Since OpenAI won’t prioritize alignment research (by devoting more than than 50% of their employees and compute to it), and won’t pause capabilities research until alignment is solved -while acknowledging that un-aligned AGI would pose an existential threat to humanity—we can deduce that they are recklessly negligent.
But I think this initiative is worse than simple inaction. As implemented, it actively lowers our chances of successful AGI alignment, for two reasons. First, by claiming that they will solve alignment with such confidence, OpenAI may be dampening interest in this problem everywhere else in the field. People will think “Oh OpenAI has got Alignment covered. I’ll work on something else.” Second, by absorbing many of the best and brightest engineers/scientists in the field, they stifle innovation elsewhere, at other companies where incentives to get it right or try different paradigms may be stronger, and those people may have had bigger impact.
Since OpenAI won’t prioritize alignment research (by devoting more than than 50% of their employees and compute to it), and won’t pause capabilities research until alignment is solved -while acknowledging that un-aligned AGI would pose an existential threat to humanity—we can deduce that they are recklessly negligent.
But I think this initiative is worse than simple inaction. As implemented, it actively lowers our chances of successful AGI alignment, for two reasons. First, by claiming that they will solve alignment with such confidence, OpenAI may be dampening interest in this problem everywhere else in the field. People will think “Oh OpenAI has got Alignment covered. I’ll work on something else.” Second, by absorbing many of the best and brightest engineers/scientists in the field, they stifle innovation elsewhere, at other companies where incentives to get it right or try different paradigms may be stronger, and those people may have had bigger impact.