I am thinking of doing a weekly substack where I post the most interesting AI Alignment breakthroughs each week.

Because I don’t have a lot of time to devote to this, for now it’s mostly just going to be a list of links to things I find interesting.

If this is something you would find useful, please subscribe or otherwise let me know.

I will post 1x/week for the next month (hopefully every Sunday). If by the end of that time I haven’t gotten at least 10 “this is helpful” or subscriptions, I will probably stop.

Here is the first week’s post [cross-posted from substack]

AI Alignment Breakthroughs this Week (10/01)

Each week, I am going to try to highlight some of the top breakthroughs in AI alignment.

Since this is the first week, I will briefly explain each section (and why it is related to AI alignment). In future weeks, if I add a section, I will make a note of it.

The sections in this week’s breakthroughs are:

Math. Teaching AI to do math is on the critical path for many AI alignment proposals, such as Max Tegmark and Steve Omohundro’s “Provably Safe Systems”

Brain-computer-interfaces. BCIs are one path (notably promoted by Elon Musk) that Humans might be able to maintain control over AI.

AI Agents. Using teams of AI Agents who communicate in a human-readable way is one proposal for scaling AI safely.

Making AI Do what you want. Teaching AI to follow instructions correctly is on the central path for almost all AI alignment proposals.

Explainability. Making AI accurately explain what it is thinking is considered to be a central problem in many AI Alignment strategies.

Mechanistic Interpretability. The ability to peer inside the “black box” that is AI and understand what it is thinking is likely to be useful for many alignment strategies

AI Art. This section is just for fun, but I have found that many AI Art techniques are closely related to AI alignment. One reason this is so is because getting the AI to understand human feelings and desires is at the heart of the AI Art movement. AI Art is also a relatively “harmless” way to explore cutting-edge AI capabilities.