Simeon Campos on Short Timelines, AI Governance and AI Alignment Field Building

Siméon Campos is the founder of EffiSciences and SaferAI, mostly focusing on alignment field building and AI Governance. More recently, he started the newsletter Navigating AI Risk on AI Governance, with a first post on slowing down AI. Note: this episode was recorded in October 2022 so a lot of the content being discussed references what was known at the time, in particular when discussing GPT-3 (insteaed of GPT-3) or ACT-1 (instead of more recent things like AutoGPT). Transcript: https://theinsideview.ai/simeon Host: https://twitter.com/MichaelTrazzi Simeon: https://twitter.com/Simeon_Cps OUTLINE (00:00) Introduction(01:12) EffiSciences, SaferAI(02:31) Concrete AI Auditing Proposals(04:56) We Need 10K People Working On Alignment(11:08) What's AI Alignment(13:07) GPT-3 Is Already Decent At Reasoning(17:11) AI Regulation Is Easier In Short Timelines(24:33) Why Is Awareness About Alignment Not Widespread?(32:02) Coding AIs Enable Feedback Loops In AI Research(36:08) Technical Talent Is The Bottleneck In AI Research(37:58): 'Fast Takeoff' Is Asymptotic Improvement In AI Capabilities(43:52) Bear Market Can Somewhat Delay The Arrival Of AGI(45:55) AGI Need Not Require Much Intelligence To Do Damage(49:38) Putting Numbers On Confidence(54:36) RL On Top Of Coding AIs(58:21) Betting On Arrival Of AGI(01:01:47) Power-Seeking AIs Are The Objects Of Concern(01:06:43) Scenarios & Probability Of Longer Timelines(01:12:43) Coordination(01:22:49) Compute Governance Seems Relatively Feasible(01:32:32) The Recent Ban On Chips Export To China(01:38:20) AI Governance & Fieldbuilding Were Very Neglected(01:44:42) Students Are More Likely To Change Their Minds About Things(01:53:04) Bootcamps Are Better Medium Of Outreach(02:01:33) Concluding Thoughts