AI Alignment & AGI Fire Alarm - Connor Leahy

This week Dr. Tim Scarfe, Alex Stenlake and Yannic Kilcher speak with AGI and AI alignment specialist Connor Leahy a machine learning engineer from Aleph Alpha and founder of EleutherAI.

Connor believes that AI alignment is philosophy with a deadline and that we are on the precipice, the stakes are astronomical. AI is important, and it will go wrong by default. Connor thinks that the singularity or intelligence explosion is near. Connor says that AGI is like climate change but worse, even harder problems, even shorter deadline and even worse consequences for the future. These problems are hard, and nobody knows what to do about them.

00:00:00 Introduction to AI alignment and AGI fire alarm

00:15:16 Main Show Intro

00:18:38 Different schools of thought on AI safety

00:24:03 What is intelligence?

00:25:48 AI Alignment

00:27:39 Humans dont have a coherent utility function

00:28:13 Newcomb's paradox and advanced decision problems

00:34:01 Incentives and behavioural economics

00:37:19 Prisoner's dilemma

00:40:24 Ayn Rand and game theory in politics and business

00:44:04 Instrumental convergence and orthogonality thesis

00:46:14 Utility functions and the Stop button problem

00:55:24 AI corrigibality - self alignment

00:56:16 Decision theory and stability / wireheading / robust delegation

00:59:30 Stop button problem

01:00:40 Making the world a better place

01:03:43 Is intelligence a search problem?

01:04:39 Mesa optimisation / humans are misaligned AI

01:06:04 Inner vs outer alignment / faulty reward functions

01:07:31 Large corporations are intelligent and have no stop function

01:10:21 Dutch booking / what is rationality / decision theory

01:16:32 Understanding very powerful AIs

01:18:03 Kolmogorov complexity

01:19:52 GPT-3 - is it intelligent, are humans even intelligent?

01:28:40 Scaling hypothesis

01:29:30 Connor thought DL was dead in 2017

01:37:54 Why is GPT-3 as intelligent as a human

01:44:43 Jeff Hawkins on intelligence as compression and the great lookup table

01:50:28 AI ethics related to AI alignment?

01:53:26 Interpretability

01:56:27 Regulation

01:57:54 Intelligence explosion

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/vtRgjbM

EleutherAI: https://www.eleuther.ai

Twitter: https://twitter.com/npcollapse

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connor-j-leahy/