Because this is from your perspective, could you say a bit about who you are, what your research tastes are, which of these people you’ve interacted with?
Background: I graduated from college at the University of Michigan this spring, I majored in Math and CS. In college I worked on vision research for self-driving cars, and wrote my undergrad thesis on robustness (my linkedin). I spent a lot of time running the EA group at Michigan. I’m currently doing SERI MATS under John Wentworth.
Research taste: currently very bad and confused and uncertain. I want to become better at research and this is mostly why I am doing MATS right now. I guess I especially enjoy reading and thinking about mathy research like Infra-Bayesianism and MIRI embedded agency stuff, but I’ll be excited about whatever research I think is the most important.
I’m pretty new to interacting with the alignment sphere (before this summer I had just read things online and taken AGISF). Who I’ve interacted with (I’m probably forgetting some, but gives a rough idea):
1 conversation with Andrew Critch
~3 conversations with people at each of Conjecture and MIRI
~8 conversations with various people at Redwood
Many conversations with people who hang around Lightcone, especially John and other SERI MATS participants (including Team Shard)
This summer, when I started talking to alignment people, I had a massive rush of information and so this was initially just a google doc of notes to organize my thoughts and figure out what people were doing. I then polished this and published this after some friends encouraged me to. I emphasize that nothing I write in the opinion section are strongly held beliefs—I am still deeply confused about a lot of things in alignment. I’m hoping that by posting this more publicly I can also get feedback / perspectives from others who are not in my social sphere right now.
Research tastes: I’m not great at understanding and working on super mathy stuff, so I mostly avoided giving opinions on these. I enjoy toy programming puzzles/competitions but got bored of engineering large/complex systems which is part of why I left Ought. I’m generally excited about some level of automating alignment research.
Who I’ve interacted with:
A ton: Ought
~3-10 conversations: Conjecture (vast majority being “Simulacra Theory” team), Team Shard
~1-2 conversations with some team members: ARC, CAIS, CHAI, CLR, Encultured, Externalized Reasoning Oversight, MIRI, OpenAI, John Wentworth, Truthful AI / Owain Evans
Because this is from your perspective, could you say a bit about who you are, what your research tastes are, which of these people you’ve interacted with?
That makes sense. For me:
Background: I graduated from college at the University of Michigan this spring, I majored in Math and CS. In college I worked on vision research for self-driving cars, and wrote my undergrad thesis on robustness (my linkedin). I spent a lot of time running the EA group at Michigan. I’m currently doing SERI MATS under John Wentworth.
Research taste: currently very bad and confused and uncertain. I want to become better at research and this is mostly why I am doing MATS right now. I guess I especially enjoy reading and thinking about mathy research like Infra-Bayesianism and MIRI embedded agency stuff, but I’ll be excited about whatever research I think is the most important.
I’m pretty new to interacting with the alignment sphere (before this summer I had just read things online and taken AGISF). Who I’ve interacted with (I’m probably forgetting some, but gives a rough idea):
1 conversation with Andrew Critch
~3 conversations with people at each of Conjecture and MIRI
~8 conversations with various people at Redwood
Many conversations with people who hang around Lightcone, especially John and other SERI MATS participants (including Team Shard)
This summer, when I started talking to alignment people, I had a massive rush of information and so this was initially just a google doc of notes to organize my thoughts and figure out what people were doing. I then polished this and published this after some friends encouraged me to. I emphasize that nothing I write in the opinion section are strongly held beliefs—I am still deeply confused about a lot of things in alignment. I’m hoping that by posting this more publicly I can also get feedback / perspectives from others who are not in my social sphere right now.
Good point. For myself:
Background (see also https://www.elilifland.com/): I did some research on adversarial robustness of NLP models while in undergrad. I then worked at Ought as a software/research engineer for 1.5 years, was briefly a longtermist forecasting entrepreneur then have been thinking independently about alignment strategy among other things for the past 2 months.
Research tastes: I’m not great at understanding and working on super mathy stuff, so I mostly avoided giving opinions on these. I enjoy toy programming puzzles/competitions but got bored of engineering large/complex systems which is part of why I left Ought. I’m generally excited about some level of automating alignment research.
Who I’ve interacted with:
A ton: Ought
~3-10 conversations: Conjecture (vast majority being “Simulacra Theory” team), Team Shard
~1-2 conversations with some team members: ARC, CAIS, CHAI, CLR, Encultured, Externalized Reasoning Oversight, MIRI, OpenAI, John Wentworth, Truthful AI / Owain Evans