Two radically different projects operate under the banner of “AI safety.” Pro-Human Safety is not Effective Altruist Lab Safety.

To clarify, the Center for AI Safety has not taken funding from Coefficient Giving / Open Philanthropy for years. We believe the effective altruism movement is, unfortunately, controlled opposition. The less influence it has on AI safety, the better.

“What would we even do during an AI slowdown?” Containment. It will take at least a year of dedicated work to harden security to ensure AIs can't self-exfiltrate, and that adversarial nations can't steal the weights of cyber-offensive AIs [1]. Propensities. Capabilities (what an AI can do) are different from propensities (what it tends to do). We can work on improving AI propensities to ensure they have a negligible rate of lying, cheating, and wanton harm. Adversarial robustness. We can also harden AIs against jailbreaks, prompt injection, and backdoors. Obtaining high levels of robustness requires careful, assiduous work, as with autonomous vehicles. Institutional adaptation. We have to greatly increase state capacity to understand and manage AI. Communities also need time to figure out how to handle AI (like AI in education). Civil society also needs to be diversified: nearly all funding for AI safety organizations is directed by the EA/utilitarian network [2]; risk management needs more independent funders, values, and centers of power. Moonshots. We can explore different paradigms for safety: mathematical foundations [3], neuroscience-based interpretability [4], safe-by-design architectures [5], and beyond. AI for good. We can collect targeted post-training data to make AI exceptional at radiology, weather forecasting, agriculture, and so on. Fortunately, we can detect if data or avenues of research actually target beneficial use cases or just secretly push general capabilities [6]. A slowdown means we don't have to bet the species to capture the benefits of AI.