One thing I think is interesting is how similar some of the work is from bay area AI safety folks and other safety crowds, like the area often referred to as “AI ethics.” For example, Redwood worked on a paper about safe language generation, focusing on descriptions of physical harm, and safe language generation is a long-running academic research area (including for physical harm! see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.10045.pdf). The deepest motivating factors behind the work may differ, but this is one reason I think there is a lot of common ground across safety research areas.
One thing I think is interesting is how similar some of the work is from bay area AI safety folks and other safety crowds, like the area often referred to as “AI ethics.” For example, Redwood worked on a paper about safe language generation, focusing on descriptions of physical harm, and safe language generation is a long-running academic research area (including for physical harm! see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.10045.pdf). The deepest motivating factors behind the work may differ, but this is one reason I think there is a lot of common ground across safety research areas.
+1 I think it’s very worthwhile to emphasize neartermist reasons to care about work that may be primarily longtermism-oriented.