CEO at Redwood Research.
AI safety is a highly collaborative field--almost all the points I make were either explained to me by someone else, or developed in conversation with other people. I'm saying this here because it would feel repetitive to say "these ideas were developed in collaboration with various people" in all my comments, but I want to have it on the record that the ideas I present were almost entirely not developed by me in isolation.
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We're planning to release some talks; I also hope we can publish various other content from this!
I'm sad that we didn't have space for everyone!
I wrote thoughts here: https://redwoodresearch.substack.com/p/fields-that-i-reference-when-thinking?selection=fada128e-c663-45da-b21d-5473613c1f5c
Alignment Forum readers might be interested in this:
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Paul is not Ajeya, and also Eliezer only gets one bit from this win, which I think is insufficient grounds for behaving like such an asshole.
1Thanks. (Also note that the model isn't the same as her overall beliefs at the time, though they were similar at the 15th and 50th percentiles.)
the OpenPhil doctrine of "AGI in 2050"
(Obviously I'm biased here by being friends with Ajeya.) This is only tangentially related to the main point of the post, but I think you're really overstating how many Bayes points you get against Ajeya's timelines report. Ajeya gave 15% to AGI before 2036, with little of that in the first few years after her report; maybe she'd have said 10% between 2025 and 2036.
I don't think you've ever made concrete predictions publicly (which makes me think it's worse behavior for you to criticize people for their predictions), but I don't think there are that many groups who would have put wildly higher probability on AGI in this particular time period. (I think some of the short-timelines people at the time put substantial mass on AGI arriving by now, which reduces their performance.) Maybe some of them would have said 40%? If we assume AGI by then, that's a couple bits of better performance, but I don't think it's massive outperformance. (And I still think it's plausible that AGI isn't developed by 2036!)
In general, I think that disagreements on AI timelines often seem more extreme when you summarize people's timelines by median timeline rather than by their probability on AGI by a particular time.
@ryan_greenblatt is working on a list of alignment research applications. For control applications, you might enjoy the long list of control techniques in our original post.
- Alignable systems design: Produce a design for an overall AI system that accomplishes something interesting, apply multiple safety techniques to it, and show that the resulting system is both capable and safe. (A lot of the value here is in figuring out how to combine various safety techniques together.)
I don't know what this means, do you have any examples?
I am not sure I agree with this change at this point. How do you feel now?