This is a special post for quick takes by Evan R. Murphy. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
2023: AI governance starting to look promising because governments are waking up about AI risks. Technical AI safety getting challenging if you're not in a frontier lab because hard to access relevant models to run experiments.
2025: AI governance looking bleak after the AI Action Summit. Technical AI safety looking more accessible because open-weight models are proliferating.
"AI governance looking bleak" seems like an overstatement. Certain types or aims of AI governance are looking bleak right now, especially getting strong safety-oriented international agreements that include the US and China, or meaningful AI regulation at the national level in the US. But there may be other sorts of AI governance projects (e.g. improving the policies of frontier labs, preparing for warning shots, etc.) that could still be quite worthwhile.
2023: AI governance starting to look promising because governments are waking up about AI risks. Technical AI safety getting challenging if you're not in a frontier lab because hard to access relevant models to run experiments.
2025: AI governance looking bleak after the AI Action Summit. Technical AI safety looking more accessible because open-weight models are proliferating.
"AI governance looking bleak" seems like an overstatement. Certain types or aims of AI governance are looking bleak right now, especially getting strong safety-oriented international agreements that include the US and China, or meaningful AI regulation at the national level in the US. But there may be other sorts of AI governance projects (e.g. improving the policies of frontier labs, preparing for warning shots, etc.) that could still be quite worthwhile.