Ben Todd: recommendation

Transcript context

…Let's click on that in a couple of different ways. I think I really appreciate you saying people should question their motives. I think this is like profound, of profound importance for individuals at AI companies and for AI companies as organizations. There's just a lot of somebody's gonna do this and we're better than the other guys, so we better do it and therefore we need to win. And yikes. This sort of leads us to a competitive situation, which I think is like quite problematic. I always say it's the smartest of times, it's the stupidest of times. And this image that I have of Sam Altman and Dario from the AI event in India where they couldn't bring themselves to join hands as everybody else on the stage was joining hands. It will be a real time capsule and a real shame if we end up messing this up and there's some alien historians or whatever are one day excavating the planet and come across this image and they were like, oh, they were so close. They almost created a world of abundance for themselves, but in a sort of In a scene fit for a Greek tragedy, here you have the two leaders who are basically building the exact same technology at very similar companies with very similar strategies, hating each other as individuals so much that they couldn't manage to figure out any way to work together or couldn't see the virtue in what the other one was doing. It's a real mess. That is a real mess. And I think that's something that everybody needs to think about for themselves. Like how do I play a positive role in making that less of a mess and not contribute to just everybody escalating the same dynamics that currently exist? So with all that said about like counterfactual analysis of this sort of like somebody's got to do it, so I guess it should be me. And how do you advise people to really take an honest look at their own character and assess, am I actually going to be able to go in to such an environment and do what I, in the abstract now, think I will do or want to do? That's a hard question, and I think it's hard to get that kind of objectivity on oneself, but it's a pretty important crux for whether you should do it or not, right? Can you hold up under that pressure and be true to your values when the stakes are high and when it really might cost you something. Yeah, how does one get a good sense for whether or not they're up to that challenge? I mean, I think this is a huge topic. One starting point would be like you're kind of gesturing out. I think a lot of the reasoning in this area is it's pretty shallow. It's just, well, like company has the good vibes. So I'm going to really encourage you to try and be more objective than that. Like think all these companies like political actors, they have all the leaders have many incentives. They have many different goals, not all of which are noble. And then try and just like actually get down to the level of specific decisions and track record that they have. And did they actually make the hard decision in that case or not? and try and. be grounded in objective decisions as much as possible. Or when they made this commitment, did they follow through on it? What do people say about this person's character who know them well? And actually try and take a view on it rather than just go with vibes. That's about assessing the company. With assessing yourself, that's even harder because you're going to be super biased there. This is just one small technique, but I do think cultivating some close friends who are willing to call you out on stuff is really helpful for this. And most people won't really call you out. They'll just go along and they want to have a friendly relationship. So if there are any people in your life who will do that, I think that's really valuable. I mean, potentially making commitments to them as well about almost like a written down commitment. If this type of thing happens, I will do this. And that can make it. I think it's very easy for kind of your standards to slide over time gradually, right? Ways to just have some kind of pre-commitment in the line where you're going to reassess, I think is really helpful as well. I guess a fourth thing that comes to mind is like you will become more similar to the people you work with. So again, that just means really taking seriously the context. And like we said with the 10 people in the inside, most people can't, if they think there's like a company that's being really reckless, most people can't actually hack like going in there and trying to make it better. That's like actually a very difficult thing to do. So I think be skeptical of your abilities in the prevailing culture, in the people around you. And so just focus on picking the right culture in the 1st place. One other argument that people have made a lot who I think are especially skeptical of AI companies, but I guess just maybe just have a hype doom as you framed it earlier, is that safety work is ultimately still counterproductive. Sometimes that's framed as saying safety ultimately is just an accelerant of the capability frontier. For example, we had things like RLHF that were supposed to be a safety measure. And in some sense, they do make the model, any given individual model, safer to use. But then they also have had the property of making the AIs much more useful and just accelerating the overall pace of development in the space, bringing lots more resources in as it became clear that, hey, these things can in fact be harnessed and become super useful. And I wonder how you feel about that now. The argument that those people usually make is just try to shut the whole thing down. And this is not my point of view to be clear, because I do really value the upside that we're getting. But There is some truth to that argument. I can't quite dismiss it. How would you assess that argument and how moved people should be by the sort of even AI safety, even technical AI safety work is still bad argument.…

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