Kokotajlo explains AI 2040 Plan A's transparency infrastructure

Thank you.

There's a lot to get into here, so I'm afraid I'll have to be kind of brief, but I'm happy to answer follow-up questions if desired.

Yeah, AI 2040 Plan A is a scenario that my organization has put out with a plan for how to solve all these problems and develop AI in a way that's safe and broadly beneficial, that avoids concentrating too much power.

In plan A, the US and China regulate their own domestic industries quite a lot and also coordinate with each other to get a similar amount of, to basically get similar regulations internationally.

Going into somewhat more detail about how it works, basically,

First, they have inspectors fly back and forth to count the chips in the major data centers so that they can

make sure that all of the chips on the major data centers in both countries are basically following the rules that they're going to agree to.

And then they set up some data centers to serve customers called the inference data centers.

And those ones are set up to only...

Run existing models and not do training runs.

Then they have other data centers, which are the training data centers, which is where the research happens and where the development happens.

Those ones are supposed to be fully transparent.

So the activity on those data centers is published to the internet.

Once that foundation is set in place and you have inspectors from multiple countries from

confirming that it's in place, then you solve the problem of having to trust.

You don't have to worry that the other country is cheating on whatever rules you agree to because you can just see exactly what's going on on their research data centers.

And then you can agree to further rules.

You can agree to rules like, for example,

How about we don't train our AIs to code, to hack, to autonomously conduct AI research?

We can train our AIs to do other things, but not those things, for example.

And once you've agreed to a rule like that, then you'll just be able to see that it's being complied with because of the way that you have this transparency infrastructure set up.

Also,

it's going to be easier to decide what rules to agree on once you have this transparency infrastructure set up because the whole world can see what's going on in these research and development data centers.

And so there can be an actual scientific conversation, a public scientific conversation about what's happening.

You know, do we like this?

Do we not like this?

What are the pros and cons of this particular thing that's being done and so forth?

And that scientific conversation can happen in the open, and it can accelerate humanity's process of figuring out where to draw the line between what types of development are good and what types of development are not good.

There's more I can get into, but I think that would be a summary of the positive vision that we lay out in plan A.

Now, obviously, that's...

Quite different from how things are currently done.

Right now, we have private companies that are racing each other in conditions of extreme secrecy and extreme tension and competitive dynamics.

And I think that that's extremely dangerous for all the reasons that we've described.

So back to your original question, my high level, a summary of my position is we have to stop the companies from doing this incredibly dangerous thing that they're currently doing and currently planning to do.

And then figure out a different, safer, more power distributed way to proceed.

And, you know, plan A is our sketch of what that might look like.

Thank you.

Thank you.