blog – Page 4 – AI Impacts

Takeaways from safety by default interviews

Asya Bergal

Last year, several researchers at AI Impacts (primarily Robert Long and I) interviewed prominent researchers inside and outside of the AI safety field who are relatively optimistic about advanced AI being developed safely. These interviews were originally intended to focus narrowly on reasons for optimism, but we ended up covering a variety of topics, including AGI timelines, the likelihood of current techniques leading to AGI, and what the right things to do in AI safety are right now. (…)

Atari early

By Katja Grace, 1 April 2020 Deepmind announced that their Agent57 beats the ‘human baseline’ at all 57 Atari games usually used as a benchmark. I think this is probably enough to resolve one of

Three kinds of competitiveness

By Daniel Kokotajlo, 30 March 2020 In this post, I distinguish between three different kinds of competitiveness — Performance, Cost, and Date — and explain why I think these distinctions are worth the brainspace they

AGI in a vulnerable world

By Asya Bergal, 25 March 2020 I’ve been thinking about a class of AI-takeoff scenarios where a very large number of people can build dangerous, unsafe AGI before anyone can build safe AGI. This seems

Cortés, Pizarro, and Afonso as precedents for takeover

Daniel Kokotajlo, 29 February 2020 Epistemic status: I am not a historian, nor have I investigated these case studies in detail. I admit I am still uncertain about how the conquistadors were able to colonize

Robin Hanson on the futurist focus on AI

By Asya Bergal, 13 November 2019 Robert Long and I recently talked to Robin Hanson—GMU economist, prolific blogger, and longtime thinker on the future of AI—about the amount of futurist effort going into thinking about

Rohin Shah on reasons for AI optimism

By Asya Bergal, 31 October 2019 I along with several AI Impacts researchers recently talked to Rohin Shah about why he is relatively optimistic about AI systems being developed safely. Rohin Shah is a 5th

The unexpected difficulty of comparing AlphaStar to humans

By Rick Korzekwa, 17 September 2019 Artificial intelligence defeated a pair of professional Starcraft II players for the first time in December 2018. Although this was generally regarded as an impressive achievement, it quickly became

Paul Christiano on the safety of future AI systems

By Asya Bergal, 11 September 2019 As part of our AI optimism project, we talked to Paul Christiano about why he is relatively hopeful about the arrival of advanced AI going well. Paul Christiano works

Soft takeoff can still lead to decisive strategic advantage

By Daniel Kokotajlo, 11 September 2019 Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. [Epistemic status: Argument by analogy to historical cases. Best case scenario it’s just one argument among many.