Thank you @RepCasar and to the other members of Congress for asking why we were fired + bringing up several safety concerns.
I agree the firing raises concerns about "how much OpenAI employees can engage with external parties, including when those external parties are conducting independent investigations of the company’s practices".
I feel sick after reading today’s METR report. I’m worried for my friends and family. I don’t know what evidence people will need to see before they start taking these risks seriously. If you’re undecided about helping, please act; there's many opportunities to help.
This report and reactions from people I trust (like Jake) are making me physically ill. As far as I can tell, Anthropic's central plan is to continue this acceleration of AI capabilities until we're getting decades of AI capabilities growth in a year. Given our very limited ability to understand or control AI systems, this would be extremely reckless and completely unacceptable, and it should be the single top priority of civil society and the US government to stop them and other companies from doing this.
I've always had substantially longer timelines than my friends at Anthropic — I've been concerned that they're in an echo chamber and believing the hype about their own models too much, and that they're underestimating bottlenecks and unknown unknowns. And there have definitely been specific occasions when they have overstated how much uplift they were getting from their models. Nonetheless, if METR is correct here (and I think they are among the most trustworthy sources on this topic), then my Anthropic friends have been much more right about timelines than me.
This report is also some evidence that a software-only singularity is plausible. I now think that we are more than 50% likely to have full blown superintelligence in the next 18 months, absent a slowdown. I need to call my family.
Our colleagues found that Anthropic’s capabilities progress has doubled, mainly due to AI. Ryan’s modeling from public info suggests the whole company’s R&D would be going 4-5x faster. Labor uplift would be higher still. This is a major update to very short timelines.
I cannot more emphatically reject this way of thinking. Everyone matters. Everyone is living a real life. No one is an NPC. It's a kind of madness to think that the will to power is a prerequisite for realness.
Even at their most aspirationally ASIpilled, the startup guys fail to grasp the enormity of what's coming. There won't be "commanding heights"; there won't be firms, or operators. It's all or nothing, a hundred or zero; "futurism is always extreme".
The benefits of abundant intelligence will accrue far outside of San Fransisco.
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Reading the most recent blogpost from Redwood on accelerating conceptual reasoning seems like another update towards Richard Ngo's position for me. Our community feels like it has contorted itself into reasoning that intuitively makes no sense, and part of that is abstracting into a particular kind of rational/game theoretic reasoning that leads one to these conclusions by disregarding basic premises about complex systems.
Ryan reported to me when we worked on Alignment Faking at Anthropic. He had access to sensitive information then and handled it with utmost professionalism. I trust Ryan a lot more than OpenAI here.
It sounds like OpenAI fired the three safety researchers because they used disappearing messages. It sounds like they weren't told not to; they were just fired without warning after the fact. Seems bad.