Eliezer already addressed this in his writing, no? He used to think that we were in the “Manhattan Project” phase where throwing gobs of money at the problem would make something happen. Then he realized he was mistaken and we aren’t nearly that far along in rigorously understanding reasoning. We’re at the phase where if you need to be told what to do/work-on/think-about it’d be hard to provide that direction (at least in the employee or contract sense). It’s unclear to me if 10-15 years of progress have changed that, but it seems like mostly no; ML has had some very impressive feats, but why any of it works remains elusive.
On the other hand, FWIW I’m a software engineer who’s intersted in this research and been following whatever he can for the last decade+, but any path from hobby to actually working on this seems extremely costly or outright nonviable. Do a bunch of networking (already costly for introverts), much of which involves travel, to maybe land an internship in one of the most expensive cities in the US where you can fight for whatever scraps of housing are available. I don’t know for sure if I could actually contribute, but I know with filters like this we aren’t likely to find out.
Eliezer already addressed this in his writing, no? He used to think that we were in the “Manhattan Project” phase where throwing gobs of money at the problem would make something happen. Then he realized he was mistaken and we aren’t nearly that far along in rigorously understanding reasoning. We’re at the phase where if you need to be told what to do/work-on/think-about it’d be hard to provide that direction (at least in the employee or contract sense). It’s unclear to me if 10-15 years of progress have changed that, but it seems like mostly no; ML has had some very impressive feats, but why any of it works remains elusive.
On the other hand, FWIW I’m a software engineer who’s intersted in this research and been following whatever he can for the last decade+, but any path from hobby to actually working on this seems extremely costly or outright nonviable. Do a bunch of networking (already costly for introverts), much of which involves travel, to maybe land an internship in one of the most expensive cities in the US where you can fight for whatever scraps of housing are available. I don’t know for sure if I could actually contribute, but I know with filters like this we aren’t likely to find out.