Cas (Stephen Casper)@StephenLCasper
It is hard to overstate how disappointing I think this new paper from Oxford, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google (et al) is. I can't take it seriously as academic work, just as propaganda. It also has some very bad scholarship and questionable adherence to research ethics.
Having the title and author list that it has is not a great start, but I think that the actual content of the paper is also much worse than it could have been.
The paper's content is a series of sections that mostly just list things with discussions that I think are generally vapid. For example, section 3.2 is titled "New and technical approaches to positive alignment" and has a collection of paragraphs on things like "goal setting and evaluations", "memory and in-context learning," and other general research topics of the LLM era. It overall strikes me as a paper built from the top down -- the authors wanted to make a certain point up top, and the paper's content ended up as filler.
I think of this paper as a mechanism of corporate capture of concepts from academic research on AI and society. It discusses topics like pluralism, liberty, and education, and frames them as solvable problems whose solution is the right tech integrated in the right way. I think that when this paper says "pluralism", "liberty", and "accountability", it means them in a way that is profoundly vapid and structurally ignorant. For example, there is a list of papers out there arguing against this paper's perspective, saying that pluralistic alignment is not a model property or a technical problem at all. None of them were mentioned.
Relatedly, the paper talks about some things that would be genuinely great if the authors' companies were not actively contributing to the problem. For example, section 5.1 is about the decentralization of power in the AI ecosystem. Great, but come on. To listen to this stuff from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google employees, I need more than just a disclaimer at the end saying, "This research paper represents the author’s own views and conclusions." This is how big companies launder their reputations through research. The first author of the paper posted about it yesterday saying, "In a rare collaboration between top universities and 3 frontier labs..." So which is it? For a paper like this with this kind of author list to honestly and ethically engage in this kind of politics, it would need to seriously confront the question of how much these authors' institutions are actively working against goals like this. If not, the big tech company authors should not have worked on this paper in their formal capacity as representatives of their companies.
