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Comment by Benjamin Hilton (80000hours) on Why I think it's net harmful to do technical safety research at AGI labs · 2024-02-07T19:15:46.097Z · LW · GW

[x-posted from EA forum]

Hi Remmelt,

Thanks for sharing your concerns, both with us privately and here on the forum. These are tricky issues and we expect people to disagree about how to about how to weigh all the considerations — so it’s really good to have open conversations about them.

Ultimately, we disagree with you that it's net harmful to do technical safety research at AGI labs. In fact, we think it can be the best career step for some of our readers to work in labs, even in non-safety roles. That’s the core reason why we list these roles on our job board.

We argue for this position extensively in my article on the topic (and we only list roles consistent with the considerations in that article).

Some other things we’ve published on this topic in the last year or so:

• A range of opinions from anonymous experts about the upsides and downsides of working on AI capabilities
• How policy roles in AI companies can be valuable for career capital and for direct impact (as well as the potential downsides)
• We recently released a podcast episode with Nathan Labenz on some of the controversy around OpenAI, including his concerns about some of their past safety practices, whether ChatGPT’s release was good or bad, and why its mission of developing AGI may be too risky.

Benjamin