I’d like to get up to speed on current alignment research. What should I read?
In progress
The intent of this question assumes a certain level of background claims for AI safety. Therefore, the focus is to provide resources on staying current in alignment research.
- Import AI
- Center for AI Safety newsletters [CAIS] - AI Safety and ML Safety (more technical)
- Alignment Newsletter
- Alignment Forum
- aisafety.community
Start here
For those wanting to get up to speed with the relevant core background knowledge for AI alignment, we recommend starting with materials below:
- Intro to AI Safety (18 minute video by Robert Miles, a PhD YouTuber who makes content about AI safety)
- AI Safety Seems hard to Measure (22 minute podcast read by Holden Karnofsky, the former CEO of and now the Director of AI Strategy at Open Philanthropy)
- The case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity (article by Kelsey Piper on Vox that’s estimated to take 25 minutes to read*)
Continuation of Resources to Read:
- Benefits & Risks of Artificial Intelligence (15 minutes)
- Instrumental Convergence (10 minutes)
- What failure looks like (15 minutes)
- The alignment problem from a deep learning perspective (40 minutes)
- Without specific countermeasures, the easiest path to transformative AI likely leads to AI takeover (90 minutes)
For those wanting to work these readings and much more with a group of people virtually, we recommend BlueDot Impact’s courses covering either AI Alignment or AI Governance. For those wanting a more technical route of upskilling, CAIS has an Intro to ML Safety.
*Reading estimates in parentheses are based on the average reading speed of 250 words per minute.