The point is that in this scenario you have aligned AGI or ASI on your side. On the assumption that the other side has/is a superintelligence and you are not, then yes this is likely a silly question, but I talk about 'TAI systems reducing the total risk from unaligned TAI'. So this is the chimp with access to a chess computer playing Gary Kasparov at chess.

And to be clear, on any slower takeoff scenario where there's intermediate steps from AGI to ASI, the analogy might not be quite that. In the scenario where there I'm talking about multiple actions, I'm usually talking about a moderate or slow takeoff where there are intermediately powerful AIs and not just a jump to ASI.

We do discuss this in the article and tried to convey that it is a very significant downside of SA. All 3 plans have enormous downsides though, so a plan posing massive risks is not disqualifying. The key is understanding when these risks might be worth taking given the alternatives.

• CD might be too weak if TAI is offense-dominant, regardless of regulations or cooperative partnerships, and result in misuse or misalignment catastrophe
• If GM fails it might blow any chance of producing protective TAI and hand over the lead to the most reckless actors.
• SA might directly provoke a world war or produce unaligned AGI ahead of schedule.

SA is favored when alignment is easy or moderately difficult (e.g. at the level where interpretability probes, scalable oversight etc. help) with high probability, and you expect to win the arms race. But it doesn't require you to be the 'best'. The key isn't whether US control is better than Chinese control, but whether centralized development under any actor is preferable to widespread proliferation of TAI capabilities to potentially malicious actors

Regarding whether the US (remember on SA there's assumed to be extensive government oversight) is better than the CCP: I think the answer is yes and I talk a bit more about why here. I don't consider US AI control being better than Chinese AI control to be the most important argument in favor of SA, however. That fact alone doesn't remotely justify SA: you also need easy/moderate alignment and you need good evidence than an arms race is likely unavoidable regardless of what we recommend.

Let me clarify an important point: The strategy preferences outlined in the paper are conditional statements - they describe what strategy is optimal given certainty about timeline and alignment difficulty scenarios. When we account for uncertainty and the asymmetric downside risks - where misalignment could be catastrophic - the calculation changes significantly. However, it's not true that GM's only downside is that it might delay the benefits of TAI.

Misalignment (or catastrophic misuse) has a much larger downside than a successful moratorium. That is true, but trying to do a moratorium, losing your lead, and then someone else developing catastrophically misaligned AI when you could have developed a defense against it if you'd adopted CD or SA has just as large a downside.

And GM has a lower chance of being adopted than CD or SA, so the downside to pushing for a moratorium is not necessarily lower.

Since a half-successful moratorium is the worst of all worlds (assuming that alignment is feasible) because you lose out on your chances of developing defenses against unaligned or misused AGI, it's not always true that the moratorium plan has fewer downsides than the others.

However, I agree with your core point - if we were to model this with full probability distributions over timeline and alignment difficulty, GM would likely be favored more heavily than our conditional analysis suggests, especially if we place significant probability on short timelines or hard alignment

For months, those who want no regulations of any kind placed upon themselves have hallucinated and fabricated information about the bill’s contents and intentionally created an internet echo chamber, in a deliberate campaign to create the impression of widespread opposition to SB 1047, and that SB 1047 would harm California’s AI industry.

There is another significant angle to add here. Namely: Many of the people in this internet echo chamber or behind this campaign are part of the network of neoreactionaries, MAGA supporters, and tech elites who want to be unaccountable that you've positioned yourself as a substantial counterpoint to.

Obviously it's invoking a culture war fight which has its downsides, but it's not just rhetoric: the charge that many bill opponents are basing their decisions on an ideology that Newsom opposes and sees as dangerous for the country, is true.

A16z and many other of the most dishonest opponents of the bill, are part of a Trump-supporting network with lots of close ties to neoreactionary thought, which opposes SB 1047 for precisely the same reason that they want Trump and republicans to win: to remove restraints on their own power in the short-to-medium term, and more broadly because they see it as a step towards making our society into one where wealthy oligarchs are given favorable treatment and can get away with anything.

