Oliver’s second message seems like a truly relevant consideration for our work in the alignment ecosystem. Sometimes, it really does feel like AI X-risk and related concerns created the current situation. Many of the biggest AGI advances might not have been developed counterfactually, and machine learning engineers would just be optimizing another person’s clicks.
I am a big fan of “Just don’t build AGI” and academic work with AI, simply because it is better at moving slowly (and thereby safely through open discourse and not $10 mil training runs) compared to massive industry labs. I do have quite a bit of trust in Anthropic, DeepMind and OpenAI simply from their general safety considerations compared to e.g. Microsoft’s release of Sydney.
As part of this EA bet on AI, it also seems like the safety view has become widespread among most AI industry researchers from my interactions with them (though might just be a sampling bias and they were honestly more interested in their equity growing in value). So if the counterfactual of today’s large AGI companies would be large misaligned AGI companies, then we would be in a significantly worse position. And if AI safety is indeed relatively trivial, then we’re in an amazing position to make the world a better place. I’ll remain slightly pessimistic here as well, though.
Oliver’s second message seems like a truly relevant consideration for our work in the alignment ecosystem. Sometimes, it really does feel like AI X-risk and related concerns created the current situation. Many of the biggest AGI advances might not have been developed counterfactually, and machine learning engineers would just be optimizing another person’s clicks.
I am a big fan of “Just don’t build AGI” and academic work with AI, simply because it is better at moving slowly (and thereby safely through open discourse and not $10 mil training runs) compared to massive industry labs. I do have quite a bit of trust in Anthropic, DeepMind and OpenAI simply from their general safety considerations compared to e.g. Microsoft’s release of Sydney.
As part of this EA bet on AI, it also seems like the safety view has become widespread among most AI industry researchers from my interactions with them (though might just be a sampling bias and they were honestly more interested in their equity growing in value). So if the counterfactual of today’s large AGI companies would be large misaligned AGI companies, then we would be in a significantly worse position. And if AI safety is indeed relatively trivial, then we’re in an amazing position to make the world a better place. I’ll remain slightly pessimistic here as well, though.