AI safety research is speeding up capabilities. I hope this is somewhat obvious to most.
This contradicts the Bitter Lesson, though. Current AI safety research doesn’t contribute to increased scaling, either through hardware advances or through algorithmic increases in efficiency. To the extent that it increases the usability of AI for mundane tasks, current safety research does so in a way that doesn’t involve making models larger. Fears of capabilities externalities from alignment research are unfounded as long as the scaling hypothesis continues to hold.
Doesn’t the whole concept of takeoff contradict the Bitter Lesson according to some uses of it? That is our present hardware could be much more capable if we had the right software.
This contradicts the Bitter Lesson, though. Current AI safety research doesn’t contribute to increased scaling, either through hardware advances or through algorithmic increases in efficiency. To the extent that it increases the usability of AI for mundane tasks, current safety research does so in a way that doesn’t involve making models larger. Fears of capabilities externalities from alignment research are unfounded as long as the scaling hypothesis continues to hold.
Doesn’t the whole concept of takeoff contradict the Bitter Lesson according to some uses of it? That is our present hardware could be much more capable if we had the right software.
Scaling matters, but it’s not all that matters.
For example, RLHF