Evan, thank you for writing this up! I think this is a pretty accurate description of my present views, and I really appreciate you taking the time to capture and distill them. :)
I’ve signed up for AF and will check comments on this post occasionally. I think some other members of Clarity are planning to so as well. So everyone should feel invited to ask us questions.
One thing I wanted to emphasize is that, to the extent these views seem intellectually novel to members of the alignment community, I think it’s more accurate to attribute the novelty to a separate intellectual community loosely clustered around Distill than to me specifically. My views are deeply informed by the thinking of other members of the Clarity team and our friends at other institutions. To give just one example, the idea presented here as a “microscope AI” is deeply influenced by Shan Carter and Michael Nielsen’s thinking, and the actual term was coined by Nick Cammarata.
To be clear, not everyone in this community would agree with my views, especially as they relate to safety and strategic considerations! So I shouldn’t be taken as speaking on behalf of this cluster, but rather as articulating a single point of view within it.
Btw, we just pushed some basic subscriptions options. In the triple-dot menu for this post (at the top of the post), there’s an option to ‘subscribe to comments’ and you’ll get notified of new comments any time you go to the Alignment Forum, rather than having to check this page in particular.
Edit: There was actually a bug in the notifications system on the AI Alignment Forum when I wrote this comment. It’s fixed now.
Evan, thank you for writing this up! I think this is a pretty accurate description of my present views, and I really appreciate you taking the time to capture and distill them. :)
I’ve signed up for AF and will check comments on this post occasionally. I think some other members of Clarity are planning to so as well. So everyone should feel invited to ask us questions.
One thing I wanted to emphasize is that, to the extent these views seem intellectually novel to members of the alignment community, I think it’s more accurate to attribute the novelty to a separate intellectual community loosely clustered around Distill than to me specifically. My views are deeply informed by the thinking of other members of the Clarity team and our friends at other institutions. To give just one example, the idea presented here as a “microscope AI” is deeply influenced by Shan Carter and Michael Nielsen’s thinking, and the actual term was coined by Nick Cammarata.
To be clear, not everyone in this community would agree with my views, especially as they relate to safety and strategic considerations! So I shouldn’t be taken as speaking on behalf of this cluster, but rather as articulating a single point of view within it.
Btw, we just pushed some basic subscriptions options. In the triple-dot menu for this post (at the top of the post), there’s an option to ‘subscribe to comments’ and you’ll get notified of new comments any time you go to the Alignment Forum, rather than having to check this page in particular.
Edit: There was actually a bug in the notifications system on the AI Alignment Forum when I wrote this comment. It’s fixed now.
Subscribed! Thanks for the handy feature.