(Epistemic status: publication date is significant.)

Some observers have argued that the totality of "AI safety" and "alignment" efforts to date have plausibly had a negative rather than positive impact on the ultimate prospects for safe and aligned artificial general intelligence. This perverse outcome is possible because research "intended" to help with AI alignment can have a larger impact on AI capabilities, moving existentially-risky systems closer to us in time without making corresponding cumulative progress on the alignment problem.

When things are going poorly, one is often inclined to ask "when it all went wrong." In this context, some identify the founding of OpenAI in 2015 as a turning point, being casually downstream of safety concerns despite the fact no one who had been thinking seriously about existential risk thought the original vision of OpenAI was a good idea.

But if we're thinking about counterfactual impacts [...]

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