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Here's a simple proposal for verifiable and enforceable slowdown that also differentially reallocates resources to alignment research (which I would see as one of if not the major benefits of a slowdown):

Enforce that labs must spend at least X% of their compute on:

Giving inference capacity to external safety organizations. I think this substantially disincentivizes capabilities research, since external research won't be as relevant to the labs' specific architectures/pipelines and is more likely to leak, both effects thus making any capabilities research the lab tries to do via this mechanism much less likely to advantage them differentially (though of course they could still just end up doing bad safety research if they pick bad external safety orgs).
Internal safety research that the lab makes fully public. Again I think this substantially disincentivizes capabilities research, since any capabilities research that is fully public will be much less able to differentially advantage that lab specifically, as others can just copy it (though again of course the labs could still just do bad public safety research).

I think this is much better than other slowdown proposals I've seen, since I think it's very concrete, verifiable, and enforceable—all the labs know exactly what they're spending their compute on, many employees know as well, and so whisteblowing is very possible—and it also differentially advantages alignment research by choosing conditions (external or fully public research) that make it much harder to do capabilities under those conditions but still pretty easy to do alignment. If you just say that compute has to go to some sort of nebulous "safety" purpose, that could easily be gamed, but I think the conditions above do a pretty good job of operationalizing criteria that are fairly hard to game. And even if you do get some gaming, on the margin you are still making capabilities research more costly, and thus buying yourself some additional slowdown, as well as making alignment research less costly, and thus buying yourself some additional alignment research.

(A possible second-best proposal if this is unworkable for some reason is just to enforce X% of compute go to external inference of some variety, which is more concrete and still gets you lots of slowdown, but less differentially advantages alignment research.)

3Avi Brach-Neufeld5mo

I don’t think you can talk about feasibility in a vacuum. Is it feasible that Congress pass a constitutional amendment removing the electoral college that is ratified by the states? From a technical sense, of course. From my perspective as someone who wants that to happen, not really. Let me try to lay out my overall position. I think right now you can break players into three categories 1. Those who model the situation as a stag hunt. 2. Those that model the situation as a prisoner’s dilemma. 3. Those that model the situation as a deadlock. If all players are in group 1 (and knew the others were in group 1) a global pause is trivial. If all players are in groups 1 and 2 a global pause is a technical question: Can you create a treaty/system strong enough that secret defection is not possible? Players in group 3 have no interest in a pause and would have to be brought to the table with other incentives. It’s very hard to know who is in which camp. I’d guess lab employees are largely split between 1, 2, and 3. I think the companies themselves are probably in groups 2 or 3.I think the U.S. government is in group 3 (caveat that there are lots of competing voices here and I have a very hard time modelling Trump). I have no idea where China or other world powers are. The groups are more of a spectrum than binary. Someone in group 2 who thinks the status quo is very negative will be willing to spend more resources on a pause than someone who more loosely prefers a pause. So I think the question of feasibility is how feasible is it for people in groups 1 and 2 to get the U.S. government into group 2 and strongly enough in group 2 that it is willing to expend lots of resources on a treaty (and I think since there are other players in group 3 you would need lots of resources). I don’t have a rock solid case that this is infeasible (I don’t think you ever really could), but I think it likely is at this time. EDIT: Adding in a little more here because I saw your conv

I think many people overrate how politically salient AI is.

I would say that much of my intuition that a pause (yes, driven by various national governments, and public desire) is plausibly doable comes from "the trajectory" of sentiments, rather than the total amount. I agree as a fraction of total political discourse it's quite small.

Anti-AI sentiment is all over the place, but I think its a mile wide and an inch deep

This vaguely matches my impression for the most part, in the sense that if you look at discussion on AI in general, much of it may be ... (read more)

3Seth Herd5mo

That's fine, I'll consider it workshopping. I'm also primarily occupied with other things. I'm spending some time on communication strategy and the logic of how opinion and policy could change, because it seems like it could be critically important, and not enough people seem to be thinking about it. As you note. I hope you will too.

evhub's Shortform

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evhub's Shortform

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