alignment

So in response, Google — thousands of jobs lighter than it was last fiscal quarter — is funneling investments toward AI safety. This morning, Google DeepMind, the AI R&D division behind Gemini and many of Google’s more recent GenAI projects, announced the formation of a new organization, AI Safety and Alignment — made up of existing teams working on AI safety but also broadened to encompass new, specialized cohorts of GenAI researchers and engineers. But it did reveal that AI Safety and Alignment will include a new team focused on safety around artificial general intelligence (AGI), or hypothetical systems that can perform any task a human can. The AI Safety and Alignment organization’s other teams are responsible for developing and incorporating concrete safeguards into Google’s Gemini models, current and in-development. One might assume issues as grave as AGI safety — and the longer-term risks the AI Safety and Alignment organization intends to study, including preventing AI in “aiding terrorism” and “destabilizing society” — require a director’s full-time attention.