Adam Scholl

Current AI models are strange. They can speak—often coherently, sometimes even eloquently—which is wild. They can predict the structure of proteins, beat the best humans at many games, recall more facts in most domains than human experts; yet they also struggle to perform simple tasks, like using computer cursors, maintaining...

Personally, I suspect the alignment problem is hard. But even if it turns out to be easy, survival may still require getting at least the absolute basics right; currently, I think we're mostly failing even at that. Early discussion of AI risk often focused on debating the viability of various...

Since at least 2017, OpenAI has asked departing employees to sign offboarding agreements which legally bind them to permanently—that is, for the rest of their lives—refrain from criticizing OpenAI, or from otherwise taking any actions which might damage its finances or reputation.[1] If they refused to sign, OpenAI threatened to...

At the Omnicide Machine Manufacturing Corporation, we work tirelessly to ensure an omnicide-free future. That’s why we’re excited to announce our Responsible Increase Policy (RIP)—our internal protocol for managing any risks that arise as we create increasingly omnicidal machines. Inspired by the risk-management framework used in gain-of-function virology research, our...

In southern California there’s a two-acre butterfly preserve owned by the oil company Chevron. They spend little to maintain it, but many millions on television advertisements featuring it as evidence of their environmental stewardship.[1] Environmentalists have a word for behavior like this: greenwashing. Greenwashing is when companies misleadingly portray themselves,...

Matt Botvinick is Director of Neuroscience Research at DeepMind. In this interview, he discusses results from a 2018 paper which describe conditions under which reinforcement learning algorithms will spontaneously give rise to separate full-fledged reinforcement learning algorithms that differ from the original. Here are some notes I gathered from the...

What information about the virus' nature and spread would cause you to believe it's too risky to continue holding workshops?