it's now been 15 months since MIRI but I just remembered that three separate people have told me they liked this post despite my not cross-posting it, so I am now cross-posting it.

Not written with the intention of being useful to any particular audience, just collecting my thoughts on this past year's work.

September-December 2023: Orienting and Threat Modeling

Until September, I was contracting full time for a project at MIRI. When the MIRI project ended, I felt very confused about lots of things in AI safety. I didn't know what sort of research would be useful for making AI safe, and I also didn't really know what my cruxes were for resolving that confusion. When people asked what I was thinking about, I usually responded with some variation of the following: