Request: stop advancing AI capabilities

I am currently job hunting, trying to get a job in AI Safety but it seems to be quite difficult especially outside of the US, so I am not sure if I will be able to do it. 

If I will not land a safety job, one of the obvious options is to try to get hired by an AI company and try to learn more there in the hope I will either be able to contribute to safety there or eventually move to the field as a more experienced engineer.

I am conscious of why pushing capabilities could be bad so I will try to avoid it, but I am not sure how far it extends. I understand that being Research Scientist in OpenAI working on GPT-5 is definitely pushing capabilities but what about doing frontend in OpenAI or building infrastructure at some strong but not leading (and hopefully a bit more safety-oriented) company such as Cohere? Or let's say working in a hedge fund which invests in AI? Or working in a generative AI company which doesn't build in-house models but generates profit for OpenAI? Or working as an engineer at Google on non-AI stuff?

I do not currently see myself as an independent researcher or AI safety lab founder, so I will definitely need to find a job. And nowadays too many things seem to touch AI one way or the other, so I am curious if anybody has an idea about how could I evaluate career opportunities.

Or am I taking it too far and the post simply says "Don't do dangerous research"?

I'd be curious to hear more about this "contributes significantly in expectation" bit. Like, suppose I have some plan that (if it doesn't work) burns timelines by X, but (if it does work) gets us 10% of the way towards aligned AGI (e.g. ~10 plans like this succeeding would suffice to achieve aligned AGI) and moreover there's a 20% chance that this plan actually buys time by providing legible evidence of danger to regulators who then are more likely to regulate and more likely to make the regulation actually useful instead of harmful. So we have these three paths to impact (one negative, two positive) and I'm trying to balance the overall considerations. I suppose you'd say (a) do the math and see what it says, and (b) be vigilant against rationalization / wishful thinking biasing your math towards saying the benefits outweigh the costs. Is that right? Anything else you want to say here?

(A concrete example here might be ARC Evals' research which may have inadvertently burned timelines a bit by inspiring the authors of AutoGPT who read the GPT-4 system card, but iiuc lots of people like Langchain were doing stuff like that anyway so it probably didn't make more than a few week's difference, and meanwhile the various beneficial effects of their evals work seem quite strong.)

(Perhaps a useful prompt would be: Do you think it's useful to distinguish between capabilities research and research-which-has-a-byproduct-of-giving-people-capabilities-ideas? Why or why not?)

What are your thoughts on the argument [LW · GW] that advancing capabilities could help make us safer?

In order to do alignment research, we need to understand how AGI works; and we currently don't understand how AGI works, so we need to have more capabilities research so that we would have a chance of figuring it out. Doing capabilities research now is good because it's likely to be slower now than it might be in some future where we had even more computing power, neuroscience understanding, etc. than we do now. If we successfully delayed capabilities research until a later time, then we might get a sudden spurt of it and wouldn't have the time to turn our increased capabilities understanding into alignment progress. Thus by doing capabilities research now, we buy ourselves a longer time period in which it's possible to do more effective alignment research.

According to Deepmind we should aim at that little spot at the top ( I added the yellow arrow). This spot is still dangerous btw. Seems tricky to me.

Image from the deepmind paper on extreme risk.(https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.15324.pdf) 

This is an occasional reminder that I think pushing the frontier of AI capabilities in the current paradigm is highly anti-social

There's plenty of other similarly fun things you can do instead! Like trying to figure out how the heck modern AI systems work as well as they do

These two research tracks actually end up being highly entangled/convergent, they don't disentangle cleanly in the way you/we would like.

Some basic examples:

1. successful interpretability tools want to be debugging/analysis tools of the type known to be very useful for capability progress (it's absolutely insane that people often try to build complex DL systems without the kinds of detailed debugging/analysis tools that are useful in many related fields such as for computer graphics pipelines. You can dramatically accelerate progress when you can quickly visualize/understand your model's internal computations on a gears level vs the black box alchemy approach).

2. Deep understanding of neuroscience mechanisms could advance safer brain-sim ish approaches, help elucidate practical partial alignment mechanisms (empathic altruism, prosociality, love, etc), but also can obviously accelerate DL capabilities.

3. Better approximations of universal efficient active learning (empowerment/curiosity) are obviously dangerous capability wise, but also seem important for alignment by modeling/bounding human utility when externalized [LW · GW].

In the DL paradigm you can't easily separate capabilities and alignment, and forcing that separation seems to constrain us to approaches that are too narrow/limiting to be relevant on short timelines.

I think you're giving only part of the moral calculus. The altruistic goal is not to delay AGI. The altruistic goal is to advance alignment faster than capabilities.

I'd love to eke out a couple more months or even days of human existence. I love it, and the humans that are enjoying their lives. But doing so at the risk of losing the alignment battle for future humans would be deeply selfish.

I think this is relevant because there's a good bit of work that does advance capabilities, but advances alignment faster. There's plenty more to say about being sure that's what you're doing, and not letting optimistic biases form your beliefs.

From Some background for reasoning about dual-use alignment research [AF · GW]:

Doing research but not publishing it has niche uses. If research would be bad for other people to know about, you should mainly just not do it.

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

Leaving aside an enormous host of questions, why do you think this request would have even a shred of efficacy, given that China exists?

Not advancing AI is highly antisocial since it prolongs the human misery that could be addressed and resolved by a powerful technology.