Ben Smith

Summary: This essay proposes specific proposals for consolidating AI development within the US in order to ensure US has the power to unilaterally slow down AI without interference from race dynamics. It offers specific proposals for (1) strengthening security measures in frontier AI labs by leveraging existing legal frameworks like...

Inspired by the sequence on LLM Psychology, I am developing a taxonomy of cognitive benchmarks for measuring intelligent behavior in LLMs. This taxonomy could facilitate understanding of intelligence to identify domains of machine intelligence that have not been adequately tested. Generally speaking, in order to understand loss-of-control threats from agentic...

"Today, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo announced the creation of the U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC), which will unite AI creators and users, academics, government and industry researchers, and civil society organizations in support of the development and deployment of safe and trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI)" It's not...

You're familiar with the orthogonality thesis. Goals and intelligence are more or less independent for one another. There's no reason to suspect an intelligent AI will also be an aligned AI because it is intelligent. Popular writing suggests to me there's a need to clear up some other orthogonality theses...

Overall, a headline that seems counterproductive and needlessly divisive. I worry very much that coverage like this has the potential to bring political polarization to AI risk and it would be extremely damaging for the prospect of regulation if one side of the US Congress/Senate decided AI risk was something...

There may be an incentives problem for AI researchers and research organizations who face a choice between researching Capabilities, Alignment, or neither. The incentives structure will lead individuals and organizations to work towards Capabilities work rather than Alignment. The incentives problem is a lot clearer at the organizational level than...

Epistemic status: speculative This is a response to recent posts including Doing EA Better and The EA community does not own its donors' money. In order to make better funding decisions, some EAs have called for democratizing EA's funding systems. This can be problematic, because others have raised questions such...