Was this funded? These sorts of findings are clearly more worthy of funding than 90% of the other stuff I’ve seen, and most the rest of the 10% is ambiguous.
Forget the “Alignment Textbook from 100 years in the future”; if we had this 6 years ago, things would have gone very differently.
I don’t think these conversations had as much impact as you suggest and I think most of the stuff funded by EA funders has decent EV, i.e. I have more trust in the funding process than you seem to have.
I think one nice side-effect of this is that I’m now widely known as “the AI safety guy” in parts of the European AIS community and some people have just randomly dropped me a message or started a conversation about it because they were curious.
I was working on different grants in the past but this particular work was not funded.
I was thinking about this post, not the conversations at all. If this post had existed 6 years ago, your conversations probably would have had much more impact than they did. It’s a really good idea for people to know how to succeed instead of fail at explaining AI safety to someone for the first time, even if this was just academics.
This post should be distilled so even more people can see it, and possibly even distributed as zines or a guidebook, e.g. at some of the AI safety events such as in DC.
Was this funded? These sorts of findings are clearly more worthy of funding than 90% of the other stuff I’ve seen, and most the rest of the 10% is ambiguous.
Forget the “Alignment Textbook from 100 years in the future”; if we had this 6 years ago, things would have gone very differently.
I don’t think these conversations had as much impact as you suggest and I think most of the stuff funded by EA funders has decent EV, i.e. I have more trust in the funding process than you seem to have.
I think one nice side-effect of this is that I’m now widely known as “the AI safety guy” in parts of the European AIS community and some people have just randomly dropped me a message or started a conversation about it because they were curious.
I was working on different grants in the past but this particular work was not funded.
I was thinking about this post, not the conversations at all. If this post had existed 6 years ago, your conversations probably would have had much more impact than they did. It’s a really good idea for people to know how to succeed instead of fail at explaining AI safety to someone for the first time, even if this was just academics.
This post should be distilled so even more people can see it, and possibly even distributed as zines or a guidebook, e.g. at some of the AI safety events such as in DC.