This update massively reduces my expectation for Conjecture’s future value. When you’re a small player in the field, you produce value through transferrable or bolt-on components, such as Conjecture’s interpretability and simulator work. CoEm on the other hand is completely disconnected from other AGI or ai safety work, and pretty much only has any impact if Conjecture is extraordinarily successful.
We mostly don’t know how to do alignment, so I take “not obviously bad, and really different from other approaches” to be a commendable quality for a research proposal. I also like research that is either meh, or extraordinarily successful, first because these pathways are going to almost always be neglected in a field, and second because I think most really great things in general come from these high risk of doing nothing (if you don’t have inside knowledge), high return if you do something strategies.
If you want to make a competitive agi from scratch (even if you only want “within 5 years of best ai”), you just have to start way earlier. If this project was anounced 7 years ago I’d like it much more, but now is just too late, you’d need huge miracles to finish in time.
Why do you think that it will not be competitive with other approaches?
For example, it took 10 years to sequence the first human genome. After nearly 7 years of work, another competitor started an alternative human genome project using completely another technology, and both projects were finished approximately at the same time.
This update massively reduces my expectation for Conjecture’s future value. When you’re a small player in the field, you produce value through transferrable or bolt-on components, such as Conjecture’s interpretability and simulator work. CoEm on the other hand is completely disconnected from other AGI or ai safety work, and pretty much only has any impact if Conjecture is extraordinarily successful.
We mostly don’t know how to do alignment, so I take “not obviously bad, and really different from other approaches” to be a commendable quality for a research proposal. I also like research that is either meh, or extraordinarily successful, first because these pathways are going to almost always be neglected in a field, and second because I think most really great things in general come from these high risk of doing nothing (if you don’t have inside knowledge), high return if you do something strategies.
If you want to make a competitive agi from scratch (even if you only want “within 5 years of best ai”), you just have to start way earlier. If this project was anounced 7 years ago I’d like it much more, but now is just too late, you’d need huge miracles to finish in time.
Why do you think that it will not be competitive with other approaches?
For example, it took 10 years to sequence the first human genome. After nearly 7 years of work, another competitor started an alternative human genome project using completely another technology, and both projects were finished approximately at the same time.