I think safetywashing is a problem but from the perspective of an xrisky researcher it’s not a big deal because for the audiences that matter, there are safetywashing things that are just way cheaper per unit of goodwill than xrisk alignment work—xrisk is kind of weird and unrelatable to anyone who doesn’t already take it super seriously. I think people who work on non xrisk safety or distribution of benefits stuff should be more worried about this.
Weird it may be, but it is also somewhat influential among people who matter. The extended LW-sphere is not without influence and also contains good ml-talent for the recruiting pool. I can easily see the case that places like Anthropic/Deepmind/OpenAI[1] benefit from giving the appearance of caring about xrisk and working on it.
Weird it may be, but it is also somewhat influential among people who matter. The extended LW-sphere is not without influence and also contains good ml-talent for the recruiting pool. I can easily see the case that places like Anthropic/Deepmind/OpenAI[1] benefit from giving the appearance of caring about xrisk and working on it.
until recently