Nat Friedman: belief

Transcript context

…Simian asks for your takes on alignment. “He seems to invest both in capabilities and alignment which is the best move under a very small set of beliefs.” So he's curious to hear the reasoning there. I guess we'll see but I'm not sure capabilities and alignment end up being these opposing forces. It may be that the capabilities are very important for alignment. Maybe alignment is very important for capabilities. I think a lot of people believe, and I think I'm included in this, that AI can have tremendous benefits, but that there's like a small chance of really bad outcomes. Maybe some people think it's a large chance. The solutions, if they exist, are likely to be technical. There's probably some combination of technical and prescriptive. It's probably a piece of code and a readme file. It says – if you want to build aligned AIs, use this code and don't do this or something like that. I think that's really important and more people should try to actually build technical solutions. I think one of the big things that's missing that perplexes me is, there's no open source technical alignment community. There's no one actually just implementing in open source, the best alignment tools. There's a lot of philosophizing and talking, and then there's a lot of behind closed doors, interpretability and alignment work. Because the alignment people have this belief that they shouldn't release their work I think we're going to end up in a world where there's a lot of open source, pure capabilities work, and no open source alignment work for a little while. Hopefully that'll change. So yeah, I wanted to, on the margin, invest in people doing alignment. It seems like that's important. I thought Sydney was a kind of an example of this. You had Microsoft essentially released an unaligned AI and I think the world sort of said – Hmm, sort of threatening its users, that seems a little bit strange. If Microsoft can't put a leash on this thing, who can? I think there'll be more interest in it and I hope there's open communities. That was so endearing for some reason. Threatening you just made it so much more lovable for some reason.…

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