Drake Thomas's Shortform

Drake Thomas

This is a special post for quick takes by Drake Thomas. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

I work on a capabilities team at Anthropic, and in the course of deciding to take this job I've spent^[1] a while thinking about whether that's good for the world and which kinds of observations could update me up or down about it. This is an open offer to chat with anyone else trying to figure out questions of working on capability-advancing work at a frontier lab! I can be reached at "graham's number is big" sans spaces at gmail.

^{^}
and still spend - I'd like to have Joseph Rotblat's virtue of noticing when one's former reasoning for working on a project changes.

3Raemon2y

(I also failed to interpret the OP correctly, although I might have been primed by Ryan's comment. Whoops)

2Drake Thomas2y

I think my original comment was ambiguous - I also consider myself to have mostly figured it out, in that I thought through these considerations pretty extensively before joining and am in a "monitoring for new considerations or evidence or events that might affect my assessment" state rather than a "just now orienting to the question" state. I'd expect to be most useful to people in shoes similar to my past self (deciding whether to apply or accept an offer) but am pretty happy to talk to anyone, including eg people who are confident I'm wrong and want to convince me otherwise.

Thanks for clearing that up. It sounds like we’re thinking along very similar lines, but that I came to a decision to stop earlier. From a position inside one of major AI labs, you’ll be positioned to more correctly perceive when the risks start outweighing the benefits. I was perceiving events more remotely from over here in Boston, and from inside a company that uses AI as a one of a number of tools, not as the main product.

I’ve been aware of the danger of superintelligence since the turn of the century, and I did my “just now orienting... (read more)

Drake Thomas's Shortform

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Drake Thomas's Shortform

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