1. Can you elaborate on your comment “Tractability”?
2. I’m less worried about multipolarity because the leading labs are so far ahead AND I have short timelines (~ 10 years). My guess is if you had short timelines, you might agree?
3. If we had moderate short term success, my intuition is that we’ve actually found an effective strategy that could then be scaled. I worry that your thinking is basically pointing to ‘it needs to be an immediately perfect strategy or don’t bother!’
Pushing a magic button would be easy; affecting the real world is hard. Even if slowing is good, we should notice whether there exist tractable interventions (or: notice interventions’ opportunity cost).
Nope, my sense is that DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic do and will have a small lead over Meta, Inflection, and others, such that I would be concerned (re increasing multipolarity among labs) about slowing DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic now. (And I have 50% credence on human-level AI [noting this is underspecified] within 9 years.)
Yeah, maybe, depending. I’m relatively excited about “short term success” that seems likely to support the long-term policy regimes I’m excited about, like global monitoring of compute and oversight of training runs with model evals for dangerous capabilities and misalignment, maybe plus a compute cap. I fear that most pause-flavored examples of “short term success” won’t really support great long-term plans. (Again, I’d be excited to talk about specific proposals/outcomes/interventions.)
Thanks for the comment Zach.
1. Can you elaborate on your comment “Tractability”?
2. I’m less worried about multipolarity because the leading labs are so far ahead AND I have short timelines (~ 10 years). My guess is if you had short timelines, you might agree?
3. If we had moderate short term success, my intuition is that we’ve actually found an effective strategy that could then be scaled. I worry that your thinking is basically pointing to ‘it needs to be an immediately perfect strategy or don’t bother!’
Pushing a magic button would be easy; affecting the real world is hard. Even if slowing is good, we should notice whether there exist tractable interventions (or: notice interventions’ opportunity cost).
Nope, my sense is that DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic do and will have a small lead over Meta, Inflection, and others, such that I would be concerned (re increasing multipolarity among labs) about slowing DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic now. (And I have 50% credence on human-level AI [noting this is underspecified] within 9 years.)
Yeah, maybe, depending. I’m relatively excited about “short term success” that seems likely to support the long-term policy regimes I’m excited about, like global monitoring of compute and oversight of training runs with model evals for dangerous capabilities and misalignment, maybe plus a compute cap. I fear that most pause-flavored examples of “short term success” won’t really support great long-term plans. (Again, I’d be excited to talk about specific proposals/outcomes/interventions.)