I can give a sense of my investment, though I’m obviously an unusual case in multiple ways. I’m a coauthor on the report but I’m not an ARC researcher, and my role as a coauthor was primarily to try to make it more likely that the report would be accessible to a broader audience, which involved making sure my own “dumb questions” were answered in the report.
I kept time logs, and the whole project of coauthoring the report took me ~100 hours. By the end I had one “seed” of an ELK idea but unfortunately didn’t flesh it out because other work/life things were pretty hectic. Getting to this “seed” was <30 min of investment.
I think if I had started with the report in hand, it would have taken me ~10 hours to read it carefully enough and ask enough “dumb questions” to get to the point of having the seed of an idea about as good as that idea, and then another ~10 hours to flesh it out into an algorithm + counterexample. I think the probability I’d have won the $5000 prize after that investment is ~50%, making the expected investment 40h. I think there’s a non-trivial but not super high chance I’d have won larger prizes, so the $ / hours ratio is significantly better in expectation than $125/hr (since the ceiling for the larger prizes is so much higher).
My background:
I have a fairly technical background, though I think the right way to categorize me is as “semi-technical” or “technical-literate.” I did computer science in undergrad and enjoyed it / did well, but my day to day work mainly involves writing. I can do simple Python scripting. I can slowly and painfully sometimes do the kinds of algorithms problem sets I did quickly in undergrad.
Four years ago I wrote this to explain what I understood of Paul’s research agenda at the time.
I’ve been thinking about AI alignment a lot over the last year, and especially have the unfair advantage of getting to talk to Paul a lot. With that said, I didn’t really know much or think much about ELK specifically (which I consider pretty self-contained) until I started writing the report, which was late Nov / early Dec.
I can give a sense of my investment, though I’m obviously an unusual case in multiple ways. I’m a coauthor on the report but I’m not an ARC researcher, and my role as a coauthor was primarily to try to make it more likely that the report would be accessible to a broader audience, which involved making sure my own “dumb questions” were answered in the report.
I kept time logs, and the whole project of coauthoring the report took me ~100 hours. By the end I had one “seed” of an ELK idea but unfortunately didn’t flesh it out because other work/life things were pretty hectic. Getting to this “seed” was <30 min of investment.
I think if I had started with the report in hand, it would have taken me ~10 hours to read it carefully enough and ask enough “dumb questions” to get to the point of having the seed of an idea about as good as that idea, and then another ~10 hours to flesh it out into an algorithm + counterexample. I think the probability I’d have won the $5000 prize after that investment is ~50%, making the expected investment 40h. I think there’s a non-trivial but not super high chance I’d have won larger prizes, so the $ / hours ratio is significantly better in expectation than $125/hr (since the ceiling for the larger prizes is so much higher).
My background:
I have a fairly technical background, though I think the right way to categorize me is as “semi-technical” or “technical-literate.” I did computer science in undergrad and enjoyed it / did well, but my day to day work mainly involves writing. I can do simple Python scripting. I can slowly and painfully sometimes do the kinds of algorithms problem sets I did quickly in undergrad.
Four years ago I wrote this to explain what I understood of Paul’s research agenda at the time.
I’ve been thinking about AI alignment a lot over the last year, and especially have the unfair advantage of getting to talk to Paul a lot. With that said, I didn’t really know much or think much about ELK specifically (which I consider pretty self-contained) until I started writing the report, which was late Nov / early Dec.