It also serves as a counterpoint against the defense and competition angle, at least if its presented by a16z (this argument doesn't work for e.g. OpenAI, but there are many other good counterarguments). The claims they make about the bill harming competitiveness e.g. for defense and security against China and other adversaries ring hollow when most of them are anti-Ukraine support or anti-NATO, making it clear they don't generally care about the US maintaining its global leadership.

I think this would maybe compel Newsom who's positioned himself as an anti-MAGA figure.

I touched upon this idea indirectly in the original post when discussing alignment-related High Impact Tasks (HITs), but I didn't explicitly connect it to the potential for reducing implementation costs and you're right to point that out.

Let me clarify how the framework handles this aspect and elaborate on its implications.

Key points:

1. Alignment-related HITs, such as automating oversight or interpretability research, introduce challenges and make the HITs more complicated. We need to ask, what's the difficulty of aligning a system capable of automating the alignment of systems capable of achieving HITs!
2. The HIT framing is flexible enough to accommodate the use of AI for accelerating alignment research, not just for directly reducing existential risk. If full alignment automation of systems capable of performing (non alignment related) HITs is construed as an HIT, the actual alignment difficulty corresponds to the level required to align the AI system performing the automation, not the automated task itself.
3. In practice, a combination of AI systems at various alignment difficulty levels will likely be employed to reduce costs and risks for both alignment-related tasks and other applications. Partial automation and acceleration by AI systems can significantly impact the cost curve for implementing advanced alignment techniques, even if full automation is not possible.
4. The cost curve presented in the original post assumes no AI assistance, but in reality, AI involvement in alignment research could substantially alter its shape. This is because the cost curve covers the cost of performing research "to achieve the given HITs", and since substantially automating alignment research is a possible HIT, by definition the cost graph is not supposed to include substantial assistance on alignment research.

However, that makes it unrealistic in practice, especially because (as indicated by the haziness on the graph), there will be many HITs, both accelerating alignment research and also incrementally reducing overall risk.

To illustrate, consider a scenario where scalable oversight at level 4 of the alignment difficulty scale is used to fully automate mechninterp at level 6, and then this level 6 system can go on to say research a method of impregnable cyber-defense, rapid counter-bio-weapon vaccines, give superhuman geopolitical strategic advice, and unmask any unaligned AI present on the internet.

In this case, the actual difficulty level would be 4, with the HIT being the automation of the level 6 technique that's then used to reduce risk substantially.

I do think that Apollo themselves were clear that this was showing that it had the mental wherewithal for deception and if you apply absolutely no mitigations then deception happens. That's what I said in my recent discussion of what this does and doesn't show.

Therefore I described the 4o case as an engineered toy model of a failure at level 4-5 on my alignment difficulty scale (e.g. the dynamics of strategically faking performance on tests to pursue a large scale goal), but it is not an example of such a failure.

In contrast, the AI scientist case was a genuine alignment failure, but that was a much simpler case of non-deceptive, non-strategic, being given a sloppy goal by bad RLHF and reward hacking, just in a more sophisticated system than say coin-run (level 2-3).

The hidden part that Zvi etc skim over is that 'of course' in real life 'in the near future' we'll be in a situation where an o1-like model has instrumental incentives because it is pursuing an adversarial large scale goal and also the mitigations they could have applied (like prompting it better, doing better RLHF, doing process oversight on the chain of thought etc) won't work, but that's the entire contentious part of the argument!

One can make arguments that these oversight methods will break down e.g. when the system is generally superhuman at predicting what feedback its overseers will provide. However, those arguments were theoretical when they were made years ago and they're still theoretical now. 

This does count against naive views that assume alignment failures can't possibly happen: there probably are those out there who believe that you have to give an AI system an "unreasonably malicious" rather than just "somewhat unrealistically single minded" prompt to get it to engage in deceptive behavior or just irrationally think AIs will always know what we want and therefore can't possibly be deceptive.