What just happened? Pragmatism and Pessimization — LessWrong
This post is about the major role alignment researchers played in advancing the frontier of AI capabilities over the last decade, and how the distinction between “alignment research” and “capabilities research" thereby lost most of its meaning.[1] In particular, I’ll chronicle the development of what I’ll call the “pragmatic alignment” paradigm, and how it helped the three leading AGI companies push hard on the path to AGI under the banner of safety.[2] This was not a subtle effect—it’s apparent even to outsiders who investigate the field, like authors Sebastian Mallaby and Karen Hao.[3] In my previous post, I summarized the alignment community’s plan as “differentially advancing alignment over capabilities”. However, it’s worth being more precise about who was nominally pursuing that plan, because it doesn’t seem to have been very action-guiding for MIRI. For example, in 2015 Nate Soares described MIRI’s “deconfusion” research as being guided by the question “what would we still be un