I agree that there will be some engineering to do, I just think that: this can probably just be done by the labs who have the main incentive to do it (which maybe you agree with), engineering progress might not be robust to model changes / changes to training methods (whereas I expect scientific progress generalises further), and then the argument above that engineering progress might actually make scientific progress harder.
Maybe another way of representing my view is that there is not one deep problem to be solved, but rather we need to build up some robust framework for understanding AIs (perhaps agent foundations, DCI, or something else entirely), and then there will be engineering to do in light of this / on-top of this, but previous engineering work or engineering work not done conditioned on this understanding will be pretty bad and we’d want to replace it with better work. I can see an argument that doing previous engineering work makes this eventual engineering work easier as we understand how to engineer better, but then I’d argue that this is still the lab’s job, and also in terms of understanding-how-to-do-things we’re much further behind on science.
I agree that there will be some engineering to do, I just think that: this can probably just be done by the labs who have the main incentive to do it (which maybe you agree with), engineering progress might not be robust to model changes / changes to training methods (whereas I expect scientific progress generalises further), and then the argument above that engineering progress might actually make scientific progress harder.
Maybe another way of representing my view is that there is not one deep problem to be solved, but rather we need to build up some robust framework for understanding AIs (perhaps agent foundations, DCI, or something else entirely), and then there will be engineering to do in light of this / on-top of this, but previous engineering work or engineering work not done conditioned on this understanding will be pretty bad and we’d want to replace it with better work. I can see an argument that doing previous engineering work makes this eventual engineering work easier as we understand how to engineer better, but then I’d argue that this is still the lab’s job, and also in terms of understanding-how-to-do-things we’re much further behind on science.