Earlier this month I had occasion to be on the campus of Stanford University, a place I had not visited since I worked at the Hoover Institution—a think tank headquartered in the center of campus—two years ago. From 2022 to 2024, I worked principally out of Hoover’s office in D.C., but spent about a quarter of my year at Stanford. Though my work there did not focus at all on AI, it was through walks around Stanford and the broader Palo Alto area that I formed many of my foundational thoughts about AI.
I happened to be at the Hoover HQ on the day that ChatGPT was released, though by then I had been observing improvements in these things called “language models” for some time. Back in an earlier job, we had briefly tried to use GPT-2 in policy research for some basic classification tasks. It failed. By 2023, those classification tasks were trivial for models, and significantly more complex research tasks felt possible for models to do. By 2023, it had dawned on me that real AI—not “deep learning” as a modality of statistics but actual, honest-to-goodness artificial intelligence—might be on the horizon. And it was on walks on campus that I reflected on what this would mean for me, my career, my friends, and ultimately the human future.
What kind of a challenge was this task of “alignment”? How should we think about the risks of “misalignment”? Was AI a new thing under the sun, or was it consistent with the pattern of prior emerging technologies? Does AI break the existing Constitutional order of the United States, or does it merely challenge it?
