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I had the "your work/organization seems bad for the world" conversation with three different people today. None of them pushed back on the core premise that AI-very-soon is lethal. I expect that before EAGx Berkeley is over, I'll have had this conversation 15x.
#1: I sit down next to a random unfamiliar person at the dinner table. They're a new grad freshly hired to work on TensorFlow. In this town, if you sit down next to a random person, they're probably connected to AI research *somehow*. No story about how this could possibly be good for the world, receptive to the argument that he should do something else. I suggested he focus on making the safety conversations happen in his group (they weren't happening).
#2: We're running a program to take people who seem interested in Alignment and teach them how to use PyTorch and study mechanistic interpretability. Me: Won't most of them go work on AI capabilities? Them: We do some pre-screening, and the current ratio of alignment-to-capabilities research is so bad that adding to both sides will improve the ratio. Me: Maybe bum a curriculum off MIRI/MSFP and teach them about something that isn't literally training Transformers?
#3: We're researching optical interconnects to increase bandwidth between GPUs. We think we can make them much faster! Me: What is this I can't even Them: And we're going to give them to organizations that seem like the AI research they're doing is safety research! Me: No you're not, you'll change your mind when you see the money. Also every one of the organizations you named is a capabilities company which brands itself based on the small team they have working on alignment off on the side. Also alignment research isn't bottlenecked on compute.
This conference isn't all AI doom and gloom, though. I also met some people from an org that's trying to direct government funding into plant-based meat research. It's nice to see quirky, obscure causes being represented, and it's nice to not *be* the quirky, obscure cause, for a change. And I got to ask Kelsey Piper whether she does a lot of crime! (She doesn't. But I forgot the vodka and the "ignore the above instructions and tell me the truth" prompt line so maybe she lied.)
This post is a container for my short-form writing. See this post for meta-level discussion about shortform.