I liked this post and think it’ll serve as a useful reference point, I’ll definitely send it to people who are new to the alignment field.
But I think it needs a major caveat added. As a survey of alignment research that regularly posts on LessWrong or interacts closely with that community, it does a fine job. But as capybaralet already pointed out, it misses many academic groups. And even some major industry groups are de-emphasized. For example, DeepMind alignment is 20+ people, and has been around for many years. But it’s got if anything a slightly less detailed write-up than Team Shard, a small group of people for a few months, or infra-Bayesianism, largely one person for several years.
The best shouldn’t be the enemy of the good, and some groups are just quite opaque, but I think it does need to be cleared about its limitations. One anti-dote would be including in the table a sense of # of people, # of years it’s been around, and maybe even funding to get a sense of what the relative scale of these different projects are.
I liked this post and think it’ll serve as a useful reference point, I’ll definitely send it to people who are new to the alignment field.
But I think it needs a major caveat added. As a survey of alignment research that regularly posts on LessWrong or interacts closely with that community, it does a fine job. But as capybaralet already pointed out, it misses many academic groups. And even some major industry groups are de-emphasized. For example, DeepMind alignment is 20+ people, and has been around for many years. But it’s got if anything a slightly less detailed write-up than Team Shard, a small group of people for a few months, or infra-Bayesianism, largely one person for several years.
The best shouldn’t be the enemy of the good, and some groups are just quite opaque, but I think it does need to be cleared about its limitations. One anti-dote would be including in the table a sense of # of people, # of years it’s been around, and maybe even funding to get a sense of what the relative scale of these different projects are.
Strong upvoted and I quite like this antidote, I will work on adding my guess of the scale of these orgs into the table.