In episode 1, you and Ryan discussed how you both came close to disbanding Redwood after the initial AI Control paper. I think folks would benefit from hearing more of your thoughts on why you decided to remain an external research organization, especially since my understanding is that you want to influince the practices of the frontier labs. This is a consideration that many folks should grapple with in their own research efforts.
Buck: Another factor here was: after we’d come up with a lot of the control stuff and finished that paper, we were seriously considering exploding Redwood and going to work at AI companies. And this meant that occasionally when staff had the reasonable enough preference for job security, they would ask us, “Okay, so how secure is this job?”
Ryan: And we’re like, “Not at all. Who knows?” To be clear, the view was: initially when we were thinking about control, we were like, “Probably the way to do this is to implement this at AI companies. Probably this is the most effective way to make this research happen”—which was reasonable at the time and remains kind of reasonable, though we’ve changed our view somewhat for various reasons. And so we were like, “We’re gonna write this initial paper, try to cause this paper to have some buzz, write up some blog posts, and then just dissolve the organization and go to AI companies and try to implement this and figure out how to make this happen.” I think this was a reasonable plan, but we decided against it for a bunch of reasons—a bunch of different factors.
In episode 1, you and Ryan discussed how you both came close to disbanding Redwood after the initial AI Control paper. I think folks would benefit from hearing more of your thoughts on why you decided to remain an external research organization, especially since my understanding is that you want to influince the practices of the frontier labs. This is a consideration that many folks should grapple with in their own research efforts.