Joshua Achiam is the OpenAI Head of Mission Alignment

I start off this post with an apology for two related mistakes from last week.

The first is the easy correction: I incorrectly thought he was the head of ‘alignment’ at OpenAI rather than his actual title ‘mission alignment.’

Both are important, and make one's views important, but they’re very different.

The more serious error, which got quoted some elsewhere, was: In the section about OpenAI, I noted some past comments from Joshua Achiam, and interpreted them as him lecturing EAs that misalignment risk from AGI was not real.

While in isolation I believe this is a reasonable way to interpret this quote, this issue is important to get right especially if I’m going to say things like that. Looking at it only that way was wrong. I both used a poor method to contact [...]

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Outline:

(00:04) Joshua Achiam is the OpenAI Head of Mission Alignment

(01:50) Joshua Achiam Has a Very Different Model of AI Existential Risk

(05:00) Joshua is Strongly Dismissive of Alternative Models of AI X-Risk

(10:05) Would Ordinary Safety Practices Would Be Sufficient for AI?

(12:25) Visions of the Future

(14:53) Joshua Achiam versus Eliezer Yudkowsky

(22:47) People Are Going to Give AI Power

(29:32) Value is Complicated

(38:22) Conclusion

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First published:

Source:

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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