For doing alignment research, I often imagine things like speeding up the entire alignment field by >100x.
As in, suppose we have 1 year of lead time to do alignment research with the entire alignment research community. I imagine producing as much output in this year as if we spent >100x serial years doing alignment research without ai assistance.
This doesn’t clearly require using super human AIs. For instance, perfectly aligned systems as intelligent and well informed as the top alignment researchers which run at 100x the speed would clearly be sufficient if we had enough.
In practice, we’d presumably use a heterogeneous blend of imperfectly aligned ais with heterogeneous alignment and security interventions as this would yield higher returns.
(Imagining the capability profile of the AIs is similar to that if humans is often a nice simplifying assumption for low precision guess work.)
Note that during this accelerated time you also have access to AGI to experiment on!
[Aside: I don’t particularly like the terminology of pivotal act/pivotal process which seems to ignore the imo default way things go well]
Why target speeding up alignment research during this crunch time period as opposed to just doing the work myself?
Conveniently, alignment work is the work I wanted to get done during that period, so this is nicely dual use. Admittedly, a reasonable fraction of the work will be on things which are totally useless at the start of such a period while I typically target things to be more useful earlier.
I also typically think the work I do is retargetable to general usages of ai (e.g., make 20 trillion dollars).
Beyond this, the world will probably be radically transformed prior to large scale usage of AIs which are strongly superhuman in most or many domains. (Weighting domains by importance.)
For doing alignment research, I often imagine things like speeding up the entire alignment field by >100x.
As in, suppose we have 1 year of lead time to do alignment research with the entire alignment research community. I imagine producing as much output in this year as if we spent >100x serial years doing alignment research without ai assistance.
This doesn’t clearly require using super human AIs. For instance, perfectly aligned systems as intelligent and well informed as the top alignment researchers which run at 100x the speed would clearly be sufficient if we had enough.
In practice, we’d presumably use a heterogeneous blend of imperfectly aligned ais with heterogeneous alignment and security interventions as this would yield higher returns.
(Imagining the capability profile of the AIs is similar to that if humans is often a nice simplifying assumption for low precision guess work.)
Note that during this accelerated time you also have access to AGI to experiment on!
[Aside: I don’t particularly like the terminology of pivotal act/pivotal process which seems to ignore the imo default way things go well]
Why target speeding up alignment research during this crunch time period as opposed to just doing the work myself?
Conveniently, alignment work is the work I wanted to get done during that period, so this is nicely dual use. Admittedly, a reasonable fraction of the work will be on things which are totally useless at the start of such a period while I typically target things to be more useful earlier.
I also typically think the work I do is retargetable to general usages of ai (e.g., make 20 trillion dollars).
Beyond this, the world will probably be radically transformed prior to large scale usage of AIs which are strongly superhuman in most or many domains. (Weighting domains by importance.)