David Krueger–Coordination, Alignment, Academia

David Krueger is an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge and got his PhD from Mila. His research group focuses on aligning deep learning systems, but he is also interested in governance and global coordination. He is famous in Cambridge for not having an AI alignment research agenda per se, and instead he tries to enable his seven PhD students to drive their own research. In this episode we discuss AI Takeoff scenarios, research going on at David's lab, Coordination, Governance, Causality, the public perception of AI Alignment research and how to change it. Youtube: https://youtu.be/bDMqo7BpNbk Transcript: https://theinsideview.ai/david OUTLINE (00:00) Highlights (01:06) Incentivized Behaviors and Takeoff Speeds (17:53) Building Models That Understand Causality (31:04) Agency, Acausal Trade And Causality in LLMs (40:44) Recursive Self Improvement, Bitter Lesson And Alignment (01:03:17) AI Governance And Coordination (01:13:26) David’s AI Alignment Research Lab and the Existential Safety Community (01:24:13) On The Public Perception of AI Alignment (01:35:58) How To Get People In Academia To Work on Alignment (02:00:19) Decomposing Learning Curves, Latest Research From David Krueger’s Lab (02:20:06) Safety-Performance Trade-Offs (02:30:20) Defining And Characterizing Reward Hacking (02:40:51) Playing Poker With Ethan Caballero, Timelines