As Michaël Trazzi in the other post, I’m interested in the kind of products you’ll develop, but more specifically in how the for-profit part interacts with both the conceptual research part and the incubator part. Are you expecting the latter two to yield new products as they make progress? Do these activities have different enough near-term goals that they mostly just coexist within Conjecture?
(also, looking forward to the pluralism sequence, this sounds great)
See the reply to Michaël for answers as to what kind of products we will develop (TLDR we don’t know yet).
As for the conceptual research side, we do not do conceptual research with product in mind, but we expect useful corollaries to fall out by themselves for sufficiently good research. We think the best way of doing fundamental research like this is to just follow the most interesting, useful looking directions guided by the “research taste” of good researchers (with regular feedback from the rest of the team, of course). I for one at least genuinely expect product to be “easy”, in the sense that AI is advancing absurdly fast and the economic opportunities are falling from the sky like candy, so I don’t expect us to need to frantically dedicate our research to finding worthwhile fruit to pick.
The incubator has absolutely nothing to do with our for profit work, and is truly meant to be a useful space for independent researchers to develop their own directions that will hopefully be maximally beneficial to the alignment community. We will not put any requirements or restrictions on what the independent researchers work on, as long as it is useful and interesting to the alignment community.
Congratulations on your launch!
As Michaël Trazzi in the other post, I’m interested in the kind of products you’ll develop, but more specifically in how the for-profit part interacts with both the conceptual research part and the incubator part. Are you expecting the latter two to yield new products as they make progress? Do these activities have different enough near-term goals that they mostly just coexist within Conjecture?
(also, looking forward to the pluralism sequence, this sounds great)
See the reply to Michaël for answers as to what kind of products we will develop (TLDR we don’t know yet).
As for the conceptual research side, we do not do conceptual research with product in mind, but we expect useful corollaries to fall out by themselves for sufficiently good research. We think the best way of doing fundamental research like this is to just follow the most interesting, useful looking directions guided by the “research taste” of good researchers (with regular feedback from the rest of the team, of course). I for one at least genuinely expect product to be “easy”, in the sense that AI is advancing absurdly fast and the economic opportunities are falling from the sky like candy, so I don’t expect us to need to frantically dedicate our research to finding worthwhile fruit to pick.
The incubator has absolutely nothing to do with our for profit work, and is truly meant to be a useful space for independent researchers to develop their own directions that will hopefully be maximally beneficial to the alignment community. We will not put any requirements or restrictions on what the independent researchers work on, as long as it is useful and interesting to the alignment community.