OpenAI, a research organization dedicated to creating artificial intelligence (AI) that can benefit humanity, is facing a daunting challenge: how to ensure that super-intelligent AI, which could surpass human intelligence in the near future, will not harm or destroy us. To tackle this problem, OpenAI has formed a new team, called Superalignment, co-led by its chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever and alignment researcher Jan Leike.
The goal of Superalignment is to build an automated alignment researcher, an AI system that can do alignment research, which is the study of how to make AI systems follow human values and intentions. The idea is that such a system could help align super-intelligent AI, which might be too complex or fast for humans to supervise or understand. By using large amounts of compute and data, the automated alignment researcher could discover and implement better alignment techniques than humans can, and work together with humans to ensure that its successors are also aligned.
To achieve this ambitious goal, Superalignment will focus on four main research areas: scalable oversight, generalization, robustness, and automated interpretability. Scalable oversight is the use of AI systems to assist in evaluating other AI systems, providing a training signal for tasks that are difficult for humans to judge. Generalization is the study of how AI systems extrapolate their oversight to new tasks or situations that they have not seen before. Robustness is the search for problematic behavior or vulnerabilities in AI systems, such as deception, manipulation, or exploitation. Automated interpretability is the analysis of the internal workings of AI systems, such as their objectives, beliefs, and strategies.
Superalignment is a bold and visionary project that aims to solve one of the most important and urgent problems of our time: how to ensure that super-intelligent AI will be a force for good, not evil. By creating an AI system that can align itself and other AI systems with human values, OpenAI hopes to pave the way for a safe and beneficial future for humanity and AI.