That's one reason why an outspoken method could be better. But it seems like you'd want some weighing of the pros and cons here? (Possible drawbacks of such messaging could include it being more likely to be ignored, or cause a backlash, or cause the issue to become polarized, etc.)

Like, presumably the experts who recommend being careful what you say also know that some people discount obviously political speech, but still recommend/practice being careful what you say. If so, that would suggest this one reason is not on its own enough to override the experts' opinion and practice.

Everything that happened since then has made it clear that this is not the case; that all these big flashy commitments like Superalignment were just safety-washing and virtue signaling. They were only going to do alignment work inasmuch as that didn't interfere with racing full-speed towards greater capabilities.

It's not clear to me that it was just safety-washing and virtue signaling. I think a better model is something like: there are competing factions within OAI that have different views, that have different interests, and that, as a result, prioritize scaling/productization/safety/etc. to varying degrees. Superalignment likely happened because (a) the safety faction (Ilya/Jan/etc.) wanted it, and (b) the Sam faction also wanted it, or tolerated it, or agreed to it due to perceived PR benefits (safety-washing), or let it happen as a result of internal negotiation/compromise, or something else, or some combination of these things.

If OAI as a whole was really only doing anything safety-adjacent for pure PR or virtue signaling reasons, I think its activities would have looked pretty different. For one, it probably would have focused much more on appeasing policymakers than on appeasing the median LessWrong user. (The typical policymaker doesn't care about the superalignment effort, and likely hasn't even heard of it.) It would also not be publishing niche (and good!) policy/governance research. Instead, it would probably spend that money on actual PR (e.g., marketing campaigns) and lobbying.

I do think OAI has been tending more in that direction (that is, in the direction of safety-washing, and/or in the direction of just doing less safety stuff period). But it doesn't seem to me like it was predestined. I.e., I don't think it was "only going to do alignment work inasmuch as that didn't interfere with racing full-speed towards greater capabilities". Rather, it looks to me like things have tended that way as a result of external incentives (e.g., looming profit, Microsoft) and internal politics (in particular, the safety faction losing power). Things could have gone quite differently, especially if the board battle had turned out differently. Things could still change, the trend could still reverse, even though that seems improbable right now.

Fwiw, there is also AI governance work that is neither policy nor lab governance, in particular trying to answer broader strategic questions that are relevant to governance, e.g., timelines, whether a pause is desirable, which intermediate goals are valuable to aim for, and how much computing power Chinese actors will have access to. I guess this is sometimes called "AI strategy", but often the people/orgs working on AI governance also work on AI strategy, and vice versa, and they kind of bleed into each other.

How do you feel about that sort of work relative to the policy work you highlight above?

Open Philanthropy did donate $30M to OpenAI in 2017, and got in return the board seat that Helen Toner occupied until very recently. However, that was when OpenAI was a non-profit, and was done in order to gain some amount of oversight and control over OpenAI. I very much doubt any EA has donated to OpenAI unconditionally, or at all since then.

They often do things of the form "leaving out info, knowing this has misleading effects"

On that, here are a few examples of Conjecture leaving out info in what I think is a misleading way.

(Context: Control AI is an advocacy group, launched and run by Conjecture folks, that is opposing RSPs. I do not want to discuss the substance of Control AI’s arguments -- nor whether RSPs are in fact good or bad, on which question I don’t have a settled view -- but rather what I see as somewhat deceptive rhetoric.)

One, Control AI’s X account features a banner image with a picture of Dario Amodei (“CEO of Anthropic, $2.8 billion raised”) saying, “There’s a one in four chance AI causes human extinction.” That is misleading. What Dario Amodei has said is, “My chance that something goes really quite catastrophically wrong on the scale of human civilisation might be somewhere between 10-25%.” I understand that it is hard to communicate uncertainty in advocacy, but I think it would at least have been more virtuous to use the middle of that range (“one in six chance”), and to refer to “global catastrophe” or something rather than “human extinction”.

Two, Control AI writes that RSPs like Anthropic’s “contain wording allowing companies to opt-out of any safety agreements if they deem that another AI company may beat them in their race to create godlike AI”. I think that, too, is misleading. The closest thing Anthropic’s RSP says is:

However, in a situation of extreme emergency, such as when a clearly bad actor (such as a rogue state) is scaling in so reckless a manner that it is likely to lead to imminent global catastrophe if not stopped (and where AI itself is helpful in such defense), we could envisage a substantial loosening of these restrictions as an emergency response. Such action would only be taken in consultation with governmental authorities, and the compelling case for it would be presented publicly to the extent possible.

Anthropic’s RSP is clearly only meant to permit labs to opt out when any other outcome very likely leads to doom, and for this to be coordinated with the government, with at least some degree of transparency. The scenario is not “DeepMind is beating us to AGI, so we can unilaterally set aside our RSP”, but more like “North Korea is beating us to AGI, so we must cooperatively set aside our RSP”.

