There doesn't seem to be any clear technical obstacle to this plan having a reasonable chance of success given substantial effort.

(That said, reasonable chance of success might look like 90% which isn't amazing. And this will depend on your probablity of various issues like scheming.)

I think an important crux here is whether you think that we can build institutions which are reasonably good at checking the quality of AI safety work done by humans (at the point where we have powerful AIs). I think this level of checking should be reasonably doable, though could go poorly (see various fields).

However, note that if you think we would fail to sufficiently check human AI safety work even given substantial time, we would also fail to solve various issues given a substantial pause (as Eliezer thinks is likely the case).

Assumming that there is an "alignment homework" to be done, I am tempted to answer something like: AI can do our homework for us, but only if we are already in a position where we could solve that homework even without AI.

An important disclaimer is that perhaps there is no "alignment homework" that needs to get done ("alignment by default", "AGI being impossible", etc). So some people might be optimistic about Superalignment, but for reasons that seem orthogonal to this question - namely, because they think that the homework to be done isn't particularly difficult in the first place.

For example, suppose OpenAI can use AI to automate many research tasks that they already know how to do. Or they can use it to scale up the amount of research they produce. Etc. But this is likely to only give them the kinds of results that they could come up with themselves (except possibly much faster, which I acknowledge matters).
However, suppose that the solution to making AI go well lies outside of the ML paradigm. Then OpenAI's "superalignment" approach would need to naturally generate solutions outside of this new paradigm. Or it would need to cause the org to pivot to a new paradigm. Or it would need to convince OpenAI that way more research is needed, and they need to stop AI progress until that happens.
And my point here is not to argue that this won't happen. Rather, I am suggesting that whether this would happen seems strongly connected to whether OpenAI would be able to do these things even prior to all the automation. (IE, this depends on things like: Will people think to look into a particular problem? Will people be able to evaluate the quality of alignment proposals? Is the organisational structure set up such that warning signs will be taken seriously?)

To put it in a different way:

• We can use AI to automate an existing process, or a process that we can describe in enough detail.
  (EG, suppose we want to "automate science". Then an example of a thing that we might be able to do would be to: Set up a system where many LLMs are tasked to write papers. Other LLMs then score those papers using the same system as human researchers use for conference reviewes. And perhaps the most successful papers then get added to the training corpus of future LLMs. And then we repeat the whole thing. However, we do not know how to "magically make science better".)
• We can also have AI generate solution proposals, but this will only be helpful to the extent that we know how to evaluate the quality of those proposals.^[1]
  (EG, we can use AI to factorise numbers into their prime factors, since we know how to check whether $p_1\cdot p_2$ is equal to the original number. However, suppose we use an AI to generate a plan for how to improve an urban design of a particular city. Then it's not really clear how to evaluate that plan. And the same issue arises when we ask for plans regarding the problem of "making AI go well".)

Finally, suppose you think that the problem with "making AI go well" is the relative speeds of progress in AI capabilities vs AI alignment. Then you need to additionally explain why the AI will do our alignment homework for us while simultaneously refraining from helping with the capabilities homework.^[2]

1. ^{^}

   A relevant intuition pump: The usefulness of forecasting questions on prediction markets seems limited by your ability to specify the resolution criteria.

2. ^{^}

   The resonable default assumption might be that AI will speed up capabilities and alignment equally. In contrast, arguing for disproportional speedup of alignment sounds like corporate b...cheap talk. However, there might be reasons to believe that AI will disproportionally speed up capabilities - for example, because we know how to evaluate capabilities research, while the field of "make AI go well" is much less mature.

Trivially, any AI smart enough to be truly dangerous is capable of doing our "alignment homework" for us, in the sense of having enough intelligence to solve the problem. This is something EY has also pointed out many times, but which often gets ignored. Any ASI that destroys humanity will have no problem whatsoever understanding that that's not what humanity wanted, and no difficulty figuring out what things we would have wanted it to do instead.

What is very different and less clear of a claim is whether we can use any AI developed with sufficient capabilities, but built before the "homework" was done, to do so safely (for likely/plausible definitions of "we" and "use").

