Another potential reason: improved interpretability may lead to improved capabilities. If the most aligned project puts more effort into interpretability, this could lead to the most aligned project having more capabilities slack compared to other projects. Alternatively, if interpretability-derived capabilities benefits are widely distributed, it may accelerate transformative AI timelines.
For a concrete example of how interpretability may improve capabilities, consider that the interpretability paper Locating and Editing Factual Knowledge in GPT indicates that deeper feed forward layers in transformers become progressively less important for storing factual knowledge (Figure 3f). This suggests that we may be able to gradually reduce the width of feed forward layers in later layers of the model without impacting performance too badly, making the model more compute-efficient.
If interpretability techniques advance to the point of delivering on the potential benefits you describe above, it seems very likely that those techniques will impact capabilities, so thinking about how that may impact timelines vs alignment slack seems relevant.
Another potential reason: improved interpretability may lead to improved capabilities. If the most aligned project puts more effort into interpretability, this could lead to the most aligned project having more capabilities slack compared to other projects. Alternatively, if interpretability-derived capabilities benefits are widely distributed, it may accelerate transformative AI timelines.
For a concrete example of how interpretability may improve capabilities, consider that the interpretability paper Locating and Editing Factual Knowledge in GPT indicates that deeper feed forward layers in transformers become progressively less important for storing factual knowledge (Figure 3f). This suggests that we may be able to gradually reduce the width of feed forward layers in later layers of the model without impacting performance too badly, making the model more compute-efficient.
If interpretability techniques advance to the point of delivering on the potential benefits you describe above, it seems very likely that those techniques will impact capabilities, so thinking about how that may impact timelines vs alignment slack seems relevant.