Why I'm Doing This

What is worth doing?

For at least four years I have believed that there is a 10% chance approximately all humans will be dead within something like 10 years. Four years later, I now think something more like 13% chance within 7 or so years.

Purpose is hard. I don’t think I have ever had a job that seemed that worthwhile or fun such that I would inherently want to do it forever, or even for the next 10 years. So, given all jobs are kind of eh, I might as well work one that most quickly gets me to a state where I never need to work again. Having enough money to free myself from having to work was my purpose after college. I managed it in about 4 years, and then once again I was purposeless. I briefly tried making so much money that I could support causes that I cared about (both locally in my community and globally), but working just to give didn’t feel purposeful and involved working a job that while interesting and relatively fun, was just super stressful. It’s been about a year since the ‘make oodles of money’ job blew up. I have really really really struggled to find aim in that time. I have tried working on things that I find fun, but eventually they stop being fun and then I stop working on them. I have tried really leaning into other aspects of my life (mostly community), but there’s something weird about a great community where the community is my purpose? To some extent it feels like the “easy way out” to purpose is just to have kids and lean into raising lots of kids in my wonderful community, after all that’s been most people’s purpose for most of history. I’ve even considered pursuing the non intellectual things that I love (mostly climbing and dancing), but I think I like solving problems too much to lean that far into my physical body as purpose.

Then, someone I think extremely highly of asked me “If you think there’s something that has a high chance of killing all humans, why the fuck aren’t you doing anything about it?!” (or something along those lines I’m terrible at remembering the exact words someone has said.) I didn’t really have a good answer. To some extent I think it’s because it has seemed intractable, solving the problem of AI potentially killing everyone has always seemed like an extremely technical problem. I would certainly consider myself both technical and a nerd, but isn’t aligning AI for the super duper turbo nerds? (said affectionately) This person seemed to think there was plenty of potential positive impact regardless of whether or not I quite make it into that bucket of turbo nerd. And, the more I thought about it the more I realized it’s crazy that I haven’t even tried working on what I consider the world’s most important open problem.

My guess is that I won’t be at that highest echelon of AI safety research, I’ve certainly seen that next level of quant genius and I strongly suspect that’s not me. But, that doesn’t mean there’s no positive impact for me to find. It seems like there’s a whole range of ways to help humanity not get wrecked by AI, and maybe working towards that will feel purposeful. I certainly hope so. If not, all I’ve got left is having kids. Also, I’d really like to not die in the next 7 years! All of humanity not dying is I suppose also pretty important. As long as I can continue living a joyous life in all my other ways, which so far it seems like I’m pretty good at.

So, what am I doing? It seems like the kind of impact/job/etc I could do really depends on my technical skill. How deep I can get into the weeds to really understand these models. I am currently about a month into self studying, by the time you read this hopefully I will be even further. I have had an AI whip up a curriculum and a tracker that I update each time I finish something which you can find here. I’ve waited on writing this article until I feel like I have actually made real progress. Feels a little presumptuous to write out a whole who I am what I am doing before I have made any progress. And, progress I have made! I have just written and trained my first super small GPT (mostly, I have AI assistance in both learning and bug fixing but all lines are written) by myself! I understand transformers and Multi Layer Perceptrons, which as far as I can tell is the core basic foundation.

What comes next? Part of why I am writing this and part of why I made the tracker public is to keep me honest. Learning is hard. 8 hours of learning one topic every day is hard, but so far it’s been going well! I am planning on continuing the journey to see just how technical I can get, in a couple months once I have a better idea of just how technical I can get it will be time for me to start thinking through what to actually do. If you have thoughts you think would be helpful for me to hear, I would love to hear them!