Does anyone know what exactly DeepMind’s CEO Demis Hassabis thinks about AGI safety, how seriously does he take AGI safety, how much time does he spend focusing on AGI safety research when compared to AI capabilities research? What does he think is the probability that we will succeed and build a flourishing future?
Well to be honest with you I do think that is a very plausible end state–the optimistic one I painted you. And of course that’s one reason I work on AI is because I hoped it would be like that. On the other hand, one of the biggest worries I have is what humans are going to do with AI technologies on the way to AGI. Like most technologies they could be used for good or bad and I think that’s down to us as a society and governments to decide which direction they’re going to go in.
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Potentially. I always imagine that as we got closer to the sort of gray zone that you were talking about earlier, the best thing to do might be to pause the pushing of the performance of these systems so that you can analyze down to minute detail exactly and maybe even prove things mathematically about the system so that you know the limits and otherwise of the systems that you’re building. At that point I think all the world’s greatest minds should probably be thinking about this problem. So that was what I would be advocating to you know the Terence Tao’s of this world, the best mathematicians. Actually I’ve even talked to him about this—I know you’re working on the Riemann hypothesis or something which is the best thing in mathematics but actually this is more pressing. I have this sort of idea of like almost uh ‘Avengers assembled’ of the scientific world because that’s a bit of like my dream.
My own guesses are - I want to underline that these are just my guesses—that he thinks the alignment problem is a real problem, but I don’t know how seriously he takes it, but it doesn’t seem like he takes it as seriously as most AGI safety researchers, I don’t think he personally spends much time on AGI safety research, although there are AGI safety researchers in his team and they are hiring more, and I think he thinks there is over 50% probability that we will on some level succeed.
Does anyone know what exactly DeepMind’s CEO Demis Hassabis thinks about AGI safety, how seriously does he take AGI safety, how much time does he spend focusing on AGI safety research when compared to AI capabilities research? What does he think is the probability that we will succeed and build a flourishing future?
In this LessWrong post there are several excerpts from Demis Hassabis:
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My own guesses are - I want to underline that these are just my guesses—that he thinks the alignment problem is a real problem, but I don’t know how seriously he takes it, but it doesn’t seem like he takes it as seriously as most AGI safety researchers, I don’t think he personally spends much time on AGI safety research, although there are AGI safety researchers in his team and they are hiring more, and I think he thinks there is over 50% probability that we will on some level succeed.