If we can extract utility in a purer fashion, I think we should. At the bare minimum, it would be much more run-time efficient. That said, trying to do so opens up a whole can of worms of really hard problems. This proposal, provided you're careful about how you set it up, pretty much dodges all of that, as far as I can tell. Which means we could implement it faster, should that be necessary. I mean, yes, AGI is still very hard problem, but I think this reduces the F part of FAI to a manageable level, even given the impoverished understanding we have right now. And, assuming a properly modular code base, it would not be too difficult to swap out 'get utility by asking questions' with 'get utility by analyzing model directly.' Actually, the thing might even do that itself, since it might better maximize its utility function.