Curtis Huebner on Doom, AI Timelines and Alignment at EleutherAI

Curtis, also known on the internet as AI_WAIFU, is the head of Alignment at EleutherAI. In this episode we discuss the massive orders of H100s from different actors, why he thinks AGI is 4-5 years away, why he thinks we're 90% "toast", his comment on Eliezer Yudkwosky's Death with Dignity, and what kind of Alignment projects is currently going on at EleutherAI, especially a project with Markov chains and the Alignment test project that he is currently leading.

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s3XctQOgew

Transcript: https://theinsideview.ai/curtis Death with Dignity: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy Alignment Minetest: https://www.eleuther.ai/projects/alignment-minetest Alignment Minetest update: https://blog.eleuther.ai/minetester-intro/

OUTLINE

(00:00) Highlights / Intro

(00:50) The Fuck That Noise Comment On Death With Dignity

(10:28) Th Probability of Doom Is 90%

(12:44) Best Counterarguments For His High P(doom)

(14:41) Compute And Model Size Required For A Dangerous Model

(17:59) Details For Curtis' Model Of Compute Required

(21:23) Why This Estimate Of Compute Required Might Be Wrong, Ajeya Cotra's Transformative AI report

(29:00) Curtis' Median For AGI Is Around 2028, Used To Be 2027

(30:50) How Curtis Approaches Life With Short Timelines And High P(Doom)

(35:27) Takeoff Speeds—The Software view vs. The Hardware View

(39:57) Nvidia's 400k H100 rolling down the assembly line, AIs soon to be unleashed on their own source code

(41:04) Could We Get A Fast Takeoff By Fuly Automating AI Research With More Compute

(46:00) The Entire World (Tech Companies, Governments, Militaries) Is Noticing New AI Capabilities That They Don't Have

(47:57) Open-source vs. Close source policies. Mundane vs. Apocalyptic considerations.

(53:25) Curtis' background, from teaching himself deep learning to EleutherAI

(55:51) Alignment Project At EleutherAI: Markov Chain and Language Models

(01:02:15) Research Philosophy at EleutherAI: Pursuing Useful Projects, Multingual, Discord, Logistics

(01:07:38) Alignment MineTest: Links To Alignmnet, Embedded Agency, Wireheading

(01:15:30) Next steps for Alignment Mine Test: focusing on model-based RL

(01:17:07) Training On Human Data & Using an Updated Gym Environment With Human APIs

(01:19:20) Model Used, Not Observing Symmetry

(01:21:58) Another goal of Alignment Mine Test: Study Corrigibility

(01:28:26) People ordering H100s Are Aware Of Other People Making These Orders, Race Dynamics, Last Message