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Your version of events requires a change of heart (for 'them to get a whole lot more serious'). I'm just looking at the default outcome. Whether alignment is hard or easy (although not if it's totally trivial), it appears to be progressing substantially more slowly than capabilities (and the parts of it that are advancing are the most capabilities-synergizing, so it's unclear what the oft-lauded 'differential advancement of safety' really looks like).
By bad I mean dishonest, and by 'we' I mean the speaker (in this case, MIRI).
I take myself to have two central claims across this thread:
- Your initial comment was straw manning the 'if we build [ASI], we all die' position.
- MIRI is likely not a natural fit to consign itself to service as the neutral mouthpiece of scientific consensus.
I do not see where your most recent comment has any surface area with either of these claims.
I do want to offer some reassurance, though:
I do not take "One guy who's thought about this for a long time and some other people he recruited think it's definitely going to fail" to be descriptive of the MIRI comms strategy.
Oh, I feel fine about saying ‘draft artifacts currently under production by the comms team ever cite someone who is not Eliezer, including experts with a lower p(doom)’ which, based on this comment, is what I take to be the goalpost. This is just regular coalition signaling though and not positioning yourself as, terminally, a neutral observer of consensus.
“You haven’t really disagreed that [claiming to speak for scientific consensus] would be more effective.”
That’s right! I’m really not sure about this. My experience has been that ~every take someone offers to normies in policy is preceded by ‘the science says…’, so maybe the market is kind of saturated here. I’d also worry that precommitting to only argue in line with the consensus might bind you to act against your beliefs (and I think EY et al have valuable inside-view takes that shouldn’t be stymied by the trends of an increasingly-confused and poisonous discourse). That something is a local credibility win (I’m not sure if it is, actually) doesn’t mean it’s got the best nth order effects among all options long-term (including on the dimension of credibility).
I believe that Seth would find messaging that did this more credible. I think ‘we’re really not sure’ is a bad strategy if you really are sure, which MIRI leadership, famously, is.
I do mean ASI, not AGI. I know Pope + Belrose also mean to include ASI in their analysis, but it’s still helpful to me if we just use ASI here, so I’m not constantly wondering if you’ve switched to thinking about AGI.
Obligatory ‘no really, I am not speaking for MIRI here.’
My impression is that MIRI is not trying to speak for anyone else. Representing the complete scientific consensus is an undue burden to place on an org that has not made that claim about itself. MIRI represents MIRI, and is one component voice of the ‘broad view guiding public policy’, not its totality. No one person or org is in the chair with the lever; we’re all just shouting what we think in directions we expect the diffuse network of decision-makers to be sitting in, with more or less success. It’s true that ‘claiming to represent the consensus’ is a tacking one can take to appear authoritative, and not (always) a dishonest move. To my knowledge, this is not MIRI’s strategy. This is the strategy of, ie, the CAIS letter (although not of CAIS as a whole!), and occasionally AIS orgs cite expert consensus or specific, otherwise-disagreeing experts as having directional agreement with the org (for an extreme case, see Yann LeCun shortening his timelines). This is not the same as attempting to draw authority from the impression that one’s entire aim is simply ‘sharing consensus.’
And then my model of Seth says ‘Well we should have an org whose entire strategy is gathering and sharing expert consensus, and I’m disappointed that this isn’t MIRI, because this is a better strategy,’ or else cites a bunch of recent instances of MIRI claiming to represent scientific consensus (afaik these don’t exist, but it would be nice to know if they do). It is fair for you to think MIRI should be doing a different thing. Imo MIRI’s history points away from it being a good fit to take representing scientific consensus as its primary charge (and this is, afaict, part of why AI Impacts was a separate project).
I think MIRI comms are by and large well sign-posted to indicate ‘MIRI thinks x’ or ‘Mitch thinks y’ or ‘Bengio said z.’ If you think a single org should build influence and advocate for a consensus view then help found one, or encourage someone else to do so. This just isn’t what MIRI is doing.
Good point - what I said isn’t true in the case of alignment by default.
Edited my initial comment to reflect this
(I work at MIRI but views are my own)
I don't think 'if we build it we all die' requires that alignment be hard [edit: although it is incompatible with alignment by default]. It just requires that our default trajectory involves building ASI before solving alignment (and, looking at our present-day resource allocation, this seems very likely to be the world we are in, conditional on building ASI at all).
