At AI-Plans.com, we are working on a contributable compendium of alignment plans and the criticisms against them. Currently, newcomers to the field of AI Alignment often struggle to understand what work is being done, who is doing it, and the assumptions, strengths, and weaknesses of each plan. We believe AI-plans.com will be an easy, centralized way to discover and learn more about the most promising alignment plans.
The site is currently in Stage 1, where it is purely a compendium. We are in the process of adding up to 1000 plans and the criticisms made against them so far. Further plans and criticisms can be added by users.
Projected benefits of Stage 1:
This makes it easy to see what plans exist and what their most common problems are.
Stage 2:
A scoring system for criticisms and a ranking system for plans will be added. Plans will be ranked based on the total scores of their criticisms, with weighted votes given to users who submit higher scoring criticisms. Alignment researchers can link their AI-Plans account to research-relevant platforms for a slightly weighted vote. New plans start with 0 bounty, with lower bounty plans giving the most points, incentivizing users to write good criticisms.
The scoring system makes it easier to identify plans with the biggest holes and helps in levying evidence against problematic plans. Additionally, it allows scientists and engineers to see which companies have the least problematic plans, making it easier to decide where to work. The creator of aisafety.careers intends to integrate with the site.
Stage 3:
In addition to everything from Stage 1 and 2, there will be monthly cash prizes for the highest ranking plan and for the user/users with the most criticism points that month.
Projected benefits of Stage 3:
This supercharges everything from Stage 2 and attracts talented people who require a non-committal monetary incentive to start engaging with alignment research. This also provides a heuristic argument for the difficulty of the problem: "There is money on the table if anyone can come up with a plan with fewer problems, yet no one has done so!"
20% - to the dev
10%- to the QA
20%- to moderators
20% - to the prize fund
15% - A lawyer to set up the non-profit, create term&conditions for the prize section at Stage 3 and help with what we need to do to comply with GDPR
15% - to the Red Team
If there is a plan at the top of the leaderboard that seems promising, someone with more money than than caution could see that and spend a lot of money to try to use that to make an ASI.
None, so far. Applying to Lightspeed Grants.
Kabir Kumar
over 1 year ago
Update: Good news!
Kristen W Carlson, an alignment researcher at the Institute of Natural Science and Technology said they like the site! They also said they found several papers on the site, so it seems to already be proving useful!!
A few other researchers have also expressed interest in the site!
Kabir Kumar
over 1 year ago
Researchers interested include:
Dr Tom Everett of DeepMind
Dr Dan Hendrycks of Xai
Dr Roman Yampolskiy
Austin Chen
over 1 year ago
Hi Kabir! Unfortunately, I'm pretty skeptical that https://ai-plans.com/ is going to be much used and would not fund this out of my regrantor budget.
This kind of meta/coordination site is very hard to pull off, as it suffers from network effect problems (cf the cold start problem). Without established connections or a track record of successful projects, even if the idea is good (which I'm not judging), the project itself won't hit critical mass. I might change my mind if you demonstrated substantial interest (hundreds of users, or a few very passionate users)
I appreciate that you've coded up your own website (I think?) Kabir, at this stage I would focus not on any specific EA project but rather just becoming a better software developer; apply for internships/jobs.
If you really want to do something "EA/AI Safety-ish" (though I don't think this would be a good rationale), consider just writing criticisms for individual plans and posting them on the EA Forum.
Kabir Kumar
over 1 year ago
Thank you for your comment!
I agree, getting the site used and having good networking is very important!
On that front, there's actually quite a bit of good news! I've been reaching out to researchers for less than a week and there are already 4 alignment researchers who are very interested in the site! One has been posting his plans himself, another has asked me to post their plan for them, one has joined the team (Jonathan Ng) and another is working on a plan they're happy to have on the site when it's done!
Esbren, the head of Apart Research is also very interested in site and I've spoken with the creator of aisafety.careers who wants to integrate with the site.
I also had a call with Kat Woods who said she really wanted the site to exist and seemed to think it would provide something very valuable.
It's been very promising to get a really great reception from almost every alignment researcher I've talked to about this- the two sceptics have been folk who either think alignment is impossible or that it is basically impossible to have any judgement of a plan since we can't test it. Those are very important points, which I am looking into seriously.