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There are a few ways in which the term alignment is used by people working on AI safety. This leads to important confusions, which are the main point of this post. But there’s some background first, so some readers may want to skip to the “alignment vs. safety” section. As...
If you’re already familiar with the history of the field, you might wanna skip this one… I like to imagine future historians trying to follow the discourse around AI during the time I’ve been in the field… “Wait, so the AI ethics people think that the AI safety people are...
On a sunny Saturday afternoon two weeks ago, I was sitting in Dolores park, watching a man get turned into a cake. It was, I gather, his birthday and for reasons (Maybe something to do with Scandanavia?) his friends had decided to celebrate by taping him to a tree and...
About a year ago, we wrote a paper that coined the term “Gradual Disempowerment.” It proved to be a great success, which is terrific. A friend and colleague told me that it was the most discussed paper at DeepMind last year (selection bias, grain of salt, etc.) It spawned articles...
A few years ago I listened to a fascinating podcast interview featuring former Democratic presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson. They agreed that politics is a mess and politicians are constantly doing bad things that harm the people they are supposed to serve. But they couldn’t agree on how...
People are often asking if (or confidently claiming that…) AI is a bubble. It seems hard to justify these massive investments -- trillions of dollars -- for a technology so unproven to deliver value. I strongly suspect the answer is “No, AI is not a bubble.” I think of a...
This is not an April fool’s joke, I’m participating in Inkhaven, which means I need to write a blog post every day. I recently watched The AI Doc. It’s the first big documentary featuring AI safety. It’s playing in theatres across America. It’s got a bunch of my friends and...