[I want to note that I'm being very intentional when I say "ASI" and "solving alignment" and not "AGI" and "improving the safety situation"]
What text analogizing LLMs to human brains have you found most compelling?
Does it seem likely to you that, conditional on ‘slow bumpy period soon’, a lot of the funding we see at frontier labs dries up (so there’s kind of a double slowdown effect of ‘the science got hard, and also now we don’t have nearly the money we had to push global infrastructure and attract top talent’), or do you expect that frontier labs will stay well funded (either by leveraging low hanging fruit in mundane utility, or because some subset of their funders are true believers, or a secret third thing)?
Only the first few sections of the comment were directed at you; the last bit was a broader point re other commenters in the thread, the fooming shoggoths, and various in-person conversations I’ve had with people in the bay.
That rationalists and EAs tend toward aesthetic bankruptcy is one of my chronic bones to pick, because I do think it indicates the presence of some bias that doesn’t exist in the general population, which results in various blind spots.
Sorry for not signposting and/or limiting myself to a direct reply; that was definitely confusing.
I think you should give 1 or 2 a try, and would volunteer my time (although if you’d find a betting structure more enticing, we could say my time is free iff I turn out to be wrong, and otherwise you’d pay me).
If this is representative of the kind of music you like, I think you’re wildly overestimating how difficult it is to make that music.
The hard parts are basically infrastructural (knowing how to record a sound, how to make different sounds play well together in a virtual space). Suno is actually pretty bad at that, though, so if you give yourself the affordance to be bad at it, too, then you can just ignore the most time-intensive part of music making.
Pasting things together (as you did here), is largely The Way Music Is Made in the digital age, anyway.
I think, in ~one hour you could:
- Learn to play the melody of this song on piano.
- Learn to use some randomizer tools within a DAW (some of which may be ML-based), and learn the fundamentals of that DAW, as well as just enough music theory to get by (nothing happening in the above Suno piece would take more than 10 minutes of explanation to understand).
The actual arrangement of the Suno piece is somewhat ambitious (not in that it does anything hard, just in that it has many sections), but this was the part you had to hack together yourself anyway, and getting those features in a human-made song is more about spending the time to do it, than it is about having the skill (there is a skill to doing an awesome job of it, but Suno doesn’t have that skill either).
Suno’s outputs are detectably bad to me and all of my music friends, even the e/acc or ai-indifferent ones, and it’s a significant negative update for me on the broader perceptual capacities of our community that so many folks here prefer Suno to music made by humans.
A great many tools like this already exist and are contracted by the major labels.
When you post a song to streaming services, it’s checked against the entire major label catalog before actually listing on the service (the technical process is almost certainly not literally this, but it’s something like this, and they’re very secretive about what’s actually happening under the hood).
Cool! I think we're in agreement at a high level. Thanks for taking the extra time to make sure you were understood.
In more detail, though:
I think I disagree with 1 being all that likely; there are just other things I could see happening that would make a pause or stop politically popular (i.e. warning shots, An Inconvenient Truth AI Edition, etc.), likely not worth getting into here. I also think 'if we pause it will be for stupid reasons' is a very sad take.
I think I disagree with 2 being likely, as well; probably yes, a lot of the bottleneck on development is ~make-work that goes away when you get a drop-in replacement for remote workers, and also yes, AI coding is already an accelerant // effectively doing gradient descent on gradient descent (RLing the RL'd researcher to RL the RL...) is intelligence-explosion fuel. But I think there's a big gap between the capabilities you need for politically worrisome levels of unemployment, and the capabilities you need for an intelligence explosion, principally because >30 percent of human labor in developed nations could be automated with current tech if the economics align a bit (hiring 200+k/year ML engineers to replace your 30k/year call center employee is only just now starting to make sense economically). I think this has been true of current tech since ~GPT-4, and that we haven't seen a concomitant massive acceleration in capabilities on the frontier (things are continuing to move fast, and the proliferation is scary, but it's not an explosion).
