[edit: my thoughts are mostly about AI alignment and research. Some discussion seems to be about “EA”, which likely DOES contain a bunch of underfunded “can probably buy it” projects, so I’d be surprised if there’s a pile of unspent money unsure how to hire mosquito-net researchers or whatever. ]
This doesn’t seem that surprising to me—the alignment problem in employees remains unsolved, and hiring people to solve AI Alignment seems one level abstracted from that. IMO (from outside), MIRI is still in the “it takes a genius missionary to know what to do next” phase, not the “pay enough and it’ll succeed” one.
I suspect that even the framing of the question exposes a serious underlying confusion. There just isn’t that much well-defined “direct work” to buy. People in the in-crowd around here often call something a “technical problems” when they mean “philosophical problem requiring rigor”. Before you can assign work or make good use of very smart workers who don’t join your cult, but just want a nice paycheck for doing what they’re good at, you need enough progress on monitoring and measurement of alignment that you have any idea if they’re helping or hurting your mission.
I’ve been involved in recruiting and hiring top-level (and mid-level and starting) technical and management talent at both big (FAANG) and medium (under 500 people) companies, and the single best strategy I know is to have lots of shovel-ready work for reasonably-well-paid entry- and mid-level employees, and over a few years some of those will evolve into stars. Hiring existing stars works too, but requires the reputation and product that attracts them. This ecosystem requires shockingly more sustainable throughput (revenue and self-funded growth) than I believe MIRI has any desire to create. Almost certainly there isn’t enough funding to make it work as a “pure expense” model.
Another common path is acquisition—find a company or group you want to hire, and overpay for their product in order to bring their key employees in. If you’re actually looking to spend $billions, this is probably the right answer—find people solving somewhat-similar technical problems, and combine them with your people solving the theoretical alignment problems.
Right, that’s my point: you can’t outsource “solve alignment”. You MAYBE can outsource/hire some specific sub-tasks or non-vision parts of your mission, but I don’t know what those are, and as far as I can tell, neither does anyone else.
[edit: my thoughts are mostly about AI alignment and research. Some discussion seems to be about “EA”, which likely DOES contain a bunch of underfunded “can probably buy it” projects, so I’d be surprised if there’s a pile of unspent money unsure how to hire mosquito-net researchers or whatever. ]
This doesn’t seem that surprising to me—the alignment problem in employees remains unsolved, and hiring people to solve AI Alignment seems one level abstracted from that. IMO (from outside), MIRI is still in the “it takes a genius missionary to know what to do next” phase, not the “pay enough and it’ll succeed” one.
I suspect that even the framing of the question exposes a serious underlying confusion. There just isn’t that much well-defined “direct work” to buy. People in the in-crowd around here often call something a “technical problems” when they mean “philosophical problem requiring rigor”. Before you can assign work or make good use of very smart workers who don’t join your cult, but just want a nice paycheck for doing what they’re good at, you need enough progress on monitoring and measurement of alignment that you have any idea if they’re helping or hurting your mission.
I’ve been involved in recruiting and hiring top-level (and mid-level and starting) technical and management talent at both big (FAANG) and medium (under 500 people) companies, and the single best strategy I know is to have lots of shovel-ready work for reasonably-well-paid entry- and mid-level employees, and over a few years some of those will evolve into stars. Hiring existing stars works too, but requires the reputation and product that attracts them. This ecosystem requires shockingly more sustainable throughput (revenue and self-funded growth) than I believe MIRI has any desire to create. Almost certainly there isn’t enough funding to make it work as a “pure expense” model.
Another common path is acquisition—find a company or group you want to hire, and overpay for their product in order to bring their key employees in. If you’re actually looking to spend $billions, this is probably the right answer—find people solving somewhat-similar technical problems, and combine them with your people solving the theoretical alignment problems.
If you have a deterministic criterion for if something makes the alignment situation better or worse, then you’ve already solved alignment.
Right, that’s my point: you can’t outsource “solve alignment”. You MAYBE can outsource/hire some specific sub-tasks or non-vision parts of your mission, but I don’t know what those are, and as far as I can tell, neither does anyone else.