In August 2022, I started making summaries of the top EA and LW forum posts each week. This post collates together the key trends I’ve seen in AI Safety discussions since then. Note a lot of good work is happening outside what's posted on these forums too! This post doesn't try to cover that work.

If you’d like to keep up on a more regular basis, consider subscribing to the Weekly EA & LW Forum Summaries. And if you’re interested in similar overviews for other fields, check out this post covering 6 months of animal welfare discussion in 6 minutes.

Disclaimer: this is a blog post and not a research report - meaning it was produced quickly and is not to our (Rethink Priorities') typical standards of substantiveness and careful checking for accuracy. Please let me know if anything looks wrong or if I've missed key pieces!

Table of Contents

(It's a long post! Feel free to pick and choose sections to read, they 're all written to make sense individually)

Overall Trends
Interpretability
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)
AI assistance for alignment
Bounded AIs
Theoretical Understanding

Outreach & Community-Building

Arguments for and against high x-risk

Against high x-risk from AI
Counters to the above arguments

Appendix - All Post Summaries

Key Takeaways

There are multiple living websites that provide good entry points into understanding AI Safety ideas, communities, key players, research agendas, and opportunities to train or enter the field. (see more)
Large language models like ChatGPT have drawn significant attention to AI and kick-started race dynamics. There seems to be slowly growing public support for regulation. (see more)
Holden Karnofsky recently took a leave of absence from Open Philanthropy to work on AI Safety Standards, which have also been called out as important by leading AI lab OpenAI. (see more)
In October 2022, the US announced extensive restrictions on the export of AI-related products (eg. chips) to Ch

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Weekly Forum Summaries