Paul Christiano: prediction

Transcript context

…But what was that famous case of that statistician who it was like, some PhD student who showed up late to a class and he saw some problems on the board and he thought they were homework, and then they were actually just open problems, and then he solved them because he thought they were homework. Right, yeah. I mean, we have much less information that these problems are hard. Again, I expect the solution to most of our problems to not be that complicated. And we’ve been working on it in some sense for a really long time. Total years of full time equivalent work across the whole team is like probably like 3 years of full time equivalent work in this area spread across a couple of people. But that’s very little compared to a problem. It is very easy to have a problem where you put in 3 years of full time equivalent work. But in fact, there’s still an approach that’s going to work quite easily with like, 3 to six months if you come at a new angle. And we’ve learned a fair amount from that that we could share, and we probably will be sharing more over the coming months. As far as funding goes, is this something where, I don’t know, if somebody gave you a whole bunch of money that would help? Or does it not matter how many people are working on this, by the way?…

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