Rob Wiblin

We don't know exactly what commitments we will want to have made.

You might end up committing to something that is useless or even actively harmful.

But if you think about why do people make commitments at all, there's a couple of different reasons.

One is that they want to, I guess, tie themselves to the mast against future temptation to do the wrong thing.

There's also, I guess, that they want to communicate to other people what they're going to do so it makes it easier for them to coordinate.

Perhaps you could reduce race dynamics by making particular commitments.

And I guess in this multi-person, multi-player situation, there's an extra reason that exists, which is that external people want to pressure Google DeepMind or they want to pressure AI companies to act in a particular way.

It's very difficult for them.

It's very difficult to communicate

you know, we're committed to doing the right thing, whatever that turns out to be.

So instead, they want to pressure you to do specific things that they suspect will be useful, might not be the case, but they kind of best guess as to what they will want you to do in future.

And that's maybe the most practical thing that they can actually campaign on.

What would you make of those kind of arguments for actually making commitments?

But because the companies won't stick to bad goals that they're given or to any goals?

Hey everyone, Rob here.

To avoid any confusion, I just wanted to point out that Rohin said the above before Anthropic released the third version of their responsible scaling policy, which indeed mostly dropped the use of the term commitment, giving a justification related to the stuff that Rohin is saying here.

All right, back to the show.

Because Google is more conservative about the commitments that it makes, it's actually more likely to follow through on the things that it does say it will do.

That's right.

They're very paranoid about commitments.