jacquesthibs

Containment is generally just a thing that people say we should at least try to do to buy time, but there’s very little discussion beyond that. No alignment researcher is arguing that containment solves our problems. The solution to alignment needs to work even if we don’t box the AI. The point is that, yes, alignment is indeed hard.

I think you’re a bit confused. Alignment researchers are the ones saying it will likely be impossible to box a superintelligent AI and that this is one small part as to why this whole AI alignment thing is hard in the first place. They are precisely working on the problem because there seems to be no easy solution like boxing the AI. And so they need to find a way to make sure the AI is aligned with our values even if the AI has the capability of escaping any box we put it in. In reality, companies will not even try to box the AI so it’s probably irrelevant.

As I said in my other comment:

“The creator of the course was a research engineer at DeepMind and now works at OpenAI. Several people at those orgs have acted as facilitators for the course since its creation.”

The course is an intro to AI risk. Nobody acts like an AGI safety researcher when they finish the course with no ML experience. The majority keep skilling up for a while, which includes replicating ML papers.

Me personally, I started doing ML in 2015 and got into AI alignment in early 2022.

The creator of the course was a research engineer at DeepMind and now works at OpenAI. Several people at those orgs have acted as facilitators for the course since its creation.

The purpose of the course is to give people an introduction to AI risk so that they can start getting into the field. Some who take it have been ML engineers for a while and some are just learning about the field.

The expectation was never to consider yourself a full-fledged alignment researcher once you finish this course, but instead to get people started. Many people will spend a bunch of time doing things like implementing GPT from scratch and replicate papers after this to try to get an internship at one of the big orgs. And then do other things to slowly make their way to producing great research. Sometimes ya’ll just want to hate on this site.