Suppose that aligning an AGI requires 1000 person-years of research.
900 of these person-years can be done in parallelizable 5-year chunks (e.g., by 180 people over 5 years — or, more realistically, by 1800 people over 10 years, with 10% of the people doing the job correctly half the time).
The remaining 100 of these person-years factor into four chunks that take 25 serial years apiece (so that you can’t get any of those four parts done in less than 25 years).
Do you have a similar model for just building (unaligned) AGI? Or is the model meaningfully different? On a similar model for just building AGI, then timelines would mostly be shortened by progressing through the serial research-person-years instead of the parallelisable research-person-years. If researchers who are progressing both capabilities and aligning are doing both in the parallelisable part, then this would be less worrying, as they’re not actually shortening timelines meaningfully.
Unfortunately I imagine you think that building (unaligned) AGI quite probably doesn’t have many more serial person-years of research required, if any. This is possibly another way of framing the prosaic AGI claim: “we expect we can get to AGI without any fundamentally new insights on intelligence, using (something like) current methods.”
Do you have a similar model for just building (unaligned) AGI? Or is the model meaningfully different? On a similar model for just building AGI, then timelines would mostly be shortened by progressing through the serial research-person-years instead of the parallelisable research-person-years. If researchers who are progressing both capabilities and aligning are doing both in the parallelisable part, then this would be less worrying, as they’re not actually shortening timelines meaningfully.
Unfortunately I imagine you think that building (unaligned) AGI quite probably doesn’t have many more serial person-years of research required, if any. This is possibly another way of framing the prosaic AGI claim: “we expect we can get to AGI without any fundamentally new insights on intelligence, using (something like) current methods.”