I’d be much happier with increasing participants enough to equal 10-20% of the field of ML than a 6 month unconditional pause, and my guess is it’s less costly. It seems like leading labs allowing other labs to catch up by 6 months will reduce their valuations more than 20%, whereas diverting 10-20% of their resources would reduce valuations only 10% or so.
There are currently 300 alignment researchers. If we take additional researchers from the pool of 30k people who attended ICML, you get 3000 researchers, and if they’re equal quality this is 10x participants. I wouldn’t expect alignment to go 10x faster, more like 2x with a decent educational effort. But this is in perpetuity and should speed up alignment by far more than 6 months. There’s the question of getting labs to pay if they’re creating most of the harms, which might be hard though.
I’d be excited about someone doing a real cost-benefit analysis here, or preferably coming up with better ideas. It just seems so unlikely that a 6 month pause is close to the most efficient thing, given it destroys much of the value of a company that has a large lead.
I’d be much happier with increasing participants enough to equal 10-20% of the field of ML than a 6 month unconditional pause, and my guess is it’s less costly. It seems like leading labs allowing other labs to catch up by 6 months will reduce their valuations more than 20%, whereas diverting 10-20% of their resources would reduce valuations only 10% or so.
There are currently 300 alignment researchers. If we take additional researchers from the pool of 30k people who attended ICML, you get 3000 researchers, and if they’re equal quality this is 10x participants. I wouldn’t expect alignment to go 10x faster, more like 2x with a decent educational effort. But this is in perpetuity and should speed up alignment by far more than 6 months. There’s the question of getting labs to pay if they’re creating most of the harms, which might be hard though.
I’d be excited about someone doing a real cost-benefit analysis here, or preferably coming up with better ideas. It just seems so unlikely that a 6 month pause is close to the most efficient thing, given it destroys much of the value of a company that has a large lead.