It’s not obvious that a highly centralized effort is needed. The Alignment Forum, open source developers, and the academic research community (e.g. the ML research community) are examples of decentralized research communities that seem to be highly effective at making progress.
Open-source development is debatable, but the academic research community and especially the alignment forum are paradigmatic examples of ineffective forms of human organisation (if the goal is real progress). And in both these cases, most real progress happens at labs anyway, i.e., organised groups of people.
Open-source development is debatable, but the academic research community and especially the alignment forum are paradigmatic examples of ineffective forms of human organisation (if the goal is real progress). And in both these cases, most real progress happens at labs anyway, i.e., organised groups of people.