This is a special post for quick takes by Jack O'Brien. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
** Progress Report: AI Safety Fundamentals Project ** This is a public space for me to keep updated on my AI safety fundamentals project. The project will take 4 weeks. My goal is to stay lean and limit my scope so I can actually finish on time. I aim to update this post at least once per week with my updates, but maybe more often.
Overall, I want to work on agent foundations and the theory behind AI alignment agendas. One stepping point for this is Selection theorems; a research program to find justifications that a given training process will result in a given agent property.
My plan for the agisf project: literature review on selection theorems. Take a whole load of concepts / blog posts, read them, riff on them if i feel like it. At least write a 1 paragraph summary of each post im intrerested in. List of posts:
TODO:
Well, haven't got much done in the last 2 weeks. Life has gotten in the way, and in the times where I thought I actually had the time and headspace to work on the project, things happened like my shoulder got injured playing sport, and my laptop mysteriously died.
But I have managed to create a github repo, and read the original posts on selection theorems. My list of selection theorems to summarize has grown. Check out the github page: https://github.com/jack-obrien/selection-theorems-review
Tonight I will try to do at least an hour of solid work on it. I want to summarize the idea of selection theorems, and sumarize the good regulator theorem, and start reading the next post (probably Turner's post on power seeking)
Ummmmm yeah what have I done so far. I didn't really get any solid work done this week either. I have decided to extend the project by another two weeks with the other two people involved - we have all been pretty preoccupied with life. Last week on sunday night i didn't really do a solid hour of work. I did manage to summarise the concept of selection theorems and think about the agent type signature - a concept i will be referring to throughout the post, super fundamental. Tonight I will hopefully actually meet with my group. I wanna do like half an hour of work before, and a little bit after too. I want to summarise the good regulator theorem this week as well as turner's post on power seeking.
Let's be optimistic and prove that an agentic AI will be beneficial for the long-term future of humanity. We probably need to prove these 3 premises:
Premise 1: Training story X will create an AI model which approximates agent formalism A
Premise 2: Agent formalism A is computable and has a set of alignment properties P
Premise 3: An AI with a set of alignment properties P will be beneficial for the long-term future.
Aaand so far I'm not happy with our answers to any of these.