Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
19 transcript-backed records
01 / prediction
“That's a lot, right? So we should definitely be considering scenarios that are sooner, right, and particularly, I think the sooner AGI happens, the more dangerous it might be, right?”
02 / belief
“Pivotal, ERA, PIBS, Laser Labs, SPAR, ARENA for technical. I think ASTRA is now running again.”
03 / belief
“I think Matt has to be pretty careful, in terms of obviously our 501c3 spending requirements for advocacy.”
04 / belief
“Like you have I think the going rate for far AI's research scientists are something like 100, 170K, so significantly lower.”
05 / belief
“I think that the way we do it is pretty good and that we have a bunch of, for our model API calls and all that, we have specific organization accounts that we sign people up, and then we kind of give them a budget and so on and top them up as necessary.”
06 / belief
“Now you could say like, okay, what if you also tried to pour resources into like secret AI safety projects at the same time, delay RLHF, delay ChatGPT, build up the AI safety field, uh uh via networks the myri summer schools weren't doing a lot and MATS came along uh just before the ChatGPT moment December 2021 and yeah I think like the first MATS cohorts were a little bit less like a little bit more directionless than the later cohorts definitely like I think safety research really kicked into gear after we had ChatGPT uh not to say that was the only cause but there were like a lot of things happening around that time and I think that like Definitely larger, more capable models have enabled certain types of essential safety research you could not do with smaller models.”
07 / commitment
“I will say that given that the value of AGI is estimated as at least between 1 and 17 quadrillion dollars, I think that's a lot of money.”
08 / belief
“With some additional caveat that like we also have some diversity picks. and minimum requirements because we want to support a great breadth of research and we think that the mentor selection committee on the whole might be biased in some ways as well.”
09 / uncertainty
“The time period required would require massive amounts of cognitive labor and human trials and stuff like that. And I don't know, it does sound very sci-fi, so I don't think we should rely on something like that, though I'm all for people pursuing moonshots on the side.”
10 / belief
“I think even in some of the interp streams as well, it's very possible to enter an interpretability stream and bring it with it like some model of the kind of theory-based interpretability mechanism or strategy that you want to pursue and then see that executed on.”
11 / belief
“Uh, though it does seem like there's some debate about this and it seems like some of, some of the deception, it's far from what we might call consequentialist, like, like ******** consequentialist deception in most situations, but I think like Alignment faking and some other papers have shown that there are such, you can like create situations where AI will deceive the user to achieve some like ulterior objective, which was something that was like deliberately given to the AI as an objective.”
12 / recommendation
“on the margin because I think we do have some very strong central research bets that we need more people pursuing because they will yield demonstrable results.”
13 / evaluation
“It's a much slower process. And I think that's because the commitment is less on our end.”
14 / prediction
“Which, by the way, is predicated on this idea that verification is easier than generation, P versus NP, blah, blah, blah, especially if you can see the other person's thoughts and they can't see yours. It does make sense to be at the frontier from that perspective, but I will say that I think the main reason that the companies are doing this is obviously to make money.”
15 / prediction
“I will say this, that like amplifiers, while not currently the most in demand across all different hierarchies of AI safety organization or team are, I think, probably in the next year or two going to be the most in demand.”
16 / prediction
“Epoch recently did a study where they showed the pace of new AI companies approaching the frontier is just so much faster than the pace of which the frontier moves because there's an abundance of chips, there's an abundance of data and methods.”
17 / prediction
“I think building a second species is actually going to violate some deep social more in the same way that human cloning would be, but I don't think people will see it that way. So that leaves us with the fact that we actually have to build the AGI because But if we can build products that are safer, right, or perhaps are under some strict regulatory control that we have some like really like ideally like, I don't know, 10 year international slow phased entry to the new AGI world, right, where all these, you know, countries and companies are kind of forced to be very careful and collaborative in the way that they align their models, then we're in a much better world.”
18 / preference
“I guess I could shout out, I mean, it's hard to play favorites because Matt's is like, we've worked with so many people and we're trying to be very broad, but Yeah, I guess like in terms of nonprofits specifically, because maybe they don't get as much attention, obviously Redwood and Meter and Randcast, Apollo Research, FAR, Goodfire, TruthfullyAI, LawZero, Miri, plenty of others.”
19 / evaluation
“I think that math selection doesn't currently emphasize breadth of knowledge very much, mostly because mentors don't necessarily want that.”