I definitely don’t recognize Eliezer in Dario’s characterization. My best guess is he’s referring to Roman Yampolskiy, who was recently on Rogan, and who has published results he claims prove alignment is impossible here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.00484
It would be both more timely and more accurate for Dario to be referring to Yampolskiy.
Some of the protest groups make similar claims that superintelligence can never be safe and so should never be developed. This is actually very distant from Eliezer’s position.
That would be my interpretation if I were to steelman him. My actual expectation is that he’s lumping Eliezer-style positions with Yampolskiy-style positions, barely differentiating between them. Eliezer has certainly said things along the general lines of “AGI can never be made aligned using the tools of the current paradigm”, backing it up by what could be called “logical arguments” from evolution or first principles.
Like, Dario clearly disagrees with Eliezer’s position as well, given who he is and what he is doing, so there must be some way he is dismissing it. And he is talking about “doomers” there, in general, yet Yampolskiy and Yampolskiy-style views are not the central AGI-doomsayer position. So why would he be talking about his anti-Yampolskiy views in the place where he should be talking about his anti-Eliezer views?
My guess is that it’s because those views are one and the same. Alternatively, he deliberately chose to associate general AGI-doom arguments with a weak-man position he could dunk on, in a way that leaves him the opportunity to retreat to the motte of “I actually meant Yampolskiy’s views, oops, sorry for causing a misunderstanding”. Not sure which is worse.
Yes, his statement is clearly nonsensical if we read it as a dismissal of Eliezer’s position, but it sure sounded, in-context, like he would’ve been referring to Eliezer’s position there. So I expect the nonsense is because he’s mischaracterizing (deliberately or not) that position; I’m not particularly inclined to search for complicated charitable interpretations.
I agree that Dario disagrees with Eliezer somewhere. I don’t know for sure that you’ve isolated the part that Dario disagrees with, and it seems plausible to me that Dario thinks we need some more MIRI-esque, principled thing, or an alternative architecture altogether, or for the LLMs to have solved the problem for us, once we cross some capabilities threshold. If he’s said something public about this either way, I’d love to know.
I also think that some interpretations of Dario’s statement are compatible with some interpretations of the section of the IABIED book excerpt above, so we ought to just… all be extra careful not to be too generous to one side or the other, or too critical of one side or the other. I agree that my interpretation errs on the side of giving Dario too much credit here.
I’m pretty confused about Dario and don’t trust him, but I want to gesture toward some care in the intended targets of some of his stronger statements about ‘doomers’. I think he’s a pretty careful communicator, and still lean toward my interpretation over yours (although I also expect him to be wrong in his characterization of Eliezer’s beliefs, I don’t expect him to be quite as wrong as the above).
I find the story you’re telling here totally plausible, and just genuinely do not know.
There’s also a meta concern where if you decide that you’re the target of some inaccurate statement that’s certainly targeted at someone but might not be tarted at you, you’ve perhaps done more damage to yourself by adopting that mischaracterization of yourself in order to amend it, than by saying something like “Well, you must not be talking about me, because that’s just not what I believe.”
I definitely don’t recognize Eliezer in Dario’s characterization. My best guess is he’s referring to Roman Yampolskiy, who was recently on Rogan, and who has published results he claims prove alignment is impossible here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.00484
It would be both more timely and more accurate for Dario to be referring to Yampolskiy.
Some of the protest groups make similar claims that superintelligence can never be safe and so should never be developed. This is actually very distant from Eliezer’s position.
That would be my interpretation if I were to steelman him. My actual expectation is that he’s lumping Eliezer-style positions with Yampolskiy-style positions, barely differentiating between them. Eliezer has certainly said things along the general lines of “AGI can never be made aligned using the tools of the current paradigm”, backing it up by what could be called “logical arguments” from evolution or first principles.
Like, Dario clearly disagrees with Eliezer’s position as well, given who he is and what he is doing, so there must be some way he is dismissing it. And he is talking about “doomers” there, in general, yet Yampolskiy and Yampolskiy-style views are not the central AGI-doomsayer position. So why would he be talking about his anti-Yampolskiy views in the place where he should be talking about his anti-Eliezer views?
My guess is that it’s because those views are one and the same. Alternatively, he deliberately chose to associate general AGI-doom arguments with a weak-man position he could dunk on, in a way that leaves him the opportunity to retreat to the motte of “I actually meant Yampolskiy’s views, oops, sorry for causing a misunderstanding”. Not sure which is worse.
Yes, his statement is clearly nonsensical if we read it as a dismissal of Eliezer’s position, but it sure sounded, in-context, like he would’ve been referring to Eliezer’s position there. So I expect the nonsense is because he’s mischaracterizing (deliberately or not) that position; I’m not particularly inclined to search for complicated charitable interpretations.
I agree that Dario disagrees with Eliezer somewhere. I don’t know for sure that you’ve isolated the part that Dario disagrees with, and it seems plausible to me that Dario thinks we need some more MIRI-esque, principled thing, or an alternative architecture altogether, or for the LLMs to have solved the problem for us, once we cross some capabilities threshold. If he’s said something public about this either way, I’d love to know.
I also think that some interpretations of Dario’s statement are compatible with some interpretations of the section of the IABIED book excerpt above, so we ought to just… all be extra careful not to be too generous to one side or the other, or too critical of one side or the other. I agree that my interpretation errs on the side of giving Dario too much credit here.
I’m pretty confused about Dario and don’t trust him, but I want to gesture toward some care in the intended targets of some of his stronger statements about ‘doomers’. I think he’s a pretty careful communicator, and still lean toward my interpretation over yours (although I also expect him to be wrong in his characterization of Eliezer’s beliefs, I don’t expect him to be quite as wrong as the above).
I find the story you’re telling here totally plausible, and just genuinely do not know.
There’s also a meta concern where if you decide that you’re the target of some inaccurate statement that’s certainly targeted at someone but might not be tarted at you, you’ve perhaps done more damage to yourself by adopting that mischaracterization of yourself in order to amend it, than by saying something like “Well, you must not be talking about me, because that’s just not what I believe.”