Nobody’s on the ball on AGI alignment
Far fewer people are working on it than you might think, and even the alignment research that is happening is very much not on track. (But it’s a solvable problem, if we get our act together.)
Observing from afar, it's easy to think there's an abundance of people working on AGI safety. Everyone on your timeline is fretting about AI risk, and it seems like there is a well-funded EA-industrial-complex that has elevated this to their main issue. Maybe you've even developed a slight distaste for it all—it reminds you a bit too much of the woke and FDA bureaucrats, and Eliezer seems pretty crazy to you.
That’s what I used to think too, a couple of years ago. Then I got to see things more up close. And here’s the thing: nobody’s actually on the friggin’ ball on this one!
If timelines are short and we don’t get our act together, we’re in a lot of trouble. Scalable alignment—aligning superhuman AGI systems—is a real, unsolved problem. It’s quite simple: current alignment techniques rely on human supervision, but as models become superhuman, humans won’t be able to reliably supervise them.
