The biggest outcome of that is perhaps how immediately they all converged on RSI.
RSI seems like an obvious idea to me, I doubt the time between “AI developed that is capable of improving itself” and “AI is applied to improve itself” will differ much between Chinese and Western labs.
So many people believe this “we only need to align a human level researcher” idea now. Leopold basically doesn’t say at all what these automated alignment researchers should be actually doing all day. I feel like a more serious thinker would have at least tried to sketch out what these agents should be working on in alignment or would have started looking into alignment and tried to figure out how hard it is,
Leopold is pretty clearly on the ‘alignment is relatively easy’ side (“I am not a doomer. Misaligned superintelligence is probably not the biggest AI risk...What I want to do is explain what I see as the “default” plan for how we’ll muddle through, and why I’m optimistic.”). As I noted if you think x risks from misalignment are very low then there is no reason to favour the western approach on alignment (essentially, caring about it at all) since both approaches will work (and if you think it’s extremely high then there is likewise no reason since both approaches will fail).
RSI seems like an obvious idea to me, I doubt the time between “AI developed that is capable of improving itself” and “AI is applied to improve itself” will differ much between Chinese and Western labs.
So many people believe this “we only need to align a human level researcher” idea now. Leopold basically doesn’t say at all what these automated alignment researchers should be actually doing all day. I feel like a more serious thinker would have at least tried to sketch out what these agents should be working on in alignment or would have started looking into alignment and tried to figure out how hard it is,