There are some simple tests to determine whether Amodei (and Altman, and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Nadella, and Pichai) are serious about any commitment to safety, alignment, “pacing the frontier”, and so forth.
Ask: How much are you, personally, willing to declare and accept responsibility for problems in your products, and the problems they cause for other people? Personally, not shielded by the protections and the pockets of the corporation?
- Are you willing to resign from your position?
- Are you willing to accept the costs of restitution for the people you’ve harmed?
- Are you willing to lose every dollar you have, and live in penury for the rest of your life?
- Are you willing to go to jail for ignoring risk that harms others?
In short, are you willing to accept consequences and real penalties for harm that you cause?
And…
- Are you willing to staff, fund, and respect internal risk investigators and critics (or call them “embedded evaluators” if you can’t bear to say the T-word)?
- Are you willing to listen to them and limit your ambitions when people tell you about problems in your product that pose a threat to your company, to other companies, to individuals, and to society?
- Are you willing to do the right things, even when others are doing the wrong things?
In a nutshell, to use a phrase near and dear to me: are you willing to take testing seriously?
If the answers to these questions are mostly No, then our societies must become determined to hold people — not corporations — to account.