There are less costly, more effective steps to reduce the underlying problem, like making the field of alignment 10x larger or passing regulation to require evals
This statement begs for cost-benefit analysis.
Increasing size of alignment field can be efficient, but it won’t be cheap. You need to teach new experts in the field that doesn’t have any polised standardized educational programs and doesn’t have much of teachers. If you want not only increase number of participants in the field, but increase productivity of the field 10x, you need an extraordinary educational effort.
Passing regulation to require evals seems like a meh idea. Nobody knows in enough details how to make such evalutions and every wrong idea that makes its way to law will be here until the end of the world.
I’d be much happier with increasing participants enough to equal 10-20% of the field of ML than a 6 month unconditional pause, and my guess is it’s less costly. It seems like leading labs allowing other labs to catch up by 6 months will reduce their valuations more than 20%, whereas diverting 10-20% of their resources would reduce valuations only 10% or so.
There are currently 300 alignment researchers. If we take additional researchers from the pool of 30k people who attended ICML, you get 3000 researchers, and if they’re equal quality this is 10x participants. I wouldn’t expect alignment to go 10x faster, more like 2x with a decent educational effort. But this is in perpetuity and should speed up alignment by far more than 6 months. There’s the question of getting labs to pay if they’re creating most of the harms, which might be hard though.
I’d be excited about someone doing a real cost-benefit analysis here, or preferably coming up with better ideas. It just seems so unlikely that a 6 month pause is close to the most efficient thing, given it destroys much of the value of a company that has a large lead.
This statement begs for cost-benefit analysis.
Increasing size of alignment field can be efficient, but it won’t be cheap. You need to teach new experts in the field that doesn’t have any polised standardized educational programs and doesn’t have much of teachers. If you want not only increase number of participants in the field, but increase productivity of the field 10x, you need an extraordinary educational effort.
Passing regulation to require evals seems like a meh idea. Nobody knows in enough details how to make such evalutions and every wrong idea that makes its way to law will be here until the end of the world.
I’d be much happier with increasing participants enough to equal 10-20% of the field of ML than a 6 month unconditional pause, and my guess is it’s less costly. It seems like leading labs allowing other labs to catch up by 6 months will reduce their valuations more than 20%, whereas diverting 10-20% of their resources would reduce valuations only 10% or so.
There are currently 300 alignment researchers. If we take additional researchers from the pool of 30k people who attended ICML, you get 3000 researchers, and if they’re equal quality this is 10x participants. I wouldn’t expect alignment to go 10x faster, more like 2x with a decent educational effort. But this is in perpetuity and should speed up alignment by far more than 6 months. There’s the question of getting labs to pay if they’re creating most of the harms, which might be hard though.
I’d be excited about someone doing a real cost-benefit analysis here, or preferably coming up with better ideas. It just seems so unlikely that a 6 month pause is close to the most efficient thing, given it destroys much of the value of a company that has a large lead.