I'm no longer sure the question makes sense, and to the extent it makes sense I'm pessimistic. Things probably won't look like one AI taking over everything, but more like an AI economy that's misaligned as a whole, gradually eclipsing the human economy. We're already seeing the first steps: the internet is filling up with AI generated crap, jobs are being lost to AI, and AI companies aren't doing anything to mitigate either of these things. This looks like a plausible picture of the future: as the AI economy grows, the money-hungry part of it will continue being stronger than the human-aligned part. So it's only a matter of time before most humans are outbid / manipulated out of most resources by AIs playing the game of money with each other.

My mental model is that there is an entire space of possible AIs, each with some capability level and alignability level. Given the state of the alignment field, there is some alignability ceiling, below which we can reliably align AIs. Right now, this ceiling is very low, but we can push it higher over time.

At some capability level, the AI is powerful enough to solve alignment of a more capable AI, which can then solve alignment for even more capable AI, etc all the way up. However, even the most alignable AI capable of this is still potentially very hard to align. There will of course be more alignable and less capable AIs too, but they will not be capable enough to actually kick off this bucket chain.

Then the key question is whether there will exist an AI that is both alignable and capable enough to start the bucket chain. This is a function of both (a) the shape of the space of AIs (how quickly do models become unalignable as they become more capable?) and (b) how good we become at solving alignment. Opinions differ on this - my personal opinion is that probably this first AI is pretty hard to align, so we're pretty screwed, though it's still worth a try.

I wrote a blog post on whether AI alignment can be automated last year. The key takeaways:

• There's a chicken-and-egg problem where you need the automated alignment researcher to create the alignment solution but the alignment solution is needed before you can safely create the automated alignment researcher. The solution to this dilemma is an iterative bootstrapping process where the AI's capabilities and alignment iteratively improve each other (a more aligned AI can be made more capable and a more capable AI can create a more aligned AI and so on).
• Creating the automated alignment researcher only makes sense if it is less capable and general than a full-blown AGI. Otherwise, aligning it is just as hard as aligning AGI.

There's no clear answer to this question because it depends on your definition of "AI alignment" work. Some AI alignment work is already automated today such as generating datasets for evals, RL from AI feedback, and simple coding work. On the other hand, there are probably some AI alignment tasks that are AGI-complete such as deep, cross-domain, and highly creative alignment work.

The idea of the bootstrapping strategy is that as the automated alignment researcher is made more capable, it improves its own alignment strategies which enables further capability and alignment capabilities and so on. So hopefully there is a virtuous feedback loop over time where more and more alignment tasks are automated.

However, this strategy relies on a robust feedback loop which could break down if the AI is deceptive, incorrigible, or undergoes recursive self-improvement and I think these risks increase with higher levels of capability.

I can't find the source but I remember reading somewhere on the MIRI website that MIRI aims to do work that can't easily be automated so Eliezer's pessimism makes sense in light of that information.

Further reading:

• OpenAI: Our approach to alignment research
• Why I'm optimistic about our alignment approach (Jan Leike's blog)
• A minimum viable product for alignment (Jan Leike's blog)

I am not so sure it will be possible to extract useful work towards solving alignment out of systems we do not already know how to carefully steer. I think that substantial progress on alignment is necessary before we know how to build things that actually want to help us advance the science. Even if we built something tomorrow that was in principle smart enough to do good alignment research, I am concerned we don’t know how to make it actually do that rather than, say, imitate more plausible-sounding but incorrect ideas. The fact that appending silly phrases like “I’ll tip $200” improves the probability of receiving correct code from current LLMs indicates to me that we haven’t succeeded at aligning them to maximally want to produce correct code when they are capable of doing so.

As one scales up a system, any small misalignment within that system will become more apparent- more skewed. I use shooting an arrow as an example. Say you shoot an arrow at a target from only a few feet away. If you are only a few degrees off from being lined up with the bullseye, when you shoot the close target your arrow will land very close to the bullseye. However, if you shoot a target many yards away with the same degree of error, your arrow will land much, much farther from the bullseye. 

So if you get a less powerful AI aligned with your goals to a degree where everything looks fine, and then assign it the task of aligning a much more powerful AI, then any small flaw in the alignment of the less powerful AI will go askew far worse in the more powerful AI. What's worse- since you assigned the less powerful AI the task aligning the larger AI, you won't be able to see exactly what the flaw was until it's too late, because if you'd been able to see the flaw, you would have aligned the larger AI yourself. 

There's only one way to know!

</joking> <=========