I’ve written a bunch elsewhere about object-level thoughts on ELK. For this review, I want to focus instead on meta-level points.
I think ELK was very well-made; I think it did a great job of explaining itself with lots of surface area, explaining a way to think about solutions (the builder-breaker cycle), bridging the gap between toy demonstrations and philosophical problems, and focusing lots of attention on the same thing at the same time. In terms of impact on the growth and development on the AI safety community, I think this is one of the most important posts from 2021 (even tho the prize and much of the related work happened in 2022).
I don’t really need to ask for follow-on work; there’s already tons, as you can see from the ELK tag.
I think it is maybe underappreciated by the broad audience how much this is an old problem, and appreciate the appendix that gives credit to earlier thinking, while thinking this doesn’t erode any of the credit Paul, Mark, and Ajeya should get for the excellent packaging.
[To the best of my knowledge, ELK is still an open problem, and one of the things that I appreciated about the significant focus on ELK specifically was helping give people better models of how quickly progress happens in this space, and what it looks like (or doesn’t look like).]
I’ve written a bunch elsewhere about object-level thoughts on ELK. For this review, I want to focus instead on meta-level points.
I think ELK was very well-made; I think it did a great job of explaining itself with lots of surface area, explaining a way to think about solutions (the builder-breaker cycle), bridging the gap between toy demonstrations and philosophical problems, and focusing lots of attention on the same thing at the same time. In terms of impact on the growth and development on the AI safety community, I think this is one of the most important posts from 2021 (even tho the prize and much of the related work happened in 2022).
I don’t really need to ask for follow-on work; there’s already tons, as you can see from the ELK tag.
I think it is maybe underappreciated by the broad audience how much this is an old problem, and appreciate the appendix that gives credit to earlier thinking, while thinking this doesn’t erode any of the credit Paul, Mark, and Ajeya should get for the excellent packaging.
[To the best of my knowledge, ELK is still an open problem, and one of the things that I appreciated about the significant focus on ELK specifically was helping give people better models of how quickly progress happens in this space, and what it looks like (or doesn’t look like).]