I take "depending on how concentrated AI R&D is" to foreshadow that you'd reply to the above with something like: "This is about lab priorities; the labs with the most impressive models are the labs focusing the most on frontier model development, and they're unlikely to set their sights on comprehensive automation of shit jobs when they can instead double-down on frontier models and put some RL in the RL to RL the RL that's been RL'd by the..."
I think that's right about lab priorities. However, I expect the automation wave to mostly come from middle-men, consultancies, what have you, who take all of the leftover ML researchers not eaten up by the labs and go around automating things away individually (yes, maybe the frontier moves too fast for this to be right, because the labs just end up with a drop-in remote worker 'for free' as long as they keep advancing down the tech tree, but I don't quite think this is true, because human jobs are human-shaped, and buyers are going to want pretty rigorous role-specific guarantees from whoever's selling this service, even if they're basically unnecessary, and the one-size-fits-all solution is going to have fewer buyers than the thing marketed as 'bespoke').
In general, I don't like collapsing the various checkpoints between here and superintelligence; there are all these intermediate states, and their exact features matter a lot, and we really don't know what we're going to get. 'By the time we'll have x, we'll certainly have y' is not a form of prediction that anyone has a particularly good track record making.
So for this argument to be worth bringing up in some general context where a pause is discussed, the person arguing it should probably believe:
- We are far and away most likely to get a pause only as a response to unemployment.
- An AI that precipitates pause-inducing levels of unemployment is inches from automating AI R+D.
- The period between implementing the pause and massive algorithmic advancements is long enough that we're able to increase compute stock...
- ....but short enough that we're not able to make meaningful safety progress before algorithmic advancements make the pause ineffective (because, i.e., we regulated FLOPS and it just now takes 100x fewer FLOPS to build the dangerous thing).
I think the conjunct probability of all these things is low, and I think their likelihood is sensitive to the terms of the pause agreement itself. I agree that the design of a pause should consider a broad range of possibilities, and try to maximize its own odds of attaining its ends (Keep Everyone Alive).
I'm also not sure how this goes better in the no-pause world? Unless this person also has really high odds on multipolar going well and expects some Savior AI trained and aligned in the same length of time as the effective window of the theoretical pause to intervene? But that's a rare position among people who care about safety ~at all; it's kind of a George Hotz take or something...
(I don't think we disagree; you did flag that this as "...somewhat relevant in worlds where..." which is often code for "I really don't expect this to happen, but Someone Somewhere should hold this possibility in mind." Just want to make sure I'm actually following!)
I've just read this post and the comments. Thank you for writing that; some elements of the decomposition feel really good, and I don't know that they've been done elsewhere.
I think discourse around this is somewhat confused, because you actually have to do some calculation on the margin, and need a concrete proposal to do that with any confidence.
The straw-Pause rhetoric is something like "Just stop until safety catches up!" The overhang argument is usually deployed (as it is in those comments) to the effect of 'there is no stopping.' And yeah, in this calculation, there are in fact marginal negative externalities to the implementation of some subset of actions one might call a pause. The straw-Pause advocate really doesn't want to look at that, because it's messy to entertain counter-evidence to your position, especially if you don't have a concrete enough proposal on the table to assign weights in the right places.
Because it's so successful against straw-Pausers, the anti-pause people bring in the overhang argument like an absolute knockdown, when it's actually just a footnote to double check the numbers and make sure your pause proposal avoids slipping into some arcane failure mode that 'arms' overhang scenarios. That it's received as a knockdown is reinforced by the gearsiness of actually having numbers (and most of these conversations about pauses are happening in the abstract, in the absence of, i.e., draft policy).
But... just because your interlocutor doesn't have the numbers at hand, doesn't mean you can't have a real conversation about the situations in which compute overhang takes on sufficient weight to upend the viability of a given pause proposal.
You said all of this much more elegantly here:
Arguments that overhangs are so bad that they outweigh the effects of pausing or slowing down are basically arguing that a second-order effect is more salient than the first-order effect. This is sometimes true, but before you've screened this consideration off by examining the object-level, I think your prior should be against.
...which feels to me like the most important part. The burden is on folks introducing an argument from overhang risk to prove its relevance within a specific conversation, rather than just introducing the adversely-gearsy concept to justify safety-coded accelerationism and/or profiteering. Everyone's prior should be against actions Waluigi-ing, by default (while remaining alert to the possibility!).
