Eddy’s AI Safety Digest
Hi, I’m Eddy, a BSCS student at UIUC. This blog documents my journey into AI safety research, focusing on alignment, interpretability, and robustness in machine learning systems.
Concrete Problems in AI Safety: A Review, Retrospection, and Reflection
Concrete Problems in AI Safety is a 2016 paper by Amodei et al. 1, a collaboration between researchers from leading industry labs (Google Brain and OpenAI) and top academic institutions (Stanford University and UC Berkeley). Published during the emergence of advanced machine learning paradigms, such as deep reinforcement learning, it has since become a cornerstone of AI safety research. The paper outlines unsolved but actionable challenges facing the field at the time in aligning increasingly intelligent systems with human intent, significantly influencing subsequent studies and industry best practices for safely deploying powerful models. In this blog post, I aim to explore the paper’s key ideas, highlight their significance to modern safety research from a retrospective perspective, and reflect on how it has shaped my academic journey. ...