Thanks for this comment—I get vibes along these lines from a lot of people but I don’t think I understand the position, so I’m enthused to hear more about it.
> I believe that by not touching the “decrease the race” or “don’t make the race worse” interventions, this playbook misses a big part of the picture of “how one single think could help massively”.
“Standards and monitoring” is the main “decrease the race” path I see. It doesn’t seem feasible to me for the world to clamp down on AI development unconditionally, which is why I am more focused on the conditional (i.e., “unless it’s demonstrably safe”) version.
But is there another “decrease the race” or “don’t make the race worse” intervention that you think can make a big difference? Based on the fact that you’re talking about a single thing that can help massively, I don’t think you are referring to “just don’t make things worse”; what are you thinking of?
> Staying at the frontier of capabilities and deploying leads the frontrunner to feel the heat which accelerates both capabilities & the chances of uncareful deployment which increases pretty substantially the chances of extinction.
I agree that this is an effect, directionally, but it seems small by default in a setting with lots of players (I imagine there will be, and is, a lot of “heat” to be felt regardless of any one player’s actions). And the potential benefits seem big. My rough impression is that you’re confident the costs outweigh the benefits for nearly any imaginable version of this; if that’s right, can you give some quantitative or other sense of how you get there?
But is there another “decrease the race” or “don’t make the race worse” intervention that you think can make a big difference? Based on the fact that you’re talking about a single thing that can help massively, I don’t think you are referring to “just don’t make things worse”; what are you thinking of?
1. I think we agree on the fact that “unless it’s provably safe” is the best version of trying to get a policy slowdown. 2. I believe there are many interventions that could help on the slowdown side, most of which are unfortunately not compatible with the successful careful AI lab. The main struggle that a successful careful AI lab encounters is that it has to trade-off tons of safety principles along the way, essentially bc it needs to attract investors & talent and that attracting investors & talent is hard if you’re say too loudly that we should slow down as long as our thing is not provably safe.
So de facto a successful careful AI lab will be a force against slowdown & a bunch of other relevant policies in the policy world. It will also be a force for the perceived race which is making things harder for every actor.
Other interventions for slowdown are mostly in the realm of public advocacy.
Mostly drawing upon the animal welfare activism playbook, you could use public campaigns to de facto limit the ability of labs to race, via corporate or policy advocacy campaigns.
I agree that this is an effect, directionally, but it seems small by default in a setting with lots of players (I imagine there will be, and is, a lot of “heat” to be felt regardless of any one player’s actions). And the potential benefits seem big. My rough impression is that you’re confident the costs outweigh the benefits for nearly any imaginable version of this; if that’s right, can you give some quantitative or other sense of how you get there?
I guess, heuristically, I tend to take arguments of the form “but others would have done this bad thing anyway” with some skepticism because I think it tends to assume too much certainty over the counterfactual, in part due to many second order effects (e.g. the existence of one marginal key player increases the chances that more player invest, show that competition is possible etc.) that tend to be hard to compute (but are sometimes observable ex post).
On this specific case I think it’s not right that there are “lots of players” close from the frontier. If we take the case of OA and Anthropic for example, there are about 0 players at their level of deployed capabilities. Maybe Google will deploy at some point but they haven’t been serious players for the past 7 months. So if Anthropic hadn’t been around, OA could have chilled longer at ChatGPT level, and then at GPT-4 without plugins + code interpreter & without suffering from any threat. And now they’ll need to do something very impressive against the 100k context etc.
The compound effects of this are pretty substantial because for each new differentiation, it accelerates the whole field and pressures teams to find something new, causing a significantly more powerful race to the bottom.
If I had to be quantitative (vaguely) for the past 9 months, I’d guess that the existence of Anthropic has caused (/will cause, if we count the 100k thing) 2 significant counterfactual features and 3-5 months of timelines (which will probably compound into more due to self-improvement effects). I’d guess there are other effects (e.g. pressure on compute, scaling for driving costs down etc.) I’m not able to give vague estimates for.
