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New book out today: The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence
Chapter 14 is published in full here: https://colossus.com/article/project-mario-demis-hassabis-deepmind-mallaby/
One excerpt:
“When we were negotiating with Google, we wanted to ensure safety in a way that would be trustless,” Hassabis said. “That’s actually very difficult to do in reality.
“Safety isn’t about governance structures,” he went on. “I mean, even if you have a governance board, it probably wouldn’t do the right thing when it came to the crunch.
“Same thing with a safety charter. You can try to negotiate one. But it’s not realistic to create bright‑line principles years in advance because you’ll probably draw the lines in the wrong places.
“So discussing these things didn’t really help,” Hassabis continued. “It made it harder to build useful trust, because when you are negotiating a trustless structure, it implies that you can’t trust the other person.
“So then I thought, why don’t I go the other way? Take the energy that was going into the trustless negotiation and put it into creating real trust—trust that was actually useful. Try leaning into Google rather than leaning out.
“And then of course two things happen. First, you are now at the table, so when a safety issue comes up, you can help to decide it. Second, you get to know the Google people and you rack up successes together. You can’t just talk about trust. You have to earn it.
“And I think for me, and maybe for Mustafa, too, it’s about us growing up,” Hassabis mused. “We went through those negotiations and we matured. Things aren’t black and white, especially when you are dealing with a technology with unknown consequences.
“So you have to be adaptable. You have to move from idealist to realist, but hopefully still with your values.”
Note: I edited this post. My original version included a link to this Atlantic article, which quotes only part of Chapter 14 and leaves out important context, making it misleading.
Though to push back on this, (1) it was always the case that AI would eventually be a big deal (even though most people throughout history didn't recognize this). And similarly, (2) in a market economy it was probably also pretty inevitable that there would eventually be multiple firms competing to create increasingly powerful AI. And (3) people see themselves as good people, so competitors to existing AI firms would presumably have said they were doing it for good reasons (e.g. to prevent a monopolist from getting all the power).
Essentially I'm trying to ... (read more)