Ryan Kidd

So I actually don't know if you can avoid this.

The only way I could conceive of doing safety research that has no impact on capabilities until, I don't know, the final critical moment when you deploy it,

It's like being holed up in a lab somewhere with people that you utterly trust under crazy NDAs and only having access to staggering resources, whatever's required, because presumably maths and theoretical methods aren't enough.

to improve safety.

At least that seems to be the lesson of the last 10 to 20 years.

I don't know, I could be wrong, but it seems like the interplay between theory and empirical research is pretty vital for most types of disciplines like this.

So you have to have staggering resources, perfectly loyal teams, like all these NDAs, no one's going to reveal your research, and then you build the system in secret or something somehow, and then you deploy it.

Maybe you open source your alignment technology and everyone has it, or

Or somehow you disable all the bad actors or something.

It just seems like a very difficult prospect.

Maybe that's what they're trying.

I don't know.

So I'm not trying to defend research like this or even defend capabilities enhancing safety research per se.

I'm just saying that it's pretty hard to imagine a situation where you, because I think you do have to build the AGI at the end of the day.

And I know I'm alienating a lot of people who might watch the show when I say that, but I think that you kind of have to from a pragmatic perspective because the market forces driving this are very strong.

Now, there are some options that we could take, right?

We could build direct source comprehensive AI services.

So you never have to have like a centralized agent.

You have distributed kind of mechanisms, right?

You build scientist AI that is very narrow AI systems to serve a bunch of economic things.