Is there any consensus on who’s making things safer, and who isn’t? I find it hard to understand the players in this game, it seems like AI safety orgs and the big language players are very similar in terms of their language, marketing and the actual work they do. Eg openAI talk about ai safety in their website and have jobs on the 80k job board, but are also advancing ai rapidly. Lately it seems to me like there isn’t even agreement in the ai safety sphere over what work is harmful and what isn’t (I’m getting that mainly from the post on closing the lightcone office)
I think your perception is spot on. The labs that are advancing towards AGI the fastest also profess to care about safety and do research on safety. Within the alignment field, many people believe that many other people’s research agendas are useless. There are varying levels of consensus about different questions—many people are opposed to racing towards AGI, and research directions like interpretability and eliciting latent knowledge are rarely criticized—but in many cases, making progress on AI safety requires having inside view opinions about what’s important and useful.
Is there any consensus on who’s making things safer, and who isn’t? I find it hard to understand the players in this game, it seems like AI safety orgs and the big language players are very similar in terms of their language, marketing and the actual work they do. Eg openAI talk about ai safety in their website and have jobs on the 80k job board, but are also advancing ai rapidly. Lately it seems to me like there isn’t even agreement in the ai safety sphere over what work is harmful and what isn’t (I’m getting that mainly from the post on closing the lightcone office)
I think your perception is spot on. The labs that are advancing towards AGI the fastest also profess to care about safety and do research on safety. Within the alignment field, many people believe that many other people’s research agendas are useless. There are varying levels of consensus about different questions—many people are opposed to racing towards AGI, and research directions like interpretability and eliciting latent knowledge are rarely criticized—but in many cases, making progress on AI safety requires having inside view opinions about what’s important and useful.