Ryan Meservey's Shortform

Ryan Meservey

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

I randomly met Jeff Dean (Google's lead AI scientist) on my bike ride home today. We were both stuck at a train intersection, and I had a cute kid in tow. We started chatting about my e-bike, the commute, and we got around to jobs. I told him I am a boring tax lawyer. He told me he worked for Google. I pressed a little more, and he explained he was a scientist. I mused, "AI?" and he told me, "Yeah."

I excitedly told him that I've been really interested in alignment the last few months (reading LW, listening to lectures), and it strikes me as a huge problem. I asked him if he was worried.

He told me that he thinks AI will have a big impact on society (some of it worrying) but he doesn't buy into the robots-taking-over thing.

I smiled and asked him, "What's your p(doom)?" to which he responded "very low" and said he thinks the technology will do a lot of good and useful things.

I thought maybe this was because he thinks that the technology will hit a limit soon, so I asked him if he thought LLMs would successfully scale. He responded that he thinks a few more breakthroughs are required but there have been lots of breakthroughs over the last 5-10 years, and so the technology is likely to continue improving in the coming years.

I told him again that I am worried about alignment, but even if you solve alignment, you are left with a very obedient superintelligence which would radically change our society and all our politics.

The train finally passed, I thanked him for the conversation, and we were on our way.

I'm new to this group and the topic in general, and so when I got home, I searched "AI google Palo Alto LinkedIn" and Jeff's picture popped up. I now feel like I bumped into Oppenheimer during the Manhattan Project, but instead of knowing it was Oppenheimer, I spent a majority of the conversation talking about my bike seat.

Anyways, if any of you were looking for a qualitative measure of how much LessWrong has broken through to people, I think one good measure is a tax lawyer asking for Jeff Dean's p(doom) while he was walking home from work.

He'd have to be insane or incredibly psychopathic

Unfortunately I think this is a misunderstanding of what a psychopath is.

4StanislavKrym1y

What matters is not whether p(doom) is low or high, but whether his joining GDM would increase or decrease p(doom). If his joining GDM changed p(doom)[1] from 0.5 to 0.499, then it would arguably be a noble act. Alas, there would be an obvious counterargument like the belief that he decreased p(doom) by researching at GDM being erroneous. However, doom could also be a blind spot, as happened with Musk who decided to skip red-teaming of Grok to the point of the MechaHitler scandal or Grok ranting about white genocide in S.Africa... 1. ^ p(doom) alone could also be a misguided measure. Suppose that doom is actually caused by adopting neuralese without having absolutely solved alignment, while creating an alternate well-monitorable architecture is genuinely hard. If the efforts invested in creating the architecture are far from the threshold where it can compete with neuralese, then a single person joining said efforts would also likely commit a noble act, but it would alter p(doom) only if lots of people do so. While this act does actually provide dignity in the Yudkowsky sense, one can also imagine a scenario where Anthropoidic doubles down on the alternate architecture while xRiskAI or OpenBrain uses neuralese, wins the capabilities race and has Anthropoidic shut down.

3dr_s1y

I think that then goes to my second point though: supposing he did believe that p(doom) is high, and worked as lead AI scientist at Google regardless due to utilitarian calculations, would he talk freely about it to the first passerby? Politically speaking it would be quite a hefty thing to say. If he wanted to say it publicly, he would do so in a dedicated forum where he gets to control the narrative best. If he wanted to keep it secret he simply wouldn't say it. Either way, talking about it lightly seems out of the question.