Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I'm glad we're talking about the moral patienthood stuff later. There’s this chance to step back and ask, "What's going on? " An adult in prison has that ability in a way that I don't know if these models necessarily have. It’s that coherence and ability to step back from what's happening in the training process. Yeah, I don't know. I'm hesitant to say it's like drugs for the model. Broadly speaking, I do basically agree that we have quite a lot of tools and options for training AIs, even AIs that are somewhat smarter than humans. I do think you have to actually do it. You had Eliezer on. I'm much more bullish on our ability to solve this problem, especially for AIs that are in what I think of as the "AI for AI safety sweet spot." This is a band of capability where they're sufficiently capable that they can be really useful for strengthening various factors in our civilization that can make us safe. That’s stuff like our alignment work, control, cybersecurity, general epistemics, maybe some coordination applications. There's a bunch of stuff you can do with AIs that, in principle, could differentially accelerate our security with respect to the sorts of considerations we're talking about. Let’s say you have AIs that are capable of that. You can successfully elicit that capability in a way that's not being sabotaged or messing with you in other ways. They can't yet take over the world or do some other really problematic form of power-seeking. If we were really committed, we could then go hard, put a ton of resources and really differentially direct this glut of AI productivity towards these security factors. We could hopefully control and understand, do a lot of these things you're talking about to make sure our AIs don't take over or mess with us in the meantime. We have a lot of tools there. You have to really try though. It's possible that those sorts of measures just don't happen, or they don't happen at the level of commitment, diligence, and seriousness that you would need. That’s especially true if things are moving really fast and there are other competitive pressures: “This is going to take compute to do these intensive experiments on the AIs. We could use that compute for experiments for the next scaling step.” There’s stuff like that. I'm not here saying this is impossible, especially for that band of AIs. It's just that you have to try really hard.…

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