Private companies can (at least in the US) easily keep their funding, revenue and the number of parameters in their big models secret, but it is hard to keep secret the fact that they are hiring AI experts or experts-in-training (without slowing down that hiring process quite a lot and probably also making it much more expensive).
Do you suggest that we should consider all companies that employ a certain number of AI experts?
(Asking for a project which involves collecting data from the major AI companies.)
Potential ideas found during a brainstorm:
- Threshold on number of parameters of biggest model produced.
- Threshold on number of money invested in AI research.
- Threshold on revenue.
We're looking for a criterion that is as simple as possible (so we can easily find all companies that pass it), that includes the major AI companies, and that excludes companies that have no chance of causing AI doom.
Hopefully, using a formal criterion (rather than all the companies we can think of off the top of our heads) will make us consider companies we wouldn't otherwise (e.g. Chinese companies) and make our subsequent analysis a bit more rigorous.