Affordances for AI labs

Published 25 January 2023

This is a list of actions AI labs could take that may be strategically relevant (or consequences or characteristics of possible actions).

• Deploy an AI system
• Pursue AI capabilities
  • Pursue risky (and more or less alignable systems) systems
  • Pursue systems that enable risky (and more or less alignable) systems
  • Pursue weak AI that's mostly orthogonal to progress in risky stuff for a specific (strategically significant) task or goal
    • This could enable or abate catastrophic risks besides unaligned AI
• Do alignment (and related) research (or: decrease the alignment tax by doing technical research)
  • Including interpretability and work on solving or avoiding alignment-adjacent problems like decision theory and strategic interaction and maybe delegation involving multiple humans or multiple AI systems
• Advance global capabilities
  • Publish capabilities research
  • Cause investment or spending in big AI projects to increase
• Advance alignment (or: decrease the alignment tax) in ways other than doing technical research
  • Support and coordinate with external alignment researchers
• Attempt to align a particular system (or: try to pay the alignment tax)
• Interact with other labs
  • Coordinate with other labs (notably including coordinating to avoid risky systems)
    • Make themselves transparent to each other
    • Make themselves transparent to an external auditor
    • Merge
    • Effectively commit to share upsides
    • Effectively commit to stop and assist
  • Affect what other labs believe on the object level (about AI capabilities or risk in general, or regarding particular memes)
    • Practice selective information sharing
    • Demonstrate AI risk (or provide evidence about it)
  • Negotiate with other labs, or affect other labs' incentives or meta-level beliefs
• Affect public opinion, media, and politics
  • Publish research
  • Make demos or public statements
  • Release or deploy AI systems
• Improve their culture or operations
  • Improve operational security
  • Affect attitudes of effective leadership
  • Affect attitudes of researchers
  • Make a plan for alignment (e.g., OpenAI's); share it; update and improve it; and coordinate with capabilities researchers, alignment researchers, or other labs if relevant
  • Make plans for what to do with powerful AI (e.g. a process for producing powerful aligned AI given some type of advanced AI system, or a specification for parties interacting peacefully)
  • Improve their ability to make themselves (selectively) transparent
• Try to better understand the future, the strategic landscape, risks, and possible actions
• Acquire resources (money, hardware, talent, influence over states, status/prestige/trust, etc.)
• Affect other actors' resources
  • Affect the flow of talent between labs or between projects
• Plan, execute, or participate in pivotal acts or processes
• Capture scarce resources
  • E.g., language data from language model users

Primary author: Zach Stein-Perlman