Scott Alexander

But I think that...

I've now become somewhat disillusioned and think that even if we do have a three-month lead, a six-month lead between the leading US project and any serious competitor, it's not at all a foregone conclusion that they will burn that lead for good purposes, either for safety or for constitutional power stuff.

I think the default outcome is that they just...

smoothly continue on without any serious refocusing.

And part of why I think this is because this is what a lot of the people at the company seem to be planning and saying they're going to do.

A lot of them are basically like, the AIs are just going to be misaligned by then.

They seem pretty good right now.

Like, oh yeah, sure, there were a few of those issues that various people have found, but we're ironing them out.

It's no big deal.

That's what a huge amount of these people think.

And then a bunch of other people think like,

even though they are more concerned about misalignment, they'll figure it out as they go along and there won't need to be any substantial slowdown.

Yeah, so basically I've become more disillusioned that they'll actually use that lead in any sort of reasonable, appropriate way.

And then I think that separately...

There's just a lot of intellectual progress that has to happen for the alignment problem to be more solved than it currently is now.

I think that currently there's various alignment teams at various companies that aren't talking that much with each other and sharing their results.

They're doing a little bit of sharing and a little bit of publishing, like we're seeing, but not as much as they could.

And then there's a bunch of smart people in academia that are basically not activated because they don't take all this stuff seriously yet.

And they're not really waking up to superintelligence yet.

And what I'm hoping will happen is that this situation will get better as time goes on.