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You can’t optimise an allocation of resources if you don’t know what the current one is. Existing maps of alignment research are mostly too old to guide you and the field has nearly no ratchet, no common knowledge of what everyone is doing and why, what is abandoned and why, what is renamed, what relates to what, what is going on. 

This post is mostly just a big index: a link-dump for as many currently active AI safety agendas as we could find. But even a linkdump is plenty subjective. It maps work to conceptual clusters 1-1, aiming to answer questions like “I wonder what happened to the exciting idea I heard about at that one conference” and “I just read a post on a surprising new insight and want to see who else has been working on this”, “I wonder roughly how many people are working on that thing”. 

This doc is unreadably long, so that it can be Ctrl-F-ed. Also this way you can fork the list and make a smaller one. 

Most of you should only read the editorial and skim the section you work in.

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zaaGsFBeDTpCsYHef/shallow-review-of-live-agendas-in-alignment-and-safety#More_meta

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The author's Substack:
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You know it must be out there, but you mostly never see it.

Author's Note 1: In something like 75% of possible futures, this will be the last essay that I publish on LessWrong.  Future content will be available on my substack, where I'm hoping people will be willing to chip in a little commensurate with the value of the writing, and (after a delay) on my personal site (not yet live).  I decided to post this final essay here rather than silently switching over because many LessWrong readers would otherwise never find out that they could still get new Duncanthoughts elsewhere.

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KpMNqA5BiCRozCwM3/social-dark-matter

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Status: Vague, sorry. The point seems almost tautological to me, and yet also seems like the correct answer to the people going around saying “LLMs turned out to be not very want-y, when are the people who expected 'agents' going to update?”, so, here we are.

Okay, so you know how AI today isn't great at certain... let's say "long-horizon" tasks? Like novel large-scale engineering projects, or writing a long book series with lots of foreshadowing?

(Modulo the fact that it can play chess pretty well, which is longer-horizon than some things; this distinction is quantitative rather than qualitative and it's being eroded, etc.)

And you know how the AI doesn't seem to have all that much "want"- or "desire"-like behavior?

(Modulo, e.g., the fact that it can play chess pretty well, which indicates a [...]

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First published:
November 24th, 2023

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AWoZBzxdm4DoGgiSj/ability-to-solve-long-horizon-tasks-correlates-with-wanting

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Recently, I have been learning about industry norms, legal discovery proceedings, and incentive structures related to companies building risky systems. I wanted to share some findings in this post because they may be important for the frontier AI community to understand well. 

TL;DR

Documented communications of risks (especially by employees) make companies much more likely to be held liable in court when bad things happen. The resulting Duty to Due Diligence from Discoverable Documentation of Dangers (the 6D effect) can make companies much more cautious if even a single email is sent to them communicating a risk.

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/J9eF4nA6wJW6hPueN/the-6d-effect-when-companies-take-risks-one-email-can-be

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