I wonder if you’re getting disagreement strictly over that last line. I think that all makes sense, but I strongly suspect that the ease of making ChatGPT had nothing to do with their decision to publicize and commercialize.
There’s little reason to think that alignment is an engineering problem to the exclusion of theory. But making good theory is also partly dependent on knowing about the system you’re addressing, so I think there’s a strong argument that that progress accelerated alignment work as strongly as capabilities.
I think the argument is that it would be way better to do all the work we could on alignment before advancing capabilities at all. Which it would be. If we were not only a wise species, but a universally utilitarian one (see my top level response on that if you care). Which we are decidedly not.
I wonder if you’re getting disagreement strictly over that last line. I think that all makes sense, but I strongly suspect that the ease of making ChatGPT had nothing to do with their decision to publicize and commercialize.
There’s little reason to think that alignment is an engineering problem to the exclusion of theory. But making good theory is also partly dependent on knowing about the system you’re addressing, so I think there’s a strong argument that that progress accelerated alignment work as strongly as capabilities.
I think the argument is that it would be way better to do all the work we could on alignment before advancing capabilities at all. Which it would be. If we were not only a wise species, but a universally utilitarian one (see my top level response on that if you care). Which we are decidedly not.