Alignment Research Center (ARC)

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One of the few nonprofits on our list, the Alignment Research Center (ARC) was founded in June 2021 by former OpenAI employee Paul Christiano to study the “alignment problem”—the question of how to align AI's actions with human values, a challenge that becomes more daunting as AI systems approach artificial general intelligence (or AGI), a single AI model that can perform all cognitive tasks a human can as well or better than we can. If AI starts to develop intentions of its own--even if these are just sub-goals needed to accomplish a human-specified primary goal--alignment becomes a pressing issue. ARC has worked with big AI houses like OpenAI and Anthropic to “red team” their models by seeing how the models respond to the kinds of prompts a malicious actor might use, and to see if the models themselves are capable of potentially dangerous self-direction actions, such as deception or self-replication. When OpenAI granted ARC access to its GPT-4 model before it was released to the public, ARC tested whether it could do things like hide itself on a server or lie to humans—no to the first, yes to the second. We can all sleep easier knowing ARC doesn’t think that present-day AI systems could pose the existential risks the most ardent "AI doomers" fear. But that may not remain true for much longer.

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