Yet another update on the running AI discussion.

Here’s an interview Ezra Klein did with a guy named David Robinson. And that interview is about a piece Robinson, a member of the Open AI safety and safety documentation team, wrote in The Atlantic announcing his resignation from OpenAI — a decision and announcement he is self-aware enough to note has become something of a cliche. I found the interview interesting and edifying, largely on the front I mentioned earlier about finding reliable narrators.

Robinson isn’t a data scientist or a programmer. His role at OpenAI was essentially being the conduit between the teams building the LLMs and the knowledgable and interested public, specifically the people who write the documentation — what does this model do, how does it work, what are the possible safety risks. As is usually the case in any highly technical space, the people doing the work aren’t going to be writers and they’re usually not going to speak a language outsiders can necessarily understand. So you have people who are close enough to the work and the workers to understand what is happening and also able to speak human so they can communicate it to everyone else. Robinson led the team that served in that role.

For years, and especially in the last month or so, we’ve been collectively inundated with an AI industry which, uncannily and bizarrely, tells us simultaneously that AI is essential, inevitable and runs a significant chance of exterminating all of us in as few as two or three years. If you’ve dipped into this debate at all, you’ve quickly come upon discussions of so-called “rationalists” or “long-termists” or supporters of “effective altruism” who are simultaneously ubiquitous among those developing AI and in the AI safety (i.e., the folks sounding the alarm) community as well. (For the sake of simplicity and brevity, I’ll refer to these folks as the “REL nexus”: rationalists, effective altruists and long-termists. This is my coinage since I don’t know a better one.) I’ve spent a fair amount of time familiarizing myself with this world and how it relates to current debates about AI. So I wanted to share my basic impressions.