Advancing AI requires making AI systems smarter, but it also requires preventing accidents—that is, ensuring that AI systems do what people actually want them to do. There’s been an increasing focus on safety research⁠(opens in a new window) from the machine learning community, such as a recent paper⁠(opens in a new window) from DeepMind⁠(opens in a new window) and FHI⁠(opens in a new window). Still, many machine learning researchers have wondered just how much safety research can be done today.

Many of the problems are not new, but the paper explores them in the context of cutting-edge systems. We hope they’ll inspire more people to work on AI safety research, whether at OpenAI⁠ or elsewhere.

We’re particularly excited to have participated in this paper as a cross-institutional collaboration. We think that broad AI safety collaborations will enable everyone to build better machine learning systems. Let us know⁠(opens in a new window) if you have a future paper you’d like to collaborate on!