Demis Hassabis: belief

Transcript context

…I feel like tech doesn’t get the credit it deserves for funding hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of R&D, obviously you have DeepMind with systems like AlphaFold and so on. When we talk about securing the weights, as we said maybe right now it’s not something that is going to cause the end of the world or anything, but as these systems get better and better, there’s the worry that a foreign agent or something gets access to them. Presumably right now there’s dozens to hundreds of researchers who have access to the weights. What’s a plan for getting the weights in a situation room where if you need to access them it’s some extremely strenuous process and no individual can really take them out? One has to balance that with allowing for collaboration and speed of progress. Another interesting thing is that of course you want brilliant independent researchers from academia or things like the UK AI Safety Institute and the US one to be able to red team these systems. So one has to expose them to a certain extent, although that’s not necessarily the weights. We have a lot of processes in place about making sure that only if you need them, those people who need access have access. Right now, I think we’re still in the early days of those kinds of systems being at risk. As these systems become more powerful and more general and more capable, I think one has to look at the access question. Some of these other labs have specialized in different things relative to safety, Anthropic for example with interpretability. Do you have some sense of where you guys might have an edge? Now that you have the frontier model, where are you guys going to be able to put out the best frontier research on safety?…

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