Note: this has been in my draft queue since well before the FLI letter and TIME article. It was sequenced behind the interpretability post, and delayed by travel, and I'm just plowing ahead and posting it without any edits to acknowledge ongoing discussion aside from this note.
This is an occasional reminder that I think pushing the frontier of AI capabilities in the current paradigm is highly anti-social, and contributes significantly in expectation to the destruction of everything I know and love. To all doing that (directly and purposefully for its own sake, rather than as a mournful negative externality to alignment research): I request you stop.
(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, preferably with a cross-organization network of people who commit not to using their insights to push the capabilities frontier before they understand what the hell they're doing!)
(I reiterate that this is not a request to stop indefinitely; I think building AGI eventually is imperative; I just think literally every human will be killed at once if we build AGI before we understand what the hell we're doing.)
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"?
For this incentives-reason, I wish hardcore-technical-AI-alignment had a greater support-infrastructure for independent researchers and students. Otherwise, we're often gonna be torn between "learning/working for something to get a job" and "learning AI alignment background knowledge with our spare time/energy".
Technical AI alignment is one of the few important fields that you can't quite major in, and whose closest-related jobs/majors make the problem worse.
As much as agency is nice, plenty of (useful!) academics out there don't have the kind of agency/ri... (read more)