The UK PM recently announced $125M for a foundation model task force. While the announcement stressed AI safety, it also stressed capabilities. But this morning the PM said 'It'll be about safety' and that the UK is spending more than other countries on this and one small media outlet had already coined this the 'safer AI taskforce'.
Ian Hogarth is leading the task force who's on record saying that AGI could lead to “obsolescence or destruction of the human race” if there’s no regulation on the technology’s progress.
Matt Clifford is also advising the task force - on record having said the same thing and knows a lot about AI safety. He had Jess Whittlestone & Jack Clark on his podcast.
If mainstream AI safety is useful and doesn't increase capabilities, then the taskforce and the $125M seem valuable.
We should use this window of opportunity to solidify this by quoting the PM and getting '$125M for AI safety research' and 'safer AI taskforce' locked in, by writing and promoting op-eds that commend spending on AI safety and urge other countries to follow (cf. the NSF has announced a $20M for empirical AI safety research). OpenAI, Anthropic, A16z and Palantir are all joining DeepMind in setting up offices in London.
This might create an AI safety race to the top as a solution to the tragedy of the commons (cf. the US has criticized Germany for not spending 2% of GDP on defence; Germany’s shot back saying the US should first meet the 0.7% of GNI on aid target).
Those names do seem like at least a bit of an update for me.
I really wish that having someone EA/AI-Alignment affiliated who has expressed some concern about x-risk was a reliable signal that a project will not end up primarily accelerationist, but alas, history has really hammered it in for me that that is not reliably true.
Some stories that seem compatible with all the observations I am seeing:
I think it's really quite bad for people to update on the involvement on AI X-Risk-adjacent people so hard as you seem to be doing here. I think it has both hurt a lot of people in the past, and I also think makes it a lot harder for people to do things like damage control because their involvement will be seen as an overall endorsement of the project.