I think it would be very helpful to me if you broke that sentence up a bit more. I took a stab at it but didn't get very far.
Sorry for my failure to parse!
I want to say yes, but I think this might be somewhat more narrow than I mean. It might be helpful if you could list a few other ways one might read my message, that seem similarly-plausible to this one.
Folks using compute overhang to 4D chess their way into supporting actions that differentially benefit capabilities.
I'm often tempted to comment this in various threads, but it feels like a rabbit hole, it's not an easy one to convince someone of (because it's an argument they've accepted for years), and I've had relatively little success talking about this with people in person (there's some change I should make in how I'm talking about it, I think).
More broadly, I've started using quick takes to catalog random thoughts, because sometimes when I'm meeting someone for the first time, they have heard of me, and are mistaken about my beliefs, but would like to argue against their straw version. Having a public record I can point to of things I've thought feels useful for combatting this.
Yes this world.
Please stop appealing to compute overhang. In a world where AI progress has wildly accelerated chip manufacture, this already-tenuous argument has become ~indefensible.
Sometimes people express concern that AIs may replace them in the workplace. This is (mostly) silly. Not that it won't happen, but you've gotta break some eggs to make an industrial revolution. This is just 'how economies work' (whether or not they can / should work this way is a different question altogether).
The intrinsic fear of joblessness-resulting-from-automation is tantamount to worrying that curing infectious diseases would put gravediggers out of business.
There is a special case here, though: double digit unemployment (and youth unemployment, in particular) is a major destabilizing force in politics. You definitely don't want an automation wave so rapid that the jobless and nihilistic youth mount a civil war, sharply curtailing your ability to govern the dangerous technologies which took everyone's jobs in the first place.
As AI systems become more expensive, and more powerful, and pressure to deploy them profitably increases, I'm fairly concerned that we'll see a massive hollowing out of many white collar professions, resulting in substantial civil unrest, violence, chaos. I'm not confident that we'll get (i.e.) a UBI (or that it would meaningfully change the situation even if we did), and I'm not confident that there's enough inertia in existing economic structures to soften the blow.
The IMF estimates that current tech (~GPT 4 at launch) can automate ~30% of human labor performed in the US. That's a big, scary number. About half of these, they imagine, are the kinds of things you always want more of anyway, and that this complementarity will just drive production in that 15% of cases. The other 15%, though, probably just stop existing as jobs altogether (for various reasons, I think a 9:1 replacement rate is more likely than full automation, with current tech).
This mostly isn't happening yet because you need an ML engineer to commit Serious Time to automating away That Job In Particular. ML engineers are expensive, and usually not specced for the kind of client-facing work that this would require (i.e. breaking down tasks that are part of a job, knowing what parts can be automated, and via what mechanisms, be that purpose-built models, fine-tuning, a prompt library for a human operator, some specialized scaffolding...). There's just a lot of friction and lay-speak necessary to accomplish this, and it's probably not economically worth it for some subset of necessary parties (ML engineers can make more elsewhere than small business owners can afford to pay them to automate things away, for instance).
So we've got a bottleneck, and on the other side of it, this speculative 15% leap in unemployment. That 15% potential leap, though, is climbing as capabilities increase (this is tautologically true; "drop in replacement for a remote worker" is one major criteria used in discussions about AI progress).
I don't expect 15% unemployment to destabilize the government (Great Depression peak was 25%, which is a decent lower bound on 'potentially dangerous' levels of unemployment in the US). But I do expect that 15% powder keg to grow in size, and potentially cross into dangerous territory before it's lit.
Previously, I'd actually arrived at that 30% number myself (almost exactly one year ago), but I had initially expected:
- Labs would devote substantial resources to this automation, and it would happen more quickly than it has so far.
- All of these jobs were just on the chopping block (frankly, I'm not sure how much I buy the complementarity argument, but I am An Internet Crank, and they are the International Monetary Fund, so I'll defer to them).
These two beliefs made the situation look much more dire than I now believe it to be, but it's still, I claim, worth entertaining as A Way This Whole Thing Could Go, especially if we're hitting a capabilities plateau, and especially if we're doubling down on government intervention as our key lever in obviating x-risk.
