Daniel Kokotajlo

And there is this – with lying, there is this thing where it's just really hard to keep an inconsistent false world model alive.

working with the people around you, and that's why psychopaths often get caught.

And so if you have all these AIs that are deployed to the economy and they're all working towards this big conspiracy, I feel like one of them who's siloed or loses internet access and has to confabulate a story will just get caught, and then you're like, wait, what the fuck?

And then, you know, you catch it before it's, like, taken over the world.

So it is the case that certain things that people would have considered egregious misalignment in the past are happening.

But also certain things which people who are especially worried about misalignment said would be impossible to solve have just been solved in the normal course of getting more capabilities.

Like Eliezer had that thing about can you even specify what you want the AI to do without the AI totally misunderstanding you and then just converting the universe to paperclothes.

And now just by the nature of

GPT-4 having to understand natural language.

It totally has a common sense understanding of what you're trying to make it do, right?

So I think this sort of like trend cuts both ways, basically.

It seems like in the whole scenario, a big part of why certain things happen is because of this race with China.

And if you read the scenarios, basically the difference between the one where things go well and the one where things don't go well is whether we decide to slow down despite that risk.

I guess the question I really want to know the answer to is like, one, it just seems like you're saying, well, it's a mistake to try to race against China or to race intensely against China.

it leads to nationalization and it leads to us not prioritizing alignment.

Maybe I should have asked you that at the beginning of the conversation.

Let's talk about geopolitics next.

So describe to me how you foresee the relationship between the government and the AI labs to proceed, how you expect that relationship in China to proceed, and how you expect the relationship between the US and China to proceed.

Three simple questions.

Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no.