Palisade is producing a set of videos of AI company employees talking directly to the camera about the AI situation. If you work for or have worked for a frontier AI company, we’d love to help you make a video.
The “Pacing the Frontier” letter, and everyone who tweeted their views in the wake of Jacob Coxon’s resignation, were both great steps. But our thesis is that they don’t go far enough to bridge the trust gap. Much of the public just doesn’t know what to make of statements like these.
We think many people will be better able to discern that lab employees are being earnest, if they watch many lab employees (from across the companies), speaking directly to camera.
We’re trying to make this as easy as possible. You show up for half an hour. We’ll ask you some questions, and film your answers. Then, we’ll edit all the videos, and then publish them all at the same time. We’ll also edit our favorite 5-8 interviews into a supercut that can be the lead video / series trailer.
You can see the videos that we’ve already published on frominside.ai.
Palisade holds the view that loss of control risk is high, but we’re not trying to filter for people who agree with us. We’re still eager to include you in the project if your position is that the risks are overblown or that we need to be concerned about over-regulation, for instance.
Sample interview questions
Note that these aren’t necessarily the only questions we’ll ask. In particular, we’ll ask follow-up questions to your answers—basically trying to ask the questions that we imagine a member of the public would have if they were listening to you. But these basically cover the topics that we want to ask you about.
You’re also free to decline to answer any question. Further, if you think that there’s something else that’s important and not captured by these questions, we’re glad to film that instead or in addition. These are intended as scaffolding, not requirements.
Questions:
- What’s your name, where do you work, what year did you start, and what do you do there?
- What do you most want the public to understand about the current AI situation?
- Why do people believe there’s a chance of human extinction from AI? Do you, personally, think there’s a chance of extinction?
- Why are many lab employees calling for pacing the frontier and what does that mean?
- Does that mean giving up US competitiveness in AI?
- What is “recursive self-improvement” and why is that significant?
- What is superintelligence? Do you think that the AI companies will make superintelligence?
- Why do you work at an AI company if you think there’s a significant chance of catastrophe?
- Do you talk about these kinds of risks with your co-workers? Do they share your concerns? What do most people think? How do they talk about this?
- What does the world need to do about all this?
- What should governments do?
- What should the average person do?
- There are policymakers currently drafting and debating legislation about AI. What do you want to tell them?
- Where did you grow up? When you think about your family and the people you grew up with, what do you most want to tell them about the AI situation?
- If you were talking to all the people, like you, who are contributing to developing this technology, what do you want to tell them?
- When you think about the future, how do you feel?