Basically I just agree with what James said. But I think the steelman is something like: you should expect shorter (or no) pauses with an RSP if all goes well, because the precautions are matched to the risks. Like, the labs aim to develop safety measures which keep pace with the dangers introduced by scaling, and if they succeed at that, then they never have to pause. But even if they fail, they’re also expecting that building frontier models will help them solve alignment faster. I.e., either way the overall pause time would probably be shorter?
It does seem like in order to not have this complaint about the RSP, though, you need to expect that it’s shorter by a lot (like by many months or years). My guess is that the labs do believe this, although not for amazing reasons. Like, the answer which feels most “real” to me is that this complaint doesn’t apply to RSPs because the labs aren’t actually planning to do a meaningful pause.
Basically I just agree with what James said. But I think the steelman is something like: you should expect shorter (or no) pauses with an RSP if all goes well, because the precautions are matched to the risks. Like, the labs aim to develop safety measures which keep pace with the dangers introduced by scaling, and if they succeed at that, then they never have to pause. But even if they fail, they’re also expecting that building frontier models will help them solve alignment faster. I.e., either way the overall pause time would probably be shorter?
It does seem like in order to not have this complaint about the RSP, though, you need to expect that it’s shorter by a lot (like by many months or years). My guess is that the labs do believe this, although not for amazing reasons. Like, the answer which feels most “real” to me is that this complaint doesn’t apply to RSPs because the labs aren’t actually planning to do a meaningful pause.