Highlights

Seedbank — discover machine learning examples (Michael Tyka): Seedbank provides interactive machine learning examples in Colab notebooks (think Jupyter notebooks in the cloud). This makes it really easy to just run example code without any setup, and even to modify it to play around with it. Google even provides a free GPU to make the training and inference faster!

My opinion: I haven't explored it yet, but this seems great, especially if you want to learn ML. I have used Colab notebooks before and recommend them highly for small projects (maybe even large ones, I'm not sure), especially if you're familiar with Jupyter notebooks.

Announcement: AI alignment prize round 3 winners and next round (Zvi Mowshowitz and Vladimir Slepnev): The winners of the second round of the AI Alignment Prize have been announced! Vadim Kosoy wins the first prize of $7500 for The Learning-Theoretic AI Alignment Research Agenda, and Alexander Turner wins the second prize of $2500 for Worrying About the Vase: Whitelisting and Overcoming Clinginess in Impact Measures. The next round has started and will last until December 31, and each participant has been asked to submit a single entry (possibly in parts).

DeepMind hiring Research Scientist, Safety: Career opportunity!

Previous newsletters

Pascal’s Muggle Pays (Zvi) (H/T Alex Mennen): Last week I mentioned non-exploitability as a justification for not paying Pascal's mugger. Alex pointed me to this post, which makes this argument, which I had seen before, but more importantly to these comments that argue against it, which I hadn't seen. The basic idea is that the downside of being continuously exploited in the real world is still not bad enough to cancel out the potentially huge upside in the (very unlikely) world where the mugger is telling the truth.

My opinion: I'm convinced, non-exploitability doesn't save you from being Pascal's mugged. My current opinion on Pascal's mugging is ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Technical AI alignment

Technical agendas and prioritization

Mechanism design for AI (Tobias Baumann): One cause of outcomes worse than extinction could be escalating conflicts between very capable AI systems (that could eg. threaten to simulate suffering beings). It is worth studying how we could have AI systems implement mechanism design in order to guide such systems into more cooperative behavior....

Alignment Newsletter