If I really thought what my company was working on had a greater than 1% chance of ending human civilization I would feel obligated to destroy what my company was working on.
Given they keep grinding away towards our alleged collective doom, I suspect it’s being overstated. Nobody knows what P(doom) actually is but I suspect it’s orders of magnitude closer to epsilon than 1.
Recall Google’s Blake Lemoine who thought an old version of Gemini was sentient.
The people who think as you think indeed have left or never joined.
The people still there necessarily think they can make a difference.
I never applied to any of them because I didn't think I could make a difference.
I currently have one idea that may help reduce risk; if I can turn that idea into research, I'll publish it for free for everyone.
I don't expect it to be an important idea.
> Recall Google’s Blake Lemoine who thought an old version of Gemini was sentient.
Indeed. Current LLMs are sychopants boosting the users' own beliefs, I also think this causes researchers to have stronger beliefs than they had before.
My own estimation happens to also be around this risk (0.1) over my lifetime, without using an LLM as a conversation partner in reaching this number.
It is necessarily high-variance: we can't look at alternate realities. I base it on my expectation of how rapidly capabilities will increase the harm done when mistakes happen, vs. the chance that some instance of harm causes governments to change the law.
Given they keep grinding away towards our alleged collective doom, I suspect it’s being overstated. Nobody knows what P(doom) actually is but I suspect it’s orders of magnitude closer to epsilon than 1.
Recall Google’s Blake Lemoine who thought an old version of Gemini was sentient.