[I'm not advocating for a centrally planned automation schema, to be clear; I think these things have basically never worked, but would like to hear counterexamples. Maybe just like... a tax on automation to help staunch the flow of resources into the labs and their surrogates, a restructuring of unemployment benefits and retraining programs and, before any of that, a more robust effort to model the economic consequences of current and future systems than the IMF report that just duplicates the findings of some idiot (me) frantically reviewing BLS statistics in the winter of 2023.]
I (and maybe you) have historically underrated the density of people with religious backgrounds in secular hubs. Most of these people don't 'think differently', in a structural sense, from their forebears; they just don't believe in that God anymore.
The hallmark here is a kind of naive enlightenment approach that ignores ~200 years of intellectual history (and a great many thinkers from before that period, including canonical philosophers they might claim to love/respect/understand). This type of thing.
They're no less tribal or dogmatic, or more critical, than the place they came from. They just vote the other way and can maybe talk about one or two levels of abstraction beyond the stereotype they identify against (although they can't really think about those levels).
You should still be nice to them, and honest with them, but you should understand what you're getting into.
The mere biographical detail of having a religious background or being religious isn't a strong mark against someone's thinking on other topics, but it is a sign you may be talking to a member of a certain meta-intellectual culture, and need to modulate your style. I have definitely had valuable conversations with people that firmly belong in this category, and would not categorically discourage engagement. Just don't be so surprised when the usual jutsu falls flat!
I agree with this in the world where people are being epistemically rigorous/honest with themselves about their timelines and where there's a real consensus view on them. I've observed that it's pretty rare for people to make decisions truly grounded in their timelines, or to do so only nominally, and I think there's a lot of social signaling going on when (especially younger) people state their timelines.
I appreciate that more experienced people are willing to give advice within a particular frame ("if timelines were x", "if China did y", "if Anthropic did z", "If I went back to school", etc etc), even if they don't agree with the frame itself. I rely on more experienced people in my life to offer advice of this form ("I'm not sure I agree with your destination, but admit there's uncertainty, and love and respect you enough to advise you on your path").
Of course they should voice their disagreement with the frame (and I agree this should happen more for timelines in particular), but to gate direct counsel on urgent, object-level decisions behind the resolution of background disagreements is broadly unhelpful.
When someone says "My timelines are x, what should I do?", I actually hear like three claims:
- Timelines are x
- I believe timelines are x
- I am interested in behaving as though timelines are x
Evaluation of the first claim is complicated and other people do a better job of it than I do so let's focus on the others.
"I believe timelines are x" is a pretty easy roll to disbelieve. Under relatively rigorous questioning, nearly everyone (particularly everyone 'career-advice-seeking age') will either say they are deferring (meaning they could just as easily defer to someone else tomorrow), or admit that it's a gut feel, especially for their ~90 percent year, and especially for more and more capable systems (this is more true of ASI than weak AGI, for instance, although those terms are underspecified). Still others will furnish 0 reasoning transparency and thus reveal their motivations to be principally social (possibly a problem unique to the bay, although online e/acc culture has a similar Thing).
"I am interested in behaving as though timelines are x" is an even easier roll to disbelieve. Very few people act on their convictions in sweeping, life-changing ways without concomitant benefits (money, status, power, community), including people within AIS (sorry friends).
With these uncertainties, piled on top of the usual uncertainties surrounding timelines, I'm not sure I'd want anyone to act so nobly as to refuse advice to someone with different timelines.
If Alice is a senior AIS professional who gives advice to undergrads at parties in Berkeley (bless her!), how would her behavior change under your recommendation? It sounds like maybe she would stop fostering a diverse garden of AIS saplings and instead become the awful meme of someone who just wants to fight about a highly speculative topic. Seems like a significant value loss.
Their timelines will change some other day; everyone's will. In the meantime, being equipped to talk to people with a wide range of safety-concerned views (especially for more senior, or just Older people), seems useful.
harder to converge
Converge for what purpose? It feels like the marketplace of ideas is doing an ok job of fostering a broad portfolio of perspectives. If anything, we are too convergent and, as a consequence, somewhat myopic internally. Leopold mind-wormed a bunch of people until Tegmark spoke up (and that only somewhat helped). Few thought governance was a good idea until pretty recently (~3 years ago), and it would be going better if those interested in the angle weren't shouted down so emphatically to begin with.
