mmitchell is a near term safety researcher doing what I view as great work. I think a lot of the miscommunications and odd mislabelings coming from her side of the AI safety/alignment field are because she doesn’t see herself as in it, and yet is doing work fundamentally within what I see as the field. So her criticisms of other parts of the field include labeling those as not her field, leading to labeling confusions. but she’s still doing good work on short-term impact safety imo.
I think she doesn’t quite see the path to AI killing everyone herself yet, if I understand from a distance? not sure about that one.
as far as I’m aware, the biggest contribution to the safety field as a whole is mainly improved datasets, which is recent. The sort of stuff that doesn’t get prioritized in existential ai safety because it’s too short-term and might aid capabilities. In general, I’d recommend reading her papers’ abstracts, but wouldn’t recommend pushing past an abstract you find uninteresting.
edit: WHOOPS WRONG MMITCHELL
mmitchell is a near term safety researcher doing what I view as great work. I think a lot of the miscommunications and odd mislabelings coming from her side of the AI safety/alignment field are because she doesn’t see herself as in it, and yet is doing work fundamentally within what I see as the field. So her criticisms of other parts of the field include labeling those as not her field, leading to labeling confusions. but she’s still doing good work on short-term impact safety imo.
I think she doesn’t quite see the path to AI killing everyone herself yet, if I understand from a distance? not sure about that one.
What’s their most important contribution? I’m wondering whether to read her papers, and I’m undecided after reading a couple of abstracts.
as far as I’m aware, the biggest contribution to the safety field as a whole is mainly improved datasets, which is recent. The sort of stuff that doesn’t get prioritized in existential ai safety because it’s too short-term and might aid capabilities. In general, I’d recommend reading her papers’ abstracts, but wouldn’t recommend pushing past an abstract you find uninteresting.
this one is probably the most interesting to me: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.05129
OH WAIT CRAP THERE ARE TWO MMITCHELLS AND I MEANT THE OTHER ONE. well, uh, anyway, have a link to the other mmitchell’s paper that seems cool.
OP mmitchell also does seem pretty cool, but maybe not quite as close to safety/alignment—her work seems to be focused on adversarial examples: https://melaniemitchell.me/ & https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13966