I think the story would be way different if the actual risk posed by WebGPT was meaningful (say if it were driving >0.1% of the risk of OpenAI’s activities).
Huh, I definitely expect it to drive >0.1% of OpenAI’s activities. Seems like the WebGPT stuff is pretty close to commercial application, and is consuming much more than 0.1% of OpenAI’s research staff, while probably substantially increasing OpenAI’s ability to generally solve reinforcement learning problems. I am confused why you would estimate it at below 0.1%. 1% seems more reasonable to me as a baseline estimate, even if you don’t think it’s a particularly risky direction of research (given that it’s consuming about 4-5% of OpenAI’s research staff).
I think the direct risk of OpenAI’s activities is overwhelmingly dominated by training new smarter models and by deploying the public AI that could potentially be used in unanticipated ways.
I agree that if we consider indirect risks broadly (including e.g. “this helps OpenAI succeed or raise money and OpenAI’s success is dangerous”) then I’d probably move back towards “what % of OpenAI’s activities is it.”
Huh, I definitely expect it to drive >0.1% of OpenAI’s activities. Seems like the WebGPT stuff is pretty close to commercial application, and is consuming much more than 0.1% of OpenAI’s research staff, while probably substantially increasing OpenAI’s ability to generally solve reinforcement learning problems. I am confused why you would estimate it at below 0.1%. 1% seems more reasonable to me as a baseline estimate, even if you don’t think it’s a particularly risky direction of research (given that it’s consuming about 4-5% of OpenAI’s research staff).
I think the direct risk of OpenAI’s activities is overwhelmingly dominated by training new smarter models and by deploying the public AI that could potentially be used in unanticipated ways.
I agree that if we consider indirect risks broadly (including e.g. “this helps OpenAI succeed or raise money and OpenAI’s success is dangerous”) then I’d probably move back towards “what % of OpenAI’s activities is it.”