- they want to make benchmarking easier by using AI systems
- they want to automate red-teaming and safety-checking ("problematic behavior" i.e. cursing at customers)
- they want to automate the understanding of model outputs ("interpretability")
Notice how absolutely none of these things require "superintelligence" to exist to be useful? They're all just bog standard Good Things that you'd want for any class of automated system, i.e. a great customer service bot.
The superintelligence meme is tiring but we're getting cool things out of it I guess...
My take is that every advancement in these highly complex and expensive fields is dependent on our ability to maintain global social, political, and economic stability.
This insistence on the importance of Super-Intelligence and AGI as the path to Paradise or Hell is one of the many brain-worms going around that have this "Revelation" structure that makes pragmatic discussions very difficult, and in turn actually makes it harder to maintain social, political, and economic stability.
There's more mumbo-jumbo in thinking human intelligence has some secret sauce that can't be replicated by a computer.
It could be theoretically possible to build an AGI smarter than a human, but is it really plausible if it turns out to need a data center the size of the Hadron Collider and the energy of a small country to maintain itself?
It could be that it turns out the only architecture we can find that is equal to the task (and feasibly produced) is the human brain, and instead the hard part of making super-intelligence is bootstrapping that human brain and training it to be more intel?
Maybe the best way to solve the "alignment problem", and other issues of creating super-intelligence, is to solve the problem of how best to raise and educate intelligent and well-adjusted humans?
What if climate change would lead to massive fires and flooding?
What if mitigation would be a thing?