Link to original article
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My May 2023 priorities for AI x-safety: more empathy, more unification of concerns, and less vilification of OpenAI, published by Andrew Critch on May 24, 2023 on LessWrong.
I have a mix of views on AI x-risk in general — and on OpenAI specifically — that no one seems be able to remember, due to my views not being easily summarized as those of a particular tribe or social group or cluster. For some of the views I consider most neglected and urgently important at this very moment, I've decided to write them here, all-in-one-place to avoid presumptions that being "for X" means I'm necessarily "against Y" for various X and Y.
Probably these views will be confusing to read, especially if you're implicitly trying to pin down "which side" of some kind of debate or tribal affiliation I land on. I don't tend to choose my beliefs in a way that's strongly correlated with or caused by the people I affiliate with. As a result, I apologize in advance if I'm not easily remembered as "for" or "against" any particular protest or movement or statement, even though I in fact have pretty clear views on most topics in this space... the views just aren't correlated according to the usual social-correlation-matrix.
Anyhoo:
Regarding "pausing": I think pausing superintelligence development using collective bargaining agreements between individuals and/or states and/or companies is a good idea, along the lines of FLI's "Pause Giant AI Experiments", which I signed early and advocated for.
Regarding OpenAI, I feel overall positively about them:
I think OpenAI has been a net-positive influence for reducing x-risk from AI, mainly by releasing products in a sufficiently helpful-yet-fallible form that society is now able to engage in less-abstract more-concrete public discourse to come to grips AI and (soon) AI-risk.
I've found OpenAI's behaviors and effects as an institution to be well-aligned with my interpretations of what they've said publicly. That said, I'm also sympathetic to people other than me who expected more access to models or less access to models than what OpenAI has ended up granting; but my personal assessment, based on my prior expectations from reading their announcements, is "Yeah, this is what I thought you told us you'd do... thanks!". I've also found OpenAI's various public testimonies, especially to Congress, to move the needle on helping humanity come to grips with AI x-risk in a healthy and coordinated way (relative to what would happen if OpenAI made their testimony and/or products less publicly accessible). I also like their charter, which creates tremendous pressure on them from their staff and the public to behave in particular ways. This leaves me, on-net, a fan of OpenAI.
Given their recent post on Governance of Superintelligence, I can't tell if their approach to superintelligence is something I do or will agree with, but I expect to find that out over the next year or two, because of the openness of their communications and stance-taking. And, I appreciate the chance to for me, and the public, to engage in dialogue with them about it.
I think the world is vilifying OpenAI too much, and that doing so is probably net-negative for existential safety. Specifically, I think people are currently over-targeting OpenAI with criticism that's easy to formulate because of the broad availability of OpenAI's products, services, and public statements. This makes them more vulnerable to attack than other labs, and I think piling onto them for that is a mistake from an x-safety perspective, in the "shooting the messenger" category. I.e., over-targeting OpenAI with criticism right now is pushing present and future companies toward being less forthright in ways that OpenAI has been forthright, thereby training the world to have less awareness of x-risk and weaker collective orien...
view more