My guess for the 3-5 months is mostly driven by the release of ChatGPT & GPT-4 which have both likely been released earlier than without Anthropic.
Re: your other interventions—I meant for these to be part of the “Standards and monitoring” category of interventions (my discussion of that mentions advocacy and external pressure as important factors).
I think it’s far from obvious that an AI company needs to be a force against regulation, both conceptually (if it affects all players, it doesn’t necessarily hurt the company) and empirically.
Thanks for giving your take on the size of speedup effects. I disagree on a number of fronts. I don’t want to get into the details of most of them, but will comment that it seems like a big leap from “X product was released N months earlier than otherwise” to “Transformative AI will now arrive N months earlier than otherwise.” (I think this feels fairly clear when looking at other technological breakthroughs and how much they would’ve been affected by differently timed product releases.)
I meant for these to be part of the “Standards and monitoring” category of interventions (my discussion of that mentions advocacy and external pressure as important factors).
I see, I guess where we might disagree is I think that IMO a productive social movement could want to apply the Henry Spira’s playbook (overall pretty adversarial) oriented mostly towards slowing things down until labs have a clue of what they’re doing on the alignment front. I would guess you wouldn’t agree with that, but I’m not sure.
I think it’s far from obvious that an AI company needs to be a force against regulation, both conceptually (if it affects all players, it doesn’t necessarily hurt the company) and empirically.
I’m not saying that it would be a force against regulation in general but that it would be a force against any regulation which slows down substantially the current capabilities progress rate of labs. And empirics don’t demonstrate the opposite as far as I can tell.
Labs have been pushing for the rule that we should wait for evals to say “it’s dangerous” before we consider what to do, rather than do like in most other industries, i.e. that something is assumed dangerous until proven safe.
Most mentions of slowdown have been described as necessary potentially at some point in the distant future, while most people in those labs have <5y timelines.
Finally, on your conceptual part, as some argued, it’s in fact probably not possible to affect all players equally without a drastic regime of control (which is a true downside of slowing down now, but IMO still much less worse than slowing down once a leak or a jailbreak of an advanced system can cause a large-scale engineered pandemic) bc smaller actors will use the time to try to catch up as close as possible from the frontier.
will comment that it seems like a big leap from “X product was released N months earlier than otherwise” to “Transformative AI will now arrive N months earlier than otherwise.”
I agree, but if anything, my sense is that due to various compound effects (due to AI accelerating AI, to investment, to increased compute demand, and to more talent earlier), an earlier product release of N months just gives a lower bound for TAI timelines shortening (hence greater than N). Moreover, I think that the ChatGPT product release is, ex-post at least, not in the typical product release reference class. It was clearly a massive game changer for OpenAI and the entire ecosystem.
I see, I guess where we might disagree is I think that IMO a productive social movement could want to apply the Henry Spira’s playbook (overall pretty adversarial) oriented mostly towards slowing things down until labs have a clue of what they’re doing on the alignment front. I would guess you wouldn’t agree with that, but I’m not sure.
I think an adversarial social movement could have a positive impact. I have tended to think of the impact as mostly being about getting risks taken more seriously and thus creating more political will for “standards and monitoring,” but you’re right that there could also be benefits simply from buying time generically for other stuff.
I’m not saying that it would be a force against regulation in general but that it would be a force against any regulation which slows down substantially the current capabilities progress rate of labs. And empirics don’t demonstrate the opposite as far as I can tell.
I said it’s “far from obvious” empirically what’s going on. I agree that discussion of slowing down has focused on the future rather than now, but I don’t think it has been pointing to a specific time horizon (the vibe looks to me more like “slow down at a certain capabilities level”).
Finally, on your conceptual part, as some argued, it’s in fact probably not possible to affect all players equally without a drastic regime of control (which is a true downside of slowing down now, but IMO still much less worse than slowing down once a leak or a jailbreak of an advanced system can cause a large-scale engineered pandemic) bc smaller actors will use the time to try to catch up as close as possible from the frontier.
