Rob Wiblin

And it sounds to me like your attitude is there's no sort of set of things you can write down and commitments you can make or good intentions you can write down on a piece of paper that can at all substitute for having, I guess, like wise, well-motivated people in the positions of decision-making over these things.

And people who like understand the things well enough that they can actually make the right decision if they're so motivated.

Is that basically right?

Mostly right.

The most common question from the audience was, does the AGI safety and alignment team have a hard veto on, I guess, any aspect of training or deploying a potential future AGI?

If Sundar Pichai wants to deploy a model or to train a model that you don't think is safe, can he just overrule everyone on your team?

People who are broadly worried about the direction that everything is going, I think more often than not, they feel themselves to be in primarily an adversarial relationship with AI companies.

You think that that's not the case, and that, in fact, they're more in a kind of apathetic relationship, or the companies are in an apathetic relationship with that group of people.

Yeah, explain that.

I guess this fragility of the process, I mean, doesn't that mean that it's actually going to be quite hard to respond quickly in real time to any new safety concerns?

Because you or anyone else might be saying, you know, we should change this product.

And you'll be like, no, you're going to break this entire Rube Goldberg machine that we've built to make this product.

So you said that it's a lot more important to have access and transparency for expert auditors, monitors, regulators, but don't we at least need enough public understanding or public transparency such that both like voters in general and politicians specifically are providing the resourcing, the funding, the backing, the will

for those auditors, for those regulators, so that they can insist on getting the access that they need, even if perhaps a company, or for whatever reason, they need resourcing in order to get the job done.

I think one of the most analogous areas of regulation and monitoring currently, in my mind, to all of this is, I guess, the Federal Reserve or Central Bank oversight of the financial system of banks and financial stability.

Incredibly technical area, very difficult to track.

I guess the public has a broad desire not to have a financial crisis.

And not to have banks go bankrupt.

But I think a very limited understanding, I guess, of the specifics.

And I suppose the analogy there would be that, I guess, the public, they understand on some level that this is a serious issue.