Alex Flint

Independent research into the nature of optimization, knowledge, and agency, with relevance to AI alignment.

Alex Flint has been doing independent AI alignment research for about a year, and his work strikes me as among the best that independent researchers have produced. From his application:

My research focuses on the frames being used by the AI and AI safety communities to understand and construct intelligent systems. My goal is to identify the frames that we don’t know we’re using and elucidate them, so that we can choose whether to endorse or discard them. I am most interested in the frames that currently underlie technical work in AI and AI safety. [...] I am seeking funding to continue thinking and writing about the frames that underlie our thinking in technical AI alignment.

AI alignment as a field is in a very early stage, which means that a substantial number of the problems we are trying to solve are very underspecified and often don't have clear formulations. I have found Alex's work to be particularly good at clarifying these problem statements, and teasing out the implicit assumptions made by those who formulated the problems of the field. This strikes me as an important step towards enabling more researchers to gain traction on solving the important problems in AI alignment.

It also seems like a crucial step to ensure that the field at large still maintains a focus on its core problems, instead of substituting the hard problems of AI alignment with easier ones. (This is a serious risk, because easier problems are easier to make progress on and might let researchers accrue prestige more easily — which makes them tempting to work on, even if the results aren’t as useful.)

Some specific posts of Alex that I thought did a good job here:

• AI Risk for Epistemic Minimalists
• Agency in Conway's Game of Life
• Parsing Chris Mingard on Neural Networks
• The ground of optimization
• Our take on CHAI's research agenda in under 1500 words

All of these feel to me like they take some high-level problem formulation and pare it down towards something more essential. Importantly, I think that I sometimes see something important being lost in the process, but that in itself is also often useful, since it helps us identify where the important elements lie.

Overall, I am happy to fund Alex to do more independent alignment research and am looking forward to what he can produce with the funding provided by this grant.