and 2. seem very similar to me. I think it’s something like that.
The way I envision him (obviously I don’t know and might be wrong):
Genuinely cares about safety and doing good.
Also really likes the thought of having power and doing earth-shaking stuff with powerful AI.
Looks at AI risk arguments with a lens of motivated cognition influenced by the bullet point above.
Mostly thinks things will go well, but this is primarily from an instinctive feel of a high-energy CEO, who are predominantly personality-selected for optimistic attitudes. If he were to really sit down and try to introspect on his views on the question (and stare into the abyss), as a very smart person, he might find that he thinks things might well go poorly, but then thoughts come up like “ehh, if I can’t make AI go well, others probably can’t either, and it’s worth the risk especially because things could be really cool for a while or so before it all ends.”
If he ever has thoughts like “Am I one of the bad guys here?,” he’ll shrug them off with “nah” rather than having the occasional existential crises and self-doubts around that sort of thing.
He maybe has no stable circle of people to whom he defers on knowledge questions; that is, no one outside himself he trusts as much as himself. He might say he updates to person x or y and considers them smarter than himself/better forecasters, but in reality, he “respects” whoever is good news for him as long as they are good news for him. If he learns that smart people around him are suddenly confident that what he’s doing is bad, he’ll feel system-1 annoyed at them, which prompts him to find reasons to now disagree with them and no longer consider them included in his circle of epistemic deference. (Maybe this trait isn’t black and white; there’s at least some chance that he’d change course if 100% of people he at one point in time respects spoke up against his plan all at once.)
Maybe doesn’t have a lot of mental machinery built around treating it as a sacred mission to have true beliefs, so he might say things about avoiding hardware overhang as an argument for OpenAI’s strategy and then later do something that seemingly contradicts his previous stance, because he was using arguments that felt like they’d fit but without really thinking hard about them and building a detailed model for forecasting that he operates from for every such decision.
and 2. seem very similar to me. I think it’s something like that.
The way I envision him (obviously I don’t know and might be wrong):
Genuinely cares about safety and doing good.
Also really likes the thought of having power and doing earth-shaking stuff with powerful AI.
Looks at AI risk arguments with a lens of motivated cognition influenced by the bullet point above.
Mostly thinks things will go well, but this is primarily from an instinctive feel of a high-energy CEO, who are predominantly personality-selected for optimistic attitudes. If he were to really sit down and try to introspect on his views on the question (and stare into the abyss), as a very smart person, he might find that he thinks things might well go poorly, but then thoughts come up like “ehh, if I can’t make AI go well, others probably can’t either, and it’s worth the risk especially because things could be really cool for a while or so before it all ends.”
If he ever has thoughts like “Am I one of the bad guys here?,” he’ll shrug them off with “nah” rather than having the occasional existential crises and self-doubts around that sort of thing.
He maybe has no stable circle of people to whom he defers on knowledge questions; that is, no one outside himself he trusts as much as himself. He might say he updates to person x or y and considers them smarter than himself/better forecasters, but in reality, he “respects” whoever is good news for him as long as they are good news for him. If he learns that smart people around him are suddenly confident that what he’s doing is bad, he’ll feel system-1 annoyed at them, which prompts him to find reasons to now disagree with them and no longer consider them included in his circle of epistemic deference. (Maybe this trait isn’t black and white; there’s at least some chance that he’d change course if 100% of people he at one point in time respects spoke up against his plan all at once.)
Maybe doesn’t have a lot of mental machinery built around treating it as a sacred mission to have true beliefs, so he might say things about avoiding hardware overhang as an argument for OpenAI’s strategy and then later do something that seemingly contradicts his previous stance, because he was using arguments that felt like they’d fit but without really thinking hard about them and building a detailed model for forecasting that he operates from for every such decision.