EA - Eli Lifland on Navigating the AI Alignment Landscape by Ozzie Gooen

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Eli Lifland on Navigating the AI Alignment Landscape, published by Ozzie Gooen on February 1, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Recently I had a conversation with Eli Lifland about the AI Alignment landscape. Eli Lifland has been a forecaster at Samotsvety and has been investigating said landscape.I’ve known Eli for the last 8 months or so, and have appreciated many of his takes on AI alignment strategy.This was my first recorded video, so there were a few issues, but I think most of it is understandable.Full (edited) transcript below. I suggest browsing the section titles for a better overview of our discussion.TranscriptSectionsSamotsvety, a Recent Forecasting OrganizationReading, “Is Power-Seeking AI an Existential Risk?”Categories of AI Failures: Accident, Misuse, and StructuralWho Is Making Strategic Progress on Alignment?Community Building: Arguments ForCommunity Building: Fellowships and MentorshipCruxes in the AI Alignment SpaceCrux: How Promising is AI Interpretability?Crux: Should We Use Narrow AIs to Help Solve Alignment?The Need for AI Alignment BenchmarksCrux: Conceptual Insights vs. Empirical IterationVehicles and Planes as Potential MetaphorsSamotsvety, a Recent Forecasting OrganizationOzzie Gooen: So to get started, I want to talk a little bit about Samotsvety.Eli Lifland: It's a Russian name. Samotsvety currently has about 15 forecasters. We've been releasing forecasts for the community on topics such as nuclear risk and AI. We’re considering how to create forecasts for different clients and make public forecasts on existential risk, particularly AI.Team forecasting has been valuable, and I've encouraged more people to do it. We have a weekly call where we choose questions to discuss in advance. If people have time, they make their forecasts beforehand, and then we discuss the differences and debate. It's beneficial for team bonding, forming friendships, and potential future work collaborations.It's also interesting to see which forecasts are correct when they resolve. It's a good activity for different groups, such as AI community groups, to try.Ozzie Gooen: How many people are in the group right now?Eli Lifland: Right now, it's about 15, but on any given week, probably closer to five to ten can come. Initially, it was just us three. It was just Nuño, Misha, and I, and we would meet each weekend and discuss different questions on either Foretell (now INFER) or Good Judgment Open, but now it's five to ten people per week, from a total pool of 15 people.Ozzie Gooen: That makes sense. I know Samotsvety has worked on nuclear risk and a few other posts. What do you forecast when you're not working on those megaprojects?Eli Lifland: Yeah. We do a mix of things. Some things we've done for specific clients haven't been released publicly. Some things are still in progress and haven't been released yet. For example, we've been working on forecasting the level of AI existential risk for the Future Fund, now called the Open Philanthropy Worldview Prize, for the past 1-2 months. We meet each week to revise and discuss different ways to decompose the risk, but we haven't finished yet. Hopefully, we will.Sometimes we just choose a few interesting questions for discussion, even if we don't publish a write-up on them.Ozzie Gooen: So the idea is to have more people do very similar things, just like other teams are three to five, they're pretty independent; do you give them like coaching or anything? If I wanted to start my own group like this, what do I do?Eli Lifland: Feel free to reach out to any of us for advice on how we did it. As I mentioned, it was fairly simple—choosing and discussing questions each week.In terms of value, I believe it was valuable for all of us and many others who joined us. Some got more interested in effec...