Ditto for the “AI Misalignment Megaproject”: $8B+ expenditure to only have a 3% chance of success (?!), plus some other misc discounting factors. Seems like you could do better with $8B.
I think we’re somewhat bearish on the ability of money by itself to solve problems. The technical issues around alignment appear quite challenging, especially given the pace of development, so it isn’t clear that any amount of money will be able to solve them. If the issues are too easy on the other hand, then your investment of money is unlikely to be needed and so your expenditure isn’t going to reduce extinction risk.
Even if the technical issues are in the goldilocks spot of being solvable but not trivially so, the political challenges around getting those solutions adopted seem extremely daunting. There is a lot we don’t explicitly specify in these parameter settings: if the money is coming from a random billionaire unaffiliated with AI scene then it might be harder to get expertise and buy in then if it is coming from insiders or the federal government.
All that said, it is plausible to me that we should have a somewhat higher chance of having an impact coupled with a lower chance of a positive outcome. A few billion dollars is likely to shake things up even if the outcome isn’t what we hoped for.
I think we’re somewhat bearish on the ability of money by itself to solve problems. The technical issues around alignment appear quite challenging, especially given the pace of development, so it isn’t clear that any amount of money will be able to solve them. If the issues are too easy on the other hand, then your investment of money is unlikely to be needed and so your expenditure isn’t going to reduce extinction risk.
Even if the technical issues are in the goldilocks spot of being solvable but not trivially so, the political challenges around getting those solutions adopted seem extremely daunting. There is a lot we don’t explicitly specify in these parameter settings: if the money is coming from a random billionaire unaffiliated with AI scene then it might be harder to get expertise and buy in then if it is coming from insiders or the federal government.
All that said, it is plausible to me that we should have a somewhat higher chance of having an impact coupled with a lower chance of a positive outcome. A few billion dollars is likely to shake things up even if the outcome isn’t what we hoped for.