In his AI Safety Needs Great Engineers post, Andy Jones explains how software engineers can reduce the risks of unfriendly artificial intelligence. Even without deep ML knowledge, these developers can work effectively on the challenges involved in building and understanding large language models. I would broaden the claim: AI safety doesn’t need only great engineers – it needs great product…
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In mid-December, I left Spring, and about a month later I joined Ought as their head of engineering. It was a momentous change to a leave a job, a company, and my team after so long, but there are so many aspects to Ought that I’m incredibly excited for that in the end it was a move I had to make. Here are some of the reasons it was not only easy but essential for me to join Ought. If any of these…
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On December 15th, 2021, I will leave Spring – the company I have been with for almost seven years. Along the way, I’ve seen quite a few people quit, fired a few people, and made some pretty big mis-steps when planning my own departure. The goal of this post is to summarise some patterns and anti-patterns, so that in the future you or I can leave our roles in the most professional and positive way…
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In a recent post on LessWrong, Andrew Critch imagines scenarios in which networks of seemingly well-behaved AI systems nonetheless results in humanity’s demise. In it, he mentions: … [both stories] follow a progression from less automation to more, and correspondingly from more human control to less … The comment is only made in passing, but it seems (a) interesting and (b) important: is this…
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About a decade ago, a friend and I were talking over dinner about our shared passion for electronic music. Our burning question was: how can we convince the world to love techno as much as we do? A common—and not always unfair—criticism is that electronic music can be repetitive, lacking an overall arc, or overly simplistic: especially when compared to something like a classical concerto. However…
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In The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris describes a framework which allows for strictly rational conversations about morality. It is based on the idea that ethical questions are eventually decomposable into objective questions about suffering and flourishing: … in the moral sphere, it is safe to begin with the premise that it is good to avoid behaving in such a way as to produce the worst possible…
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