately just a technical question, and it’s hard to say how difficult such questions are to solve in advance, when they’ve literally never been attempted before.
But it was obviously never wise for humanity to take a gamble on it being that easy (and specifically easy for the one org that happened to start talking about the problem first). And insofar as we did take that gamble, it hasn’t paid out in “we now have a clear path to solving alignment”.