Relatedly, Control AI writes that, with RSPs, companies “can decide freely at what point they might be falling behind – and then they alone can choose to ignore the already weak” RSPs. But part of the idea with RSPs is that they are a stepping stone to national or international policy enforced by governments. For example, ARC and Anthropic both explicitly said that they hope RSPs will be turned into standards/regulation prior to the Control AI campaign. (That seems quite plausible to me as a theory of change.) Also, Anthropic commits to only updating its RSP in consultation with its Long-Term Benefit Trust (consisting of five people without any financial interest in Anthropic) -- which may or may not work well, but seems sufficiently different from Anthropic being able to “decide freely” when to ignore its RSP that I think Control AI’s characterisation is misleading. Again, I don't want to discuss the merits of RSPs, I just think Control AI is misrepresenting Anthropic's and others' positions.

Three, Control AI seems to say that Anthropic’s advocacy for RSPs is an instance of safetywashing and regulatory capture. (Connor Leahy: “The primary aim of responsible scaling is to provide a framework which looks like something was done so that politicians can go home and say: ‘We have done something.’ But the actual policy is nothing.” And also: “The AI companies in particular and other organisations around them are trying to capture the summit, lock in a status quo of an unregulated race to disaster.”) I don’t know exactly what Anthropic’s goals are -- I would guess that its leadership is driven by a complex mixture of motivations -- but I doubt it is so clear-cut as Leahy makes it out to be.

To be clear, I think Conjecture has good intentions, and wants the whole AI thing to go well. I am rooting for its safety work and looking forward to seeing updates on CoEm. And again, I personally do not have a settled view on whether RSPs like Anthropic’s are in fact good or bad, or on whether it is good or bad to advocate for them – it could well be that RSPs turn out to be toothless, and would displace better policy – I only take issue with the rhetoric.

(Disclosure: Open Philanthropy funds the organisation I work for, though the above represents only my views, not my employer’s.)

I think it is reasonable to treat this as a proxy for the state of the evidence, because lots of AI policy people specifically praised it as a good and thoughtful paper on policy.

All four of those AI policy people are coauthors on the paper -- that does not seem like good evidence that the paper is widely considered good and thoughtful, and therefore a good proxy (though I think it probably is an ok proxy).

When Jeff Kaufman shared one of the papers discussed here on the EA Forum, there was a highly upvoted comment critical of the paper (more upvoted than the post itself). That would suggest to me that this post would be fairly well received on the EA Forum, though its tone is definitely more strident than that comment, so maybe not.

ARC & Open Philanthropy state in a press release “In a sane world, all AGI progress should stop. If we don’t, there’s more than a 10% chance we will all die.”

Could you spell out what you mean by "in a sane world"? I suspect a bunch of people you disagree with do not favor a pause due to various empirical facts about the world (e.g., there being competitors like Meta).

Well, it's not like vegans/vegetarians are some tiny minority in EA. Pulling together some data from the 2022 ACX survey, people who identify as EA are about 40% vegan/vegetarian, and about 70% veg-leaning (i.e., vegan, vegetarian, or trying to eat less meat and/or offsetting meat-eating for moral reasons). (That's conditioning on identifying as an LW rationalist, since anecdotally I think being vegan/vegetarian is somewhat less common among Bay Area EAs, and the ACX sample is likely to skew pretty heavily rationalist, but the results are not that different if you don't condition.)

ETA: From the 2019 EA survey, 46% of EAs are vegan/vegetarian and 77% veg-leaning.

Israel's strategy since the Hamas took the strip over in 2007 has been to try and contain it, and keeping it weak by periodic, limited confrontations (the so called Mowing the Lawn doctorine), and trying to economically develop the strip in order to give Hamas incentives to avoid confrontation. While Hamas grew stronger, the general feeling was that the strategy works and the last 15 years were not that bad.

I am surprised to read the bolded part! What actions have the Israeli government taken to develop Gaza, and did Gaza actually develop economically in that time? (That is not a rhetorical question -- I know next to nothing about this.)

Looking quickly at some stats, real GDP per capita seems to have gone up a bit since 2007, but has declined since 2016, and its current figure ($5.6K in 2021) is lower than e.g., Angola, Bangladesh, and Venezuela.

Qualitatively, the blockade seems to have been net negative for Gaza's economic development. NYT writes:

The Palestinian territory of Gaza has been under a suffocating Israeli blockade, backed by Egypt, since Hamas seized control of the coastal strip in 2007. The blockade restricts the import of goods, including electronic and computer equipment, that could be used to make weapons and prevents most people from leaving the territory.

More than two million Palestinians live in Gaza. The tiny, crowded coastal enclave has a nearly 50 percent unemployment rate, and Gaza’s living conditions, health system and infrastructure have all deteriorated under the blockade.

But that is a news report, so we should take it with a grain of salt.