Critiques of Prominent AI Safety Labs: Redwood Research

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 Critiques of prominent AI safety labs: Redwood Research 

 by Omega. 17th Apr 2023 Linkpost for forum.effectivealtruism.org 26 min read 0 4

 In this series, we evaluate AI safety organizations that have received more than $10 million per year in funding. We do not critique MIRI ( 1 ) and OpenAI ( 1 , 2 , 3 ) as there have been several conversations and critiques of these organizations.

 The authors of this post include two technical AI safety researchers, and others who have spent significant time in the Bay Area community. One technical AI safety researcher is senior (>4 years experience), the other junior. We would like to make our critiques non-anonymously but unfortunately believe this would be professionally unwise. Further, we believe our criticisms stand on their own. Though we have done our best to remain impartial, readers should not assume that we are completely unbiased or don’t have anything to personally or professionally gain from publishing these critiques. We take the benefits and drawbacks of the anonymous nature of our post seriously, and are open to feedback on anything we might have done better.

 The first post in this series will cover Redwood Research (Redwood). Redwood is a non-profit started in 2021 working on technical AI safety (TAIS) alignment research. Their approach is heavily informed by the work of Paul Christiano, who runs the Alignment Research Center (ARC), and previously ran the language model alignment team at OpenAI. Paul originally proposed one of Redwood's original projects and is on Redwood’s board. Redwood has strong connections with central EA leadership and funders, has received significant funding since its inception, recruits almost exclusively from the EA movement, and partly acts as a gatekeeper to central EA institutions.

 We shared a draft of this document with Redwood prior to publication and are grateful for their feedback and corrections (we recommend others also reach out similarly ). We’ve also invited them to share their views in the comments of this post.

 We would like to also invite others to share their thoughts in the comments openly if you feel comfortable, or contribute anonymously via this form . We will add inputs from there to the comments section of this post, but will likely not be updating the main body of the post as a result (unless comments catch errors in our writing).

 Summary of our views 

 We believe that Redwood has some serious flaws as an org, yet has received a significant amount of funding from a central EA grantmaker (Open Philanthropy). Inadequately kept in check conflicts of interest (COIs) might be partly responsible for funders giving a relatively immature org lots o

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