If individual actors need to cross some confidence threshold in order to act, but the reasonable confidence interval is in fact very wide, I'd rather have a bunch of actors with different timelines, which roughly sum to the shape of the reasonable thing*, then have everyone working on the same overconfident assumption that later comes back to bite us (when we've made mistakes in the past, this is often why).
*Which is, by the way, closer to flat than most people's individual timelines
I don't think I really understood what it meant for establishment politics to be divisive until this past election.
As good as it feels to sit on the left and say "they want you to hate immigrants" or "they want you to hate queer people", it seems similarly (although probably not equally?) true that the center left also has people they want you to hate (the religious, the rich, the slightly-more-successful-than-you, the ideologically-impure-who-once-said-a-bad-thing-on-the-internet).
But there's also a deeper, structural sense in which it's true.
Working on AIS, I've long hoped that we could form a coalition with all of the other people worried about AI, because a good deal of them just.. share (some version of) our concerns, and our most ambitious policy solutions (e.g. stopping development, mandating more robust interpretability and evals) could also solve a bunch of problems highlighted by the FATE community, the automation-concerned, etc etc.
Their positions also have the benefit of conforming to widely-held anxieties ('I am worried AI will just be another tool of empire', 'I am worried I will lose my job for banal normie reasons that have nothing to do with civilizational robustness', 'I am worried AI's will cheaply replace human labor and do a worse job, enshittifying everything in the developed world'). We could generally curry popular support and favor, without being dishonest, by looking at the Venn diagram of things we want and things they want (which would also help keep AI policy from sliding into partisanship, if such a thing is still possible, given the largely right-leaning associations of the AIS community*).
For the next four years, at the very least, I am forced to lay this hope aside. That the EO contained language in service of the FATE community was, in hindsight, very bad, and probably foreseeably so, given that even moderate Republicans like to score easy points on culture war bullshit. Probably it will be revoked, because language about bias made it an easy thing for Vance to call "far left".
"This is ok because it will just be replaced."
Given the current state of the game board, I don't want to be losing any turns. We've already lost too many turns; setbacks are unacceptable.
"What if it gets replaced by something better?"
I envy your optimism. I'm also concerned about the same dynamic playing out in reverse; what if the new EO (or piece of legislation via whatever mechanism), like the old EO, contains some language that is (to us) beside the point, but nonetheless signals partisanship, and is retributively revoked or repealed by the next administration? This is why you don't want AIS to be partisan; partisanship is dialectics without teleology.
Ok, so structurally divisive: establishment politics has made it ~impossible to form meaningful coalitions around issues other than absolute lightning rods (e.g. abortion, immigration; the 'levers' available to partisan hacks looking to gin up donations). It's not just that they make you hate your neighbors, it's that they make you behave as though you hate your neighbors, lest your policy proposals get painted with the broad red brush and summarily dismissed.
I think this is the kind of observation that leads many experienced people interested in AIS to work on things outside of AIS, but with an eye toward implications for AI (e.g. Critch, A Ray). You just have these lucid flashes of how stacked the deck really is, and set about digging the channel that is, compared to the existing channels, marginally more robust to reactionary dynamics ('aligning the current of history with your aims' is maybe a good image).
Hopefully undemocratic regulatory processes serve their function as a backdoor for the sensible, but it's unclear how penetrating the partisanship will be over the next four years (and, of course, those at the top are promising that it will be Very Penetrating).
*I am somewhat ambivalent about how right-leaning AIS really is. Right-leaning compared to middle class Americans living in major metros? Probably. Tolerant of people with pretty far-right views? Sure, to a point. Right of the American center as defined in electoral politics (e.g. 'Republican-voting')? Usually not.
I think the key missing piece you’re pointing at (making sure that our interpretability tools etc actually tell us something alignment-relevant) is one of the big things going on in model organisms of misalignment (iirc there’s a step that’s like ‘ok, but if we do interpretability/control/etc at the model organism does that help?’). Ideally this type of work, or something close to it, could become more common // provide ‘evals for our evals’ // expand in scope and application beyond deep deception.
If that happened, it seems like it would fit the bill here.
Does that seem true to you?
