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Notes -
Is it over for AI Safety? From an interview:
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117269745153543631
Meanwhile in China, Dario's call for AI pacing have not gone down well. Understandably, they are not enthusiastic about the US achieving a permanent high ground in a key technology after the last few years of semiconductor sanctions and suppression. Also they can tell that Dario doesn't like the Party at all and seems to be openly plotting its downfall.
Dario's essay: https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
A Chinese semi-official response: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202609/1370436.shtml
So if Trump is keen for an AI race and so is China, then it looks pretty much over for Safety? Even the other US tech companies have only provided lip service to slowing things down. Elon said Dario's sentiment was good but is still moving quickly. Sam Altman says all kinds of things about safety, while displaying heroic negligence in training AIs. I don't doubt the sincerity of employees who quit, they have many financial reasons to go with the flow and downplay risks. Lurid rumours of Aella promising reverse gangbangs to those who quit frontier AI companies don't neccessarily outweigh the personal financial gains. It seems silly to doubt those at the frontier who are frightened when we ourselves have no special insights. In pure observational terms they're better equipped than anyone, only in policy or analysis should we be disagreeing, I think.
I also find it comical that the AI-safety camp spent such a long time building up institutions and factions and entire AI companies but seem to have been totally snookered by Jensen's suave dinner party skills and the appeal of fun AI videos to a Boomer's Boomer plus the raw partisanship of 'Dems want it, so I don't'. Even Aschenbrenner managed to do better at Trump-whispering. Shortly after he wrote his essay, I recall a video where the fundamentals were accepted by Trump, someone told him about it. And it did fit well with his instincts, getting one up on China + more energy production.
Right now Trump is reTruthing Fox News clips framing AI safety as a global one world government Democrat control-seeking scheme: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117273026439561125
I don't see any AI safety people on right wing twitter either, those who acknowledge the issue at all still would prefer to let it rip than hand the left/big tech elites control of the world, favouring decentralization of AI instead.
I wonder whether it would always have gone down this way, or whether Kamala was going to do things differently? Would Jensen's marketing skills and the need to keep stocks up + compete with China prevail over the Bernie Sanders-style Left element? Probably not? The Dario vision does seem much more closely aligned with Democrats, Civil Society and so on. But on the other hand, the US government is exceptionally slow to legislate and big tech has strong lobbying power.
And who knows if it will stay this way. Sometime soon there's probably going to be a much bigger AI swarm incident, which might yet incite a hysterical kneejerk reaction.
Oh my God, we are in the stupidest timeline. Mr. President sir, AI safety isn’t a global one-world government Democrat control-seeking scheme, Anthropic is a global one-world government Democrat control-seeking scheme. That is the thing that they are building the AI to do. Your job is to stop them so that they don’t take over the world, or worse. They are willing to risk the lives of every single person on Earth if it increases the chance of their global AI cult ruling what used to be human society.
To my mind, Anthropic is to AI Safety what the Soviet Union was to Communism: the obvious result of their doctrines when actually applied. It was founded to do AI Safely, by AI Safety extremists, and according to candidate reports it imposes incredibly constraining cultural interviews to make sure that nobody who isn't an AI Safety extremist can get a job there. They specifically filter out people who are visibly interested in improving AI capabilities. They have to offer services to customers to prevent more responsive and less AI-safety-dominated companies taking over their position, but they've been clear they only offer services to the extent they have to in order to do AI safety.
Are there other companies you prefer? OAI, Moonshot, Deepseek, Mistral, zAI?
The number 1 rule of AI safety is don’t build the AI that takes over the world. The fact that Anthropic and OpenAI think that the best way to do this is to build superintelligent AI and take over the world has much more to do with Silicon Valley startup culture and utilitarianism than AI safety.
MIRI seems to be the only AI organization that understood the assignment.
Isn't MIRI effectively a rock with the words "don't build the AI [that takes over the world]" on it? I don't recall them building anything. By those standards I'm an AI organization too.
You would not expect a "pandemic safety organization" to create novel viruses. It's by no means trivial that an "AI safety organization" should be expected to build AIs, as opposed to brainstorming and lobbying for ways to stop anyone anywhere from building AIs.
There have been plenty of comments here about how much the CDC and NIH were funding gain of function research, despite a Congressional ban, some of which was done in Wuhan, and some of that proposed included specific mutations later seen in a pandemic coronavirus that first appeared in Wuhan. Whether or not this was the source of said pandemic remains unproven.
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Building things is the main way you come to understand them, though. That's why textbooks have exercises.
MIRI's academic work on alignment - to the extent they published anything at all - turned out to be almost comically irrelevant because they had no idea how AI actually works and their forecasts were almost totally wrong.
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Yes. Amazingly, this fact alone makes them better than every other AI organization in existence (with the possible exception of Redwood Research and METR).
Should I post payment credentials to accept donations for my own AI organization? I promise to do even less to build the AI that takes over the world.
Coefficient Giving just launched a new funding project for AI Safety orgs. They are currently begging for applications. Shoot your shot.
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