I think Pause AI is making a variety of bad strategic choices. I think that knifing other safety advocates is one bad strategic choice, but it’s more like a bad choice that is downstream of my main problems with them, rather than my core concern about them.
Pause AI is a global activist movement with many chapters, and members with a mix of opinions, with some voices louder than others.
I’ve been volunteering there full time for a couple of years. I’m someone who cares a lot about partnership and the ecosystem of AIXR organizations. (I reckon not being killed by superintelligence is helped by pursuing a portfolio of bets that are mostly disjunctive and individually low odds.)
Buck, I would be really interested to hear more about your concrete concerns with Pause AI. By all means link a previous account if one exists.
Happy to discuss in public or private.
At this point in history I feel a combination of bemused and outraged that no-one has really tried to run the experiment.
Tests of non-frontier models with even imperfectly curated pretraining data are relatively cheap and have brought directional insight in other domains.
It would be better if Anthropic executed it given other aspects of training are likely relevant, but it doesn’t seem beyond the reach of open source academia.
Can we be Humans please?