A year or so ago, I thought that 10x speedups in safety research would require AIs so capable that takeover risks would be very high. 2-3x gains seemed plausible, 10x seemed unlikely. I no longer think this.

What changed? I continue to think that AI x-risk research is predominantly bottlenecked on good ideas, but I suffered from a failure of imagination of the speedups that could be gained from AIs that are unable to produce great high-level ideas. I’ve realised that humans trying to get empirical feedback from their ideas waste a huge amount of thought cycles on tasks that could be done by just moderately capable AI agents.

I don’t expect this to be an unpopular position, but I thought it might be useful to share some details of how I see this speedup happening in my current research.

Tooling alone could 3-5x progress

If we stopped frontier [...]

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Outline:

(00:59) Tooling alone could 3-5x progress

(03:52) Going from 3-5x to 10x speedup

(04:25) My takeaways

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
June 29th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p28GHSYskzsGKvABH/i-underestimated-safety-research-speedups-from-safe-ai

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“I underestimated safety research speedups from safe AI” by Dan Braun

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“I underestimated safety research speedups from safe AI” by Dan Braun