Holly Elmore

But then, you know, the, the stakes and, like, the level of danger keep also rising quite a lot, so it's very mixed.

This is Holly Elmore, founder and executive director of Pause AI, which organizes people to pause the development of the most advanced AI.

The conversation has just shifted so quickly, um, away from, well, the AI companies should be able to do whatever they want, you know, we don't even know if this is real, to, okay, what are we gonna do about this? And that's extremely heartening.

[electronic music]

Similarly, the discourse following the Pacing the Frontier essay has also pushed together some weird folks.

The accelerationists don't like METR as an evaluator because of their close ties to Anthropic, but neither do folks like Pause AI Executive Director Holly Elmore, who points out that one of the METR team is married to an OpenAI board member, that they share office space with OpenAI folks, and that, quote, "They get all the access they require to the models as a favor because of their sweetheart relationship." Still, in the same way that Matthew Yglesias was beating his head against the desk, effectively just telling us to solve the problem of antitrust rather than let it be a stopper on this, it does not seem all that difficult to solve this particular concern either, perhaps just deciding that there need to be other evaluators that aren't necessarily handpicked by the labs.

Already, some organizations are raising their hand and offering.

Hugging Face CEO Clem Delang wrote, "It's now clear that alignment is critical and won't be solved behind the closed doors of a handful of frontier labs.

And it's great that OpenAI has him instead of like another Lauren Summers or whatever, right? Like people who don't really get it, right? Just like these random people who Sam can manipulate.

So that's good, but there's also a downside, as our friend Holly Elmore has pointed out, and Richard Ngo, who used to do governance at OpenAI, is pointing out.

He's like, listen, now he's in OpenAI, he's in the tent pissing out, so that means he can't be outside the tent pissing in, but we need people like him pissing in.

He shouldn't be silencing himself about OpenAI.

So that's good.

But there's also a downside, as our friend Holly Elmore has pointed out, and Richard Ngo, who used to do governance at OpenAI, is pointing out.

He's like, listen, now he's in OpenAI, you know, he's in the tent pissing out, right? So that means he can't be outside the tent pissing in.

But we need people like him pissing in.

The newly disclosed additional message board pushes Gary Marcus into pause AI territory.

as per his conversation with Holly Elmore.

Mostly not about AI, but it me.

I go on risk of ruin.

it generates.

While the following is not a perspective I endorse, I certainly think that it is a valid perspective to believe that anyone or any organization pushing the frontier of AI capabilities should be presumed to be a morally bad actor until proven otherwise, if you believe that doing so contributes to the chances that everyone gets killed.

Speaking in a personal capacity, I simultaneously think that some of Holly Elmore's attacks on me have been honorable and helpful and correct given her views, while others were not those things, and I am guessing from her perspective those roughly cancelled each other out.

I am far from a central target.

Yeah.

The leader of Pause AI here in, in the US is a woman named Holly Elmore.

She's been of, involved in sort of effective altruism circles, writing about concerns about AI for many years.

Obviously, there's Eliezer Yudkowsky, who's probably, in terms of the mainstream, the most well-known.

So what should we do if a fairy godmother waved a wand and gave us three wishes? A lot of people talk about a pause in AI development.

We've talked about the different calls for a pause on the show, going back to the original open letter from the Future of Life Institute, and more recently, talking with Holly Elmore, leader of the Pause AI US movement in episodes 297 and 298.

And even more recently, Bernie Sanders wrote to Sam Altman, Dario Amadei, and Mark Zuckerberg.

asking for an AI pause, saying that if they don't act, quote, my colleagues and I in the US Senate will.