Does anyone know what exactly DeepMind's CEO Demis Hassabis thinks about AGI safety, how seriously does he take AGI safety, how much time does he spend focusing on AGI safety research when compared to AI capabilities research? What does he think is the probability that we will succeed and build a flourishing future?
In this LessWrong post there are several excerpts from Demis Hassabis:
Well to be honest with you I do think that is a very plausible end state–the optimistic one I painted you. And of course that's one reason I work on AI is because I hoped it would be like that. On the other hand, one of the biggest worries I have is what humans are going to do with AI technologies on the way to AGI. Like most technologies they could be used for good or bad and I think that's down to us as a society and governments to decide which direction they're going to go in.
And
Potentially. I always imagine that as we got closer to the sort of gray zone that you were talking about earlier, the best thing to do might be to pause the pushing of the performance of these systems so that you can analyze down to minute detail exactly and maybe even prove things mathematically about the system so that you know the limits and otherwise of the systems that you're building. At that point I think all the world's greatest minds should probably be thinking about this problem. So that was what I would be advocating to you know the Terence Tao’s of this world, the best mathematicians. Actually I've even talked to him about this—I know you're working on the Riemann hypothesis or something which is the best thing in mathematics but actually this is more pressing. I have this sort of idea of like almost uh ‘Avengers assembled’ of the scientific world because that's a bit of like my dream.
My own guesses are - I want to underline that these are just my guesses - that he thinks the alignment problem is a real problem, but I don't know how seriously he takes it, but it doesn't seem like he takes it as seriously as most AGI safety researchers, I don't think he personally spends much time on AGI safety research, although there are AGI safety researchers in his team and they are hiring more, and I think he thinks there is over 50% probability that we will on some level succeed.
tl;dr: Ask questions about AGI Safety as comments on this post, including ones you might otherwise worry seem dumb!
Asking beginner-level questions can be intimidating, but everyone starts out not knowing anything. If we want more people in the world who understand AGI safety, we need a place where it's accepted and encouraged to ask about the basics.
As requested in the previous thread[1], we'll be putting up monthly FAQ posts as a safe space for people to ask all the possibly-dumb questions that may have been bothering them about the whole AGI Safety discussion, but which until now they didn't feel able to ask.
It's okay to ask uninformed questions, and not worry about having done a careful search before asking.
Stampy's Interactive AGI Safety FAQ
Additionally, this will serve as a soft-launch of the project Rob Miles' volunteer team[2] has been working on: Stampy - which will be (once we've got considerably more content) a single point of access into AGI Safety, in the form of a comprehensive interactive FAQ with lots of links to the ecosystem. We'll be using questions and answers from this thread for Stampy (under these copyright rules), so please only post if you're okay with that! You can help by adding other people's questions and answers to Stampy or getting involved in other ways!
We're not at the "send this to all your friends" stage yet, we're just ready to onboard a bunch of editors who will help us get to that stage :)
stamp maximizationAGI Safety!We welcome feedback[3] and questions on the UI/UX, policies, etc. around Stampy, as well as pull requests to his codebase.[4] You are encouraged to add other people's answers from this thread to Stampy if you think they're good, and collaboratively improve the content that's already on our wiki.
We've got a lot more to write before he's ready for prime time, but we think Stampy can become an excellent resource for everyone from skeptical newcomers, through people who want to learn more, right up to people who are convinced and want to know how they can best help with their skillsets.
Guidelines for Questioners:
Guidelines for Answerers:
Finally: Please think very carefully before downvoting any questions, remember this is the place to ask stupid questions!
I'm re-using content from Aryeh Englander's thread with permission.
If you'd like to join, head over to Rob's Discord and introduce yourself!
Either via the feedback form or in the feedback thread on this post.
Stampy is a he, we asked him.