Status: Vague, sorry. The point seems almost tautological to me, and yet also seems like the correct answer to the people going around saying “LLMs turned out to be not very want-y, when are the people who expected ‘agents’ going to update?”, so, here we are. Okay, so you know how AI today isn’t great… Read more »
Posts By: Nate Soares
Thoughts on the AI Safety Summit company policy requests and responses
Over the next two days, the UK government is hosting an AI Safety Summit focused on “the safe and responsible development of frontier AI”. They requested that seven companies (Amazon, Anthropic, DeepMind, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI) “outline their AI Safety Policies across nine areas of AI Safety”. Below, I’ll give my thoughts on the… Read more »
AI as a science, and three obstacles to alignment strategies
AI used to be a science. In the old days (back when AI didn’t work very well), people were attempting to develop a working theory of cognition. Those scientists didn’t succeed, and those days are behind us. For most people working in AI today and dividing up their work hours between tasks, gone is the… Read more »
Misgeneralization as a misnomer
Here’s two different ways an AI can turn out unfriendly: You somehow build an AI that cares about “making people happy”. In training, it tells people jokes and buys people flowers and offers people an ear when they need one. In deployment (and once it’s more capable), it forcibly puts each human in a separate… Read more »
Truth and Advantage: Response to a draft of “AI safety seems hard to measure”
Status: This was a response to a draft of Holden’s cold take “AI safety seems hard to measure”. It sparked a further discussion, that Holden recently posted a summary of. The follow-up discussion ended up focusing on some issues in AI alignment that I think are underserved, which Holden said were kinda orthogonal to the… Read more »
Deep Deceptiveness
Meta This post is an attempt to gesture at a class of AI notkilleveryoneism (alignment) problem that seems to me to go largely unrecognized. E.g., it isn’t discussed (or at least I don’t recognize it) in the recent plans written up by OpenAI (1,2), by DeepMind’s alignment team, or by Anthropic, and I know of… Read more »
Comments on OpenAI’s "Planning for AGI and beyond"
Sam Altman shared me on a draft of his OpenAI blog post Planning for AGI and beyond, and I left some comments, reproduced below without typos and with some added hyperlinks. Where the final version of the OpenAI post differs from the draft, I’ve noted that as well, making text Sam later cut red and… Read more »
Focus on the places where you feel shocked everyone’s dropping the ball
Writing down something I’ve found myself repeating in different conversations: If you’re looking for ways to help with the whole “the world looks pretty doomed” business, here’s my advice: look around for places where we’re all being total idiots. Look for places where everyone’s fretting about a problem that some part of you thinks it… Read more »
