Connor Leahy

Sometimes people make various suggestions that we should simply build "safe" artificial Superintelligence (ASI), rather than the presumably "unsafe" kind.[1] There are various flavors of “safe” people suggest. * Sometimes they suggest building “aligned” ASI: You have a full agentic autonomous god-like ASI running around, but it really really loves...

On Carcinogenic Complexity, Software Senescence and Cognitive Provenance: Our roadmap for 2025 and beyond It is mandatory to start any essay on AI in the post-ChatGPT era with the disclaimer that AI brings huge potential, and great risks. Unfortunately, on the path we are currently on, we will not realize...

We (Connor Leahy, Gabriel Alfour, Chris Scammell, Andrea Miotti, Adam Shimi) have just published The Compendium, which brings together in a single place the most important arguments that drive our models of the AGI race, and what we need to do to avoid catastrophe. We felt that something like this...

I have started a new personal blog! I intend to use it to write about more esoteric/lower confidence/epistemologically-sticky topics than elsewhere. You can already read the first post: "Mysticism 101, or: In defence of Natural Language DSLs"

(Co-written by Connor Leahy and Gabe) We have talked to a whole bunch of people about pauses and moratoriums. Members of the AI safety community, investors, business peers, politicians, and more. Too many claimed to pursue the following approach: 1. It would be great if AGI progress stopped, but that...

I gave a talk at MIT in March earlier this year on barriers to mechanistic interpretability being helpful to AGI/ASI safety, and why by default it will likely be net dangerous. Several people seem to be coming to similar conclusions recently (e.g., this recent post). I discuss two major points...

Preface In December 2022, Rohin Shah (DeepMind) and Connor Leahy (Conjecture) discussed why Leahy is pessimistic about AI risk, and Shah is less so. Below is a summary and transcript. Summary Leahy expects discontinuities - capabilities rapidly increasing and behavior diverging far from what we aim towards - to be...