Slow down AI

i.e. because of AI risk

  • We probably can’t slow it down indefinitely:
    • Even if we slow down training runs, we’ll still make algorithmic and hardware progress, lowering the barrier to future training by defectors, or producing sudden discontinuous is a ban is suddenly lifted.
    • Matthew Barnett argues that at least theoretically, a private individual could afford to run inference with a brain-scale model.
  • It might be better to slow/stop research later, when we’re closer to truly dangerous systems; i.e. maybe AI alignment is easier with more ASI-like systems
    • This is probably true of RLHF as an alignment method method.
    • I notice that much of the progress in Mechanistic interpretability has been made with very small systems, and that’s often cited as one of the more promising paths.
  • Related: Preventing AI proliferation seems hard

References

Last updated 2023-07-13.