I like this post but I think redwood has varied some on whether control is for getting alignment work out of AIs vs getting generally good-for-humanity work out of them and pushing for a pause once they reach some usefulness/danger threshold (eg well before super intelligence).
[based on my recollection of Buck seminar in MATS 6]
Makes sense. Pretty sure you can remove it (and would appreciate that).
Many MATS scholars go to Anthropic (source: I work there).
Redwood I’m really not sure, but that could be right.
Sam now works at Anthropic.
Palisade: I’ve done some work for them, I love them, I don’t know that their projects so far inhibit Anthropic (BadLlama, which I’m decently confident was part of the cause for funding them, was pretty squarely targeted at Meta, and is their most impactful work to date by several OOM). In fact, the softer versions of Palisade’s proposal (highlighting misuse risk, their core mission), likely empower Anthropic as seemingly the most transparent lab re misuse risks.
I take the thrust of your comment to be “OP funds safety, do your research”. I work in safety; I know they fund safety.
I also know most safety projects differentially benefit Anthropic (this fact is independent of whether you think differentially benefiting Anthropic is good or bad).
If you can make a stronger case for any of the other of the dozens of orgs on your list than exists for the few above, I’d love to hear it. I’ve thought about most of them and don’t see it, hence why I asked the question.
Further: the goalpost is not ‘net positive with respect to TAI x-risk.’ It is ‘not plausibly a component of a meta-strategy targeting the development of TAI at Anthropic before other labs.’
Edit: use of the soldier mindset flag above is pretty uncharitable here; I am asking for counter-examples to a hypothesis I’m entertaining. This is the actual opposite of soldier mindset.
updated, thanks!
The CCRU is under-discussed in this sphere as a direct influence on the thoughts and actions of key players in AI and beyond.
Land started a creative collective, alongside Mark Fisher, in the 90s. I learned this by accident, and it seems like a corner of intellectual history that’s at least as influential as ie the extropians.
If anyone knows of explicit connections between the CCRU and contemporary phenomena (beyond Land/Fisher’s immediate influence via their later work), I’d love to hear about them.
Does anyone have examples of concrete actions taken by Open Phil that point toward their AIS plan being anything other than ‘help Anthropic win the race’?
I think a non-zero number of those disagree votes would not have appeared if the same comment were made by someone other than an Anthropic employee, based on seeing how Zac is sometimes treated IRL. My comment is aimed most directly at the people who cast those particular disagree votes.
I agree with your comment to Ryan above that those who identified "Anthropic already does most of these" as "the central part of the comment" were using the disagree button as intended.
The threshold for hitting the button will be different in different situations; I think the threshold many applied here was somewhat low, and a brief look at Zac's comment history, to me, further suggests this.
I want to double down on this:
Zac is consistently generous with his time, even when dealing with people who are openly hostile toward him. Of all lab employees, Zac is among the most available for—and eager to engage in—dialogue. He has furnished me personally with >2 dozen hours of extremely informative conversation, even though our views differ significantly (and he has ~no instrumental reason for talking to me in particular, since I am but a humble moisture farmer). I've watched him do the same with countless others at various events.
I've also watched people yell at him more than once. He kinda shrugged, reframed the topic, and politely continued engaging with the person yelling at him. He has leagues more patience and decorum than is common among the general population. Moreover, in our quarrelsome pocket dimension, he's part of a mere handful of people with these traits.
I understand distrust of labs (and feel it myself!), but let's not kill the messenger, lest we run out of messengers.
This may be an example, but I don't think it's an especially central one, for a few reasons:
1. The linked essay discusses, quite narrowly, the act of making predictions about artificial intelligence/the Actual Future based on the contents of science fiction stories that make (more-or-less) concrete predictions on those topics, thus smuggling in a series of warrants that poison the reasoning process from that point onward. This post, by contrast, is about feelings.
2. The process for reasoning about one's, say, existential disposition, is independent of the process for reasoning regarding the technical details of AI doom. Respective solutions-spaces for the question "How do I deal with this present-tense emotional experience?" and "How do I deal with this future-tense socio-technical possibility?" are quite different. While they may feed into each other (in the case, for instance, of someone who's decided they must self-soothe and level out before addressing the technical problem that's staring them down or, conversely, someone who's decided the most effective anxiety treatment is direct material action regarding the object of anxiety), they're otherwise quite independent. It's useful to use a somewhat different (part of your)self to read the Star Wars Extended Universe than you would use to read, i.e., recent AI Safety papers.
