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What would be accomplished during a "six-month-pause" that would make it worth the enormous difficulty of getting that sort of international cooperation, even if the petition had any chance of success at all? Why should people concerned about unaligned AI consider this the best thing to spend their credibility and effort on? It's not like "alignment research" is some separate thing with a clear path forward, where if only we pause the AI training runs we'll have the time for a supercomputer to finish computing the Alignment Solution. Alignment researchers are stumbling around in the dark trying to think of ideas that will eventually help the AI developers when they hit superintelligence. Far more important to make sure that the first people to create a superintelligence consider "the superintelligence exterminates humanity" a real threat and try to guide their work accordingly, which if anything this interferes with by weakening the alignment-concerned faction within AI research. (The petition also talks about irrelevant and controversial nonsense like misinformation and automation, the last thing we want is alignment to be bureaucratized into a checklist of requirements for primitive AI while sidelining the real concern, or politicized into a euphemism for left-wing censorship.) Right now the leading AI research organization is run by people who started off trying to help AI alignment, that seems a lot better than the alternative! To quote Microsoft's "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4" paper:
Here is the baseline: if the first people to create superintelligence aren't concerned with alignment, there's a decent chance they will deliberately give it "agency and intrinsic motivations". (Not that I'm saying the Microsoft researchers necessarily would, maybe they only said that because LLMs are so far from superintelligence, but it isn't a promising sign.) Personally I'm inclined to believe that there's no reason a superintelligent AI needs to have goals, which would make "create a Tool AI and then ask it to suggest solutions to alignment" the most promising alignment method. But even if you think otherwise, surely the difference between having superintelligence developed by researchers who take alignment seriously and researchers who think "lets try giving the prospective superintelligence intrinsic motivations and write a paper about what happens!" matters a lot more than whatever "alignment researchers" are going to come up with in 6 months.
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