It’s certainly a consideration, and I don’t want us to convince anybody who is genuinely working on alignment at DeepMind to leave. On the other hand, I don’t think their positive affinity towards AGI alignment matters much if what they are doing is accelerating its production. This seems a little like saying “you shouldn’t get those Iranian nuclear researchers to quit, because you’re removing the ‘checks’ on the other more radical researchers”. It’s probably a little naive to assume they’re “checking” the other members of DeepMind if their name is on this blog post: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/generally-capable-agents-emerge-from-open-ended-play.
This is also probably ignoring the maybe more plausible intermediate success of outreach, which is to get someone who doesn’t already have concerns to have them, who then keeps their job because of inertia. We can still do a lot of work getting those who refuse to quit to help move organizations like OpenAI or DeepMind more toward actual alignment research, and create institutional failsafes.
It’s certainly a consideration, and I don’t want us to convince anybody who is genuinely working on alignment at DeepMind to leave. On the other hand, I don’t think their positive affinity towards AGI alignment matters much if what they are doing is accelerating its production. This seems a little like saying “you shouldn’t get those Iranian nuclear researchers to quit, because you’re removing the ‘checks’ on the other more radical researchers”. It’s probably a little naive to assume they’re “checking” the other members of DeepMind if their name is on this blog post: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/generally-capable-agents-emerge-from-open-ended-play.
This is also probably ignoring the maybe more plausible intermediate success of outreach, which is to get someone who doesn’t already have concerns to have them, who then keeps their job because of inertia. We can still do a lot of work getting those who refuse to quit to help move organizations like OpenAI or DeepMind more toward actual alignment research, and create institutional failsafes.
I think a case could be made that if you don’t want Eleuther making X public, then it is also bad for DeepMind or OpenAI to make X.
I would make that case. In this circumstance it’s also definitely the far lesser evil.