Thomas Larsen's Shortform

Thomas Larsen

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

Some claims I've been repeating in conversation a bunch:

Safety work (I claim) should either be focused on one of the following

CEV-style full value loading, to deploy a sovereign
A task AI that contributes to a pivotal act or pivotal process.

I think that pretty much no one is working directly on 1. I think that a lot of safety work is indeed useful for 2, but in this case, it's useful to know what pivotal process you are aiming for. Specifically, why aren't you just directly working to make that pivotal act/process happen? Why do you need an AI to help you? Typically, the response is that the pivotal act/process is too difficult to be achieved by humans. In that case, you are pushing into a difficult capabilities regime -- the AI has some goals that do not equal humanity's CEV, and so has a convergent incentive to powerseek and escape. With enough time or intelligence, you therefore get wrecked, but you are trying to operate in this window where your AI is smart enough to do the cognitive work, but is 'nerd-sniped' or focused on the particular task that you like. In particular, if this AI reflects on its goals and starts thinking big picture, you reliably get wrecked. This is one of the reasons that doing alignment research seems like a particularly difficult pivotal act to aim for.

I also think "a task ai" is a misleading way to think about this: we're reasonably likely to be using a heterogeneous mix of a variety of AIs with differing strengths and training objectives.

Perhaps a task AI driven corporation?

7ryan_greenblatt3y

For doing alignment research, I often imagine things like speeding up the entire alignment field by >100x. As in, suppose we have 1 year of lead time to do alignment research with the entire alignment research community. I imagine producing as much output in this year as if we spent >100x serial years doing alignment research without ai assistance. This doesn't clearly require using super human AIs. For instance, perfectly aligned systems as intelligent and well informed as the top alignment researchers which run at 100x the speed would clearly be sufficient if we had enough. In practice, we'd presumably use a heterogeneous blend of imperfectly aligned ais with heterogeneous alignment and security interventions as this would yield higher returns. (Imagining the capability profile of the AIs is similar to that if humans is often a nice simplifying assumption for low precision guess work.) Note that during this accelerated time you also have access to AGI to experiment on! [Aside: I don't particularly like the terminology of pivotal act/pivotal process which seems to ignore the imo default way things go well]

3ryan_greenblatt3y

Why target speeding up alignment research during this crunch time period as opposed to just doing the work myself? Conveniently, alignment work is the work I wanted to get done during that period, so this is nicely dual use. Admittedly, a reasonable fraction of the work will be on things which are totally useless at the start of such a period while I typically target things to be more useful earlier. I also typically think the work I do is retargetable to general usages of ai (e.g., make 20 trillion dollars). Beyond this, the world will probably be radically transformed prior to large scale usage of AIs which are strongly superhuman in most or many domains. (Weighting domains by importance.)

Thomas Larsen's Shortform

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Thomas Larsen's Shortform

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