Looking back at the 2017 AI risk project and the conversation with Amodei
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An author looked back at the AI risk research he conducted after being laid off in 2017, including a conversation with Dario Amodei, who was then at OpenAI. The author says he found the right person and heard highly prescient ideas, but got the bottom-line judgment wrong. This retrospective does not provide more details about the content of the conversation or the basis for the judgment.
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- Hacker News AIReviewing My 2017 AI Risk Project Including with Dario at OpenAI
The author revisits a 2017 series of twelve blog posts on AI risk, including conversations with Dario Amodei, Michael Littman, and others, concluding he talked to the right people and heard prescient ideas but got the bottom line wrong. He notes that prosaic AGI, which many mainstream ML researchers then thought impossible, largely happened through scaling, and that Concrete Problems in AI Safety held up better than Highly Reliable Agent Design. He says he never asked Amodei whether AI reliably doing what we want might become a limiting factor on AI progress, potentially accelerating development along riskier short timelines.
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