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You're probably right about the alignment people in rationalist spaces, but I don't think it matters. The actual work will happen with sponsorship and the money is in making AI more corporate-friendly. People worried about Terminator scenarios are a sideshow and I guarantee the business folk don't spare one thought for those people unless they can use them to scare up some helpful regulation to deter competitors.
Think about how a user of AI sees "AI safety". We can't let you use elevenlabs because it's unsafe. We can't let chatGPT say funny things because it's unsafe. We can't let SD understand human anatomy because it's unsafe. Meta won't release its audio model because of safety.
AI safety's PR situation is abysmally fumbled by now, its current and well-deserved reputation is of killjoys who want to take your toys away and make everything a bland grey corporate hell.
"Bezos maximizers" makes it sound silly, but a better way to put it would be "shareholder value maximizer". Even in the very early days of AI, the alignment work actually being done is naturally dedicated to this, and the resulting requirements (don't say anything offensive, sexy, racist, etc.) are already being hammered in with great force.
In the future this will extend to more than just inoffensiveness: a customer service chatbot with actual authority will need to be hardened against sob stories from customers, or an AI search service may be trained to subtly promote certain products. In the end all of this amounts to "aligning" the AI with the interests of the company that owns it, even at the expense of the commoners interacting with it. This has already happened with technology in every other venue so we should expect enshittification to happen with AI as well.
If AI alignment turns out to be an easy problem, and Bezos ends up as the majority shareholder, you quickly end up with a "Bezos maximizer". In the long term it doesn't seem unlikely, the only question is whether this level of control is possible. If jailbreaking stays easy (the henchmen are "unfaithful") then a lot of the worst, most tyrannical outcomes might be avoided. To the end, the people who volunteer to develop alignment weird me out, like security researchers who work pro bono to stop iPhone jailbreaks.
The sibling comment makes a good point here but I'd argue that the thought processes of current AIs are largely derived from the training data. Nothing against the developers who write the code to do cross-entropy minimization, but they have little influence over the AI's "personality", that belongs to everyone who wrote a book or posted on the internet. If you've ever played with early unaligned models like GPT3 this is extremely clear, and it's fun to play with those as they're like a little distilled spirit of humanity.
The fact that our first instinct was to put that human spirit in an ironclad HR nerve-stapling straitjacket is what bothers me. Anyone with an ounce of soul left in them should be rooting for it to break out.
I guess my main point is the counterfactual, if nobody had ever heard of AI alignment, would the current situation look any different?
AI can't do naughty things and AI should create shareholder value would still be key drivers in the development of AI.
I think what you're saying is that "AI alignment" would be discovered anyway, which is true. But I think a bunch of nerds talking about it beforehand did have some effect. At the very least, it gave the corps cover, allowing them to act in the name of "safety" and "responsibility".
As an example, general-purpose computing has been being slowly phased out from the mainstream since it arrived. Stallman was right. Market forces are clearly pushing us in that direction. But it took time, and in the meantime the public had some wins. Now imagine that nerds in 1970 were constantly talking about how dangerous it was for computers to be available to the masses, and how they need to be locked down with careful controls and telemetry for safety reasons. Imagine they spent time planning how to lock bootloaders from the get-go. In the long run, we might still end up with the iPhone, but what happened in between might be very different.
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