It’s true that no regulation will affect everyone precisely the same way. But there is plenty of precedent for major industry players supporting regulation that generally slows things down (even when the dynamic you’re describing applies).
I agree, but if anything, my sense is that due to various compound effects (due to AI accelerating AI, to investment, to increased compute demand, and to more talent earlier), an earlier product release of N months just gives a lower bound for TAI timelines shortening (hence greater than N). Moreover, I think that the ChatGPT product release is, ex-post at least, not in the typical product release reference class. It was clearly a massive game changer for OpenAI and the entire ecosystem.
I don’t agree that we are looking at a lower bound here, bearing in mind that (I think) we are just talking about when ChatGPT was released (not when the underlying technology was developed), and that (I think) we should be holding fixed the release timing of GPT-4. (What I’ve seen in the NYT seems to imply that they rushed out functionality they’d otherwise have bundled with GPT-4.)
If ChatGPT had been held for longer, then:
Scaling and research would have continued in the meantime. And even with investment and talent flooding in, I expect that there’s very disproportionate impact from players who were already active before ChatGPT came out, who were easily well capitalized enough to go at ~max speed for the few months between ChatGPT and GPT-4.
GPT-4 would have had the same absolute level of impressiveness, revenue potential, etc. (as would some other things that I think have been important factors in bringing in investment, such as Midjourney). You could have a model like “ChatGPT maxed out hype such that the bottleneck on money and talent rushing into the field became calendar time alone,” which would support your picture; but you could also have other models, e.g. where the level of investment is more like a function of the absolute level of visible AI capabilities such that the timing of ChatGPT mattered little, holding fixed the timing of GPT-4. I’d guess the right model is somewhere in between those two; in particular, I’d guess that it matters a lot how high revenue is from various sources, and revenue seems to behave somewhere in between these two things (there are calendar-time bottlenecks, but absolute capabilities matter a lot too; and parallel progress on image generation seems important here as well.)
Attention from policymakers would’ve been more delayed; the more hopeful you are about slowing things via regulation, the more you should think of this as an offsetting factor, especially since regulation may be more of a pure “calendar-time-bottlenecked response to hype” model than research and scaling progress.
(I also am not sure I understand your point for why it could be more than 3 months of speedup. All the factors you name seem like they will nearly-inevitably happen somewhere between here and TAI—e.g., there will be releases and demos that galvanize investment, talent, etc. - so it’s not clear how speeding a bunch of these things up 3 months speeds the whole thing up more than 3 months, assuming that there will be enough time for these things to matter either way.)
But more important than any of these points is that circumstances have (unfortunately, IMO) changed. My take on the “successful, careful AI lab” intervention was quite a bit more negative in mid-2022 (when I worried about exactly the kind of acceleration effects you point to) than when I did my writing on this topic in 2023 (at which point ChatGPT had already been released and the marginal further speedup of this kind of thing seemed a lot lower). Since I wrote this post, it seems like the marginal downsides have continued to fall, although I do remain ambivalent.
Thanks for this comment—I get vibes along these lines from a lot of people but I don’t think I understand the position, so I’m enthused to hear more about it.
> I believe that by not touching the “decrease the race” or “don’t make the race worse” interventions, this playbook misses a big part of the picture of “how one single think could help massively”.
“Standards and monitoring” is the main “decrease the race” path I see. It doesn’t seem feasible to me for the world to clamp down on AI development unconditionally, which is why I am more focused on the conditional (i.e., “unless it’s demonstrably safe”) version.
But is there another “decrease the race” or “don’t make the race worse” intervention that you think can make a big difference? Based on the fact that you’re talking about a single thing that can help massively, I don’t think you are referring to “just don’t make things worse”; what are you thinking of?
> Staying at the frontier of capabilities and deploying leads the frontrunner to feel the heat which accelerates both capabilities & the chances of uncareful deployment which increases pretty substantially the chances of extinction.
