I agree that large companies are likely incoherent in this way; that’s what I was addressing in my follow-on comment :-). (Short version: I think getting a warning and then pressing the issue is a great way to press the company for consistency on this (important!) issue, and I think that it matters whether the company coheres around “oh yeah, you’re right, that is okay” vs whether it coheres around “nope, we do alignmentwashing here”.)
With regards to whether senior figures are paying attention: my guess is that if a good chunk of alignment researchers (including high-profile ones such as yourself) are legitimately worried about alignmentwashing and legitimately considering doing your work elsewhere (and insofar as you prefer telling the media if that happens—not as a threat but because informing the public is the right thing to do) -- then, if it comes to that extremity, I think companies are pretty likely to get the senior figures involved. And I think that if you act in a reasonable, sensible, high-integrity way throughout the process, that you’re pretty likely to have pretty good effects on the internal culture (either by leaving or by causing the internal policy to change in a visible way that makes it much easier for researchers to speak about this stuff).
I agree that large companies are likely incoherent in this way; that’s what I was addressing in my follow-on comment :-). (Short version: I think getting a warning and then pressing the issue is a great way to press the company for consistency on this (important!) issue, and I think that it matters whether the company coheres around “oh yeah, you’re right, that is okay” vs whether it coheres around “nope, we do alignmentwashing here”.)
With regards to whether senior figures are paying attention: my guess is that if a good chunk of alignment researchers (including high-profile ones such as yourself) are legitimately worried about alignmentwashing and legitimately considering doing your work elsewhere (and insofar as you prefer telling the media if that happens—not as a threat but because informing the public is the right thing to do) -- then, if it comes to that extremity, I think companies are pretty likely to get the senior figures involved. And I think that if you act in a reasonable, sensible, high-integrity way throughout the process, that you’re pretty likely to have pretty good effects on the internal culture (either by leaving or by causing the internal policy to change in a visible way that makes it much easier for researchers to speak about this stuff).