Alignment Newsletter #25 by Rohin Shah

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What is the alternative to intent alignment called? Q, published by Richard Ngo on the AI Alignment Forum. Paul defines intent alignment of an AI A to a human H as the criterion that A is trying to do what H wants it to do. What term do people use for the definition of alignment in which A is trying to achieve H's goals (whether or not H intends for A to achieve H's goals)? Secondly, this seems to basically map on to the distinction between an aligned genie and an aligned sovereign. Is this a fair characterisation? (Intent alignment definition from) Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AMA: Paul Christiano, alignment researcher, published by Paul Christiano on the AI Alignment Forum. I'll be running an Ask Me Anything on this post from Friday (April 30) to Saturday (May 1). If you want to ask something just post a top-level comment; I'll spend at least a day answering questions. You can find some background about me here. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AI alignment landscape, published byPaul Christiano on the AI Alignment Forum. Here (link) is a talk I gave at EA Global 2019, where I describe how intent alignment fits into the broader landscape of “making AI go well,” and how my work fits into intent alignment. This is particularly helpful if you want to understand what I’m doing, but may also be useful more broadly. I often find myself wishing people were clearer about some of these distinctions. Here is the main overview slide from the talk: The highlighted boxes are where I spend most of my time. Here are the full slides from the talk. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing the Alignment Research Center, published by on the AI Alignment Forum. (Cross-post from ai-alignment.com) I’m now working full-time on the Alignment Research Center (ARC), a new non-profit focused on intent alignment research. I left OpenAI at the end of January and I’ve spent the last few months planning, doing some theoretical research, doing some logistical set-up, and taking time off. For now it’s just me, focusing on theoretical research. I’m currently feeling pretty optimistic about this work: I think there’s a good chance that it will yield big alignment improvements within the next few years, and a good chance that those improvements will be integrated into practice at leading ML labs. My current goal is to build a small team working productively on theory. I’m not yet sure how we’ll approach hiring, but if you’re potentially interested in joining you can fill out this tiny form to get notified when we’re ready. Over the medium term (and maybe starting quite soon) I also expect to implement and study techniques that emerge from theoretical work, to help ML labs adopt alignment techniques, and to work on alignment forecasting and strategy. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.