Talked with Paul Christiano (world’s leading AI safety researcher) about:
- Does he regret inventing RLHF?
- What do we want post-AGI world to look like (do we want to keep gods enslaved forever)?
- Why he has relatively modest timelines (40% by 2040, 15% by 2030),
- Why he’s leading the push to get to labs develop responsible scaling policies, & what it would take to prevent an AI coup or bioweapon,
- His current research into a new proof system, and how this could solve alignment by explaining model's behavior,
- and much more.
Open Philanthropy
Open Philanthropy is currently hiring for twenty-two different roles to reduce catastrophic risks from fast-moving advances in AI and biotechnology, including grantmaking, research, and operations.
For more information and to apply, please see this application:
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/new-roles-on-our-gcr-team/
The deadline to apply is November 9th; make sure to check out those roles before they close:
Transcript:
https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/paul-christiano
Apple Podcasts:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/paul-christiano-preventing-an-ai-takeover/id1516093381?i=1000633226398
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5vOuxDP246IG4t4K3EuEKj?si=VW7qTs8ZRHuQX9emnboGcA
Follow me on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp
Timestamps
(00:00:00) - What do we want post-AGI world to look like?
(00:24:25) - Timelines
(00:45:28) - Evolution vs gradient descent
(00:54:53) - Misalignment and takeover
(01:17:23) - Is alignment dual-use?
(01:31:38) - Responsible scaling policies
(01:58:25) - Paul’s alignment research
(02:35:01) - Will this revolutionize theoretical CS and math?
(02:46:11) - How Paul invented RLHF
(02:55:10) - Disagreements with Carl Shulman
(03:01:53) - Long TSMC but not NVIDIA
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