I agree that this is an effect, directionally, but it seems small by default in a setting with lots of players (I imagine there will be, and is, a lot of “heat” to be felt regardless of any one player’s actions). And the potential benefits seem big. My rough impression is that you’re confident the costs outweigh the benefits for nearly any imaginable version of this; if that’s right, can you give some quantitative or other sense of how you get there?
Thanks for the clarifications.
1. I think we agree on the fact that “unless it’s provably safe” is the best version of trying to get a policy slowdown.
2. I believe there are many interventions that could help on the slowdown side, most of which are unfortunately not compatible with the successful careful AI lab. The main struggle that a successful careful AI lab encounters is that it has to trade-off tons of safety principles along the way, essentially bc it needs to attract investors & talent and that attracting investors & talent is hard if you’re say too loudly that we should slow down as long as our thing is not provably safe.
So de facto a successful careful AI lab will be a force against slowdown & a bunch of other relevant policies in the policy world. It will also be a force for the perceived race which is making things harder for every actor.
Other interventions for slowdown are mostly in the realm of public advocacy.
Mostly drawing upon the animal welfare activism playbook, you could use public campaigns to de facto limit the ability of labs to race, via corporate or policy advocacy campaigns.
I guess, heuristically, I tend to take arguments of the form “but others would have done this bad thing anyway” with some skepticism because I think it tends to assume too much certainty over the counterfactual, in part due to many second order effects (e.g. the existence of one marginal key player increases the chances that more player invest, show that competition is possible etc.) that tend to be hard to compute (but are sometimes observable ex post).
On this specific case I think it’s not right that there are “lots of players” close from the frontier. If we take the case of OA and Anthropic for example, there are about 0 players at their level of deployed capabilities. Maybe Google will deploy at some point but they haven’t been serious players for the past 7 months. So if Anthropic hadn’t been around, OA could have chilled longer at ChatGPT level, and then at GPT-4 without plugins + code interpreter & without suffering from any threat. And now they’ll need to do something very impressive against the 100k context etc.
The compound effects of this are pretty substantial because for each new differentiation, it accelerates the whole field and pressures teams to find something new, causing a significantly more powerful race to the bottom.
If I had to be quantitative (vaguely) for the past 9 months, I’d guess that the existence of Anthropic has caused (/will cause, if we count the 100k thing) 2 significant counterfactual features and 3-5 months of timelines (which will probably compound into more due to self-improvement effects). I’d guess there are other effects (e.g. pressure on compute, scaling for driving costs down etc.) I’m not able to give vague estimates for.
My guess for the 3-5 months is mostly driven by the release of ChatGPT & GPT-4 which have both likely been released earlier than without Anthropic.
Thanks for the response!
Re: your other interventions—I meant for these to be part of the “Standards and monitoring” category of interventions (my discussion of that mentions advocacy and external pressure as important factors).
I think it’s far from obvious that an AI company needs to be a force against regulation, both conceptually (if it affects all players, it doesn’t necessarily hurt the company) and empirically.
Thanks for giving your take on the size of speedup effects. I disagree on a number of fronts. I don’t want to get into the details of most of them, but will comment that it seems like a big leap from “X product was released N months earlier than otherwise” to “Transformative AI will now arrive N months earlier than otherwise.” (I think this feels fairly clear when looking at other technological breakthroughs and how much they would’ve been affected by differently timed product releases.)
I see, I guess where we might disagree is I think that IMO a productive social movement could want to apply the Henry Spira’s playbook (overall pretty adversarial) oriented mostly towards slowing things down until labs have a clue of what they’re doing on the alignment front. I would guess you wouldn’t agree with that, but I’m not sure.
I’m not saying that it would be a force against regulation in general but that it would be a force against any regulation which slows down substantially the current capabilities progress rate of labs. And empirics don’t demonstrate the opposite as far as I can tell.
Labs have been pushing for the rule that we should wait for evals to say “it’s dangerous” before we consider what to do, rather than do like in most other industries, i.e. that something is assumed dangerous until proven safe.
