Quick list of some ideas I’m excited about, broadly around epistemics/strategy/AI.
1. I think AI auditors / overseers of critical organizations (AI efforts, policy groups, company management) are really great and perhaps crucial to get right, but would be difficult to do well.
2. AI strategists/tools telling/helping us broadly what to do about AI safety seems pretty safe.
3. In terms of commercial products, there’s been some neat/scary military companies in the last few years (Palantir, Anduril). I’d be really interested if there could be some companies to automate core parts of the non-military government. I imagine there are some parts of the government that are particularly tractable/influenceable/tractable. For example, just making great decisions on which contractors the government should work with. There’s a ton of work to do here, between the federal government / state government / local government.
6. I think there are a lot of interesting ways for us to experiment with [AI tools to help our research/epistemics]. I want to see a wide variety of highly creative experimentation here. I think people are really limiting themselves in this area to a few narrow conceptions of how AI can be used in very specific ways that humans are very comfortable with. For example, I’d like to see AI dashboards of “How valuable is everything in this space” or even experiments where AIs negotiate on behalf of people and they use the result of that. A lot of this will get criticized for being too weird/disruptive/speculative, but I think that’s where good creative works should begin.
7. Right now, I think the field of “AI forecasting” is actually quite small and constrained. There’s not much money here, and there aren’t many people with bold plans or research agendas. I suspect that some successes / strong advocates could change this.
8. I think that it’s likely that Anthropic (and perhaps Deepmind) would respond well to good AI+epistemics work. “Control” was quickly accepted at Anthropic, for example. I suspect that it’s possible that things like the idea of an “Internal AI+human auditor” or an internal “AI safety strategist” could be adopted if done well.
Quick list of some ideas I’m excited about, broadly around epistemics/strategy/AI.
1. I think AI auditors / overseers of critical organizations (AI efforts, policy groups, company management) are really great and perhaps crucial to get right, but would be difficult to do well.
2. AI strategists/tools telling/helping us broadly what to do about AI safety seems pretty safe.
3. In terms of commercial products, there’s been some neat/scary military companies in the last few years (Palantir, Anduril). I’d be really interested if there could be some companies to automate core parts of the non-military government. I imagine there are some parts of the government that are particularly tractable/influenceable/tractable. For example, just making great decisions on which contractors the government should work with. There’s a ton of work to do here, between the federal government / state government / local government.
4. Epistemic Evals of AI seem pretty great to me, I imagine work here can/should be pushed more soon. I’m not a huge fan of emphasizing “truthfulness” specifically, I think there’s a whole lot to get right here. I think my post here is relevant—it’s technically specific to evaluating math models, but I think it applies to broader work. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fxDpddniDaJozcqvp/enhancing-mathematical-modeling-with-llms-goals-challenges
5. One bottleneck to some of the above is AI with strong guarantees+abilities of structured transparency. It’s possible that more good work here can wind up going a long way. That said, some of this is definitely already something companies are trying to do for commercial reasons. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/piAQ2qpiZEFwdKtmq/llm-secured-systems-a-general-purpose-tool-for-structured
6. I think there are a lot of interesting ways for us to experiment with [AI tools to help our research/epistemics]. I want to see a wide variety of highly creative experimentation here. I think people are really limiting themselves in this area to a few narrow conceptions of how AI can be used in very specific ways that humans are very comfortable with. For example, I’d like to see AI dashboards of “How valuable is everything in this space” or even experiments where AIs negotiate on behalf of people and they use the result of that. A lot of this will get criticized for being too weird/disruptive/speculative, but I think that’s where good creative works should begin.
7. Right now, I think the field of “AI forecasting” is actually quite small and constrained. There’s not much money here, and there aren’t many people with bold plans or research agendas. I suspect that some successes / strong advocates could change this.
8. I think that it’s likely that Anthropic (and perhaps Deepmind) would respond well to good AI+epistemics work. “Control” was quickly accepted at Anthropic, for example. I suspect that it’s possible that things like the idea of an “Internal AI+human auditor” or an internal “AI safety strategist” could be adopted if done well.