The Man Who Might SOLVE AI Alignment 🦸‍♂️ Dr. Steven Byrnes (@steve47285) is one of the few people who both understands why alignment is hard, and is taking a serious technical shot at solving it. He has a whopping 90% P(Doom), but argues that LLMs will plateau before becoming truly dangerous, and the real threat will come from next-generation “brain-like AGI” based on actor-critic reinforcement learning. After his UC Berkeley physics PhD & Harvard postdoc, he became an AGI safety researcher at @AsteraInstitute. He's now deep in the neuroscience of reverse-engineering how human brains actually work, knowledge that could plausibly help us solve the technical AI alignment problem. In this unusually deep episode — because with all due respect to my other guests, I didn't have to waste any time arguing with him about obvious surface issues — we talk about his "two subsystems" model of the brain, why current AI safety approaches miss the mark, his disagreements with social evolution approaches, and why understanding human neuroscience matters for building aligned AGI.

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The rare episode where the guest is RIGHT!