Most mentions of slowdown have been described as necessary potentially at some point in the distant future, while most people in those labs have <5y timelines.
Finally, on your conceptual part, as some argued, it’s in fact probably not possible to affect all players equally without a drastic regime of control (which is a true downside of slowing down now, but IMO still much less worse than slowing down once a leak or a jailbreak of an advanced system can cause a large-scale engineered pandemic) bc smaller actors will use the time to try to catch up as close as possible from the frontier.
I agree, but if anything, my sense is that due to various compound effects (due to AI accelerating AI, to investment, to increased compute demand, and to more talent earlier), an earlier product release of N months just gives a lower bound for TAI timelines shortening (hence greater than N). Moreover, I think that the ChatGPT product release is, ex-post at least, not in the typical product release reference class. It was clearly a massive game changer for OpenAI and the entire ecosystem.
(Apologies for slow reply!)
I think an adversarial social movement could have a positive impact. I have tended to think of the impact as mostly being about getting risks taken more seriously and thus creating more political will for “standards and monitoring,” but you’re right that there could also be benefits simply from buying time generically for other stuff.
I said it’s “far from obvious” empirically what’s going on. I agree that discussion of slowing down has focused on the future rather than now, but I don’t think it has been pointing to a specific time horizon (the vibe looks to me more like “slow down at a certain capabilities level”).
It’s true that no regulation will affect everyone precisely the same way. But there is plenty of precedent for major industry players supporting regulation that generally slows things down (even when the dynamic you’re describing applies).
I don’t agree that we are looking at a lower bound here, bearing in mind that (I think) we are just talking about when ChatGPT was released (not when the underlying technology was developed), and that (I think) we should be holding fixed the release timing of GPT-4. (What I’ve seen in the NYT seems to imply that they rushed out functionality they’d otherwise have bundled with GPT-4.)
If ChatGPT had been held for longer, then:
Scaling and research would have continued in the meantime. And even with investment and talent flooding in, I expect that there’s very disproportionate impact from players who were already active before ChatGPT came out, who were easily well capitalized enough to go at ~max speed for the few months between ChatGPT and GPT-4.
GPT-4 would have had the same absolute level of impressiveness, revenue potential, etc. (as would some other things that I think have been important factors in bringing in investment, such as Midjourney). You could have a model like “ChatGPT maxed out hype such that the bottleneck on money and talent rushing into the field became calendar time alone,” which would support your picture; but you could also have other models, e.g. where the level of investment is more like a function of the absolute level of visible AI capabilities such that the timing of ChatGPT mattered little, holding fixed the timing of GPT-4. I’d guess the right model is somewhere in between those two; in particular, I’d guess that it matters a lot how high revenue is from various sources, and revenue seems to behave somewhere in between these two things (there are calendar-time bottlenecks, but absolute capabilities matter a lot too; and parallel progress on image generation seems important here as well.)
Attention from policymakers would’ve been more delayed; the more hopeful you are about slowing things via regulation, the more you should think of this as an offsetting factor, especially since regulation may be more of a pure “calendar-time-bottlenecked response to hype” model than research and scaling progress.
(I also am not sure I understand your point for why it could be more than 3 months of speedup. All the factors you name seem like they will nearly-inevitably happen somewhere between here and TAI—e.g., there will be releases and demos that galvanize investment, talent, etc. - so it’s not clear how speeding a bunch of these things up 3 months speeds the whole thing up more than 3 months, assuming that there will be enough time for these things to matter either way.)
But more important than any of these points is that circumstances have (unfortunately, IMO) changed. My take on the “successful, careful AI lab” intervention was quite a bit more negative in mid-2022 (when I worried about exactly the kind of acceleration effects you point to) than when I did my writing on this topic in 2023 (at which point ChatGPT had already been released and the marginal further speedup of this kind of thing seemed a lot lower). Since I wrote this post, it seems like the marginal downsides have continued to fall, although I do remain ambivalent.