This is an annual post reviewing the last year and setting goals for next year. Overall, this was a reasonably good year with