Introduction to AI safety

I was invited by my former Mathematics Professor, René Adad, to give a 50-minute introductory talk on AI safety at Lycée Thiers to an audience of classe préparatoire students and teachers. The outline of my presentation covered:

• The possibility that AGI might be as close as just a few years away
• How our current AI training methods can cause problems like misalignment, reward hacking, and instrumental convergence, which could lead to catastrophic outcomes
• Early signs of these problems already emerging in chatbot LLMs (including the Apollo Research demonstration of deception)
• A brief overview of current research agendas, including:
  • Evaluation frameworks
  • Governance approaches
  • Mechanistic interpretability
  • Scalable oversight methods (such as Debate and Iterated Amplification)