Scott Alexander

We have lots of opinions about policy and about what is to be done and stuff like that, but we're trying to save those opinions for later and subsequent work.

So I'm happy to talk about it if you're interested, but it's not what we've spent most of our time thinking about right now.

I flip-flopped on this.

I used to be, I think I used to be against and then I became for and then now I'm more lenient.

think i'm still four but i'm not i'm uncertain so um i think you should go back in time like three years ago i would have been against nationalization for the reasons you mentioned um where i was like look the companies are like taking this stuff seriously and talking all good talk about how they're going to slow down and like pivot to alignment research when time comes and like

We don't want to get into a Manhattan Project race against China because then there will be blah, blah, blah.

Now I have less faith in the companies than I did three years ago.

And so I've shifted more of my hope towards hoping that the government will step in.

Even though I don't have much hope that the government will do the right thing when the time comes.

I definitely have the concerns you mentioned there still.

I think that secrecy is...

has got huge downsides for overall, like, probability of success for humanity for both the concentration of power stuff and the loss of control alignment issues stuff.

Yeah, so I think traditionally in the AI safety community, there's been this idea, which I myself used to believe, that it's an incredibly high priority to basically have way better information security.

And if you're going to be trying to build AGI...

you should be not publishing your research because that helps other less responsible actors build AGI.

And the whole game plan is for a responsible actor to get to AGI first and then stop

and burn down their lead time over everybody else and spend that lead on making it safe and then proceed.

And so if you're publishing all your research, then there's less lead time because your competitors are going to be close behind you.

And other reasons too, but that's one reason why I think historically people such as myself have been pro-secrecy even.

Another reason, of course, is obviously you don't want rivals to be stealing your stuff.