3. One principle use of fiction is to open a window into aspects of experience that the reader might not otherwise access. Most directly, fiction can help to empathize with people who are very different from you, or help you come to grips with the fact that other people in fact exist at all. It can also show you things you might not otherwise see, and impart tools for seeing in new and exciting ways. I think reading The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence as totally invalidating insights from fiction is a mistake, particularly because the work itself closes with a quote from a work of fiction (which I take as pretty strong evidence the author would not endorse using the work in this way). If you don't think your implied reading of Yudkowsky here would actually preculde deriving any insight whatsoever from fiction, I'd like to hear what insights from fiction it would permit, since it seems to me like Ray's committing the most innocent class of this sin, were it a sin. It's possible you just don't think fiction is useful at all, and in that case I just wouldn't try to convince you further.
4. I read Ray's inclusion of the story as immaterial to his point (this essay is, not-so-secretly, about his own emotional development, with some speculation about the broader utility for others in the community undergoing similar processes). It's common practice in personal essay writing to open with a bit of fiction, or a poem, or something else that illustrates a point before getting more into the meat of it. Ray happens to have a cute/nerdy memory from his childhood that he connects to a class of thinking that in fact has a rich tradition (or, multiple rich traditions, with parallel schools and approaches in ~every major religious lineage).
[there's a joke here, too, and I hope you'll read my tone generously, because I do mean it lightheartedly, about "The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence"]
Sometimes people give a short description of their work. Sometimes they give a long one.
I have an imaginary friend whose work I’m excited about. I recently overheard them introduce and motivate their work to a crowd of young safety researchers, and I took notes. Here’s my best reconstruction of what he’s up to:
"I work on median-case out-with-a-whimper scenarios and automation forecasting, with special attention to the possibility of mass-disempowerment due to wealth disparity and/or centralization of labor power. I identify existing legal and technological bottlenecks to this hypothetical automation wave, including a list of relevant laws in industries likely to be affected and a suite of evals designed to detect exactly which kinds of tasks are likely to be automated and when.
"My guess is that there are economically valuable AI systems between us and AGI/TAI/ASI, and that executing on safety and alignment plans in the midst of a rapid automation wave is dizzyingly challenging. Thinking through those waves in advance feels like a natural extension of placing any weight at all on the structure of the organization that happens to develop the first Real Scary AI. If we think that the organizational structure and local incentives of a scaling lab matter, shouldn’t we also think that the societal conditions and broader class of incentives matter? Might they matter more? The state of the world just before The Thing comes on line, or as The Team that makes The Thing is considering making The Thing, has consequences for the nature of the socio-technical solutions that work in context.
"At minimum, my work aims to buy us some time and orienting-power as the stakes raise. I’d imagine my maximal impact is something like “develop automation timelines and rollout plans that you can peg AI development to, such that the state of the world and the state of the art AI technology advance in step, minimizing the collateral damage and chaos of any great economic shift.”
"When I’ve brought these concerns up to folks at labs, they’ve said that these matters get discussed internally, and that there’s at least some agreement that my direction is important, but that they can’t possibly be expected to do everything to make the world ready for their tech. I, perhaps somewhat cynically, think they’re doing narrow work here on the most economically valuable parts, but that they’re disinterested in broader coordination with public and private entities, since it would be economically disadvantageous to them.
"When I’ve brought these concerns up to folks in policy, they’ve said that some work like this is happening, but that it’s typically done in secret, to avoid amorphous negative externalities. Indeed, the more important this work is, the less likely someone is to publish it. There’s some concern that a robust and publicly available framework of this type could become a roadmap for scaling labs that helps them focus their efforts for near-term investor returns, possibly creating more fluid investment feedback loops and lowering the odds that disappointed investors back out, indirectly accelerating progress.
"Publicly available work on the topic is ~abysmal, painting the best case scenario as the most economically explosive one (most work of this type is written for investors and other powerful people), rather than pricing in the heightened x-risk embedded in this kind of destabilization. There's actually an IMF paper modeling automation from AI systems using math from the industrial revolution. Surely there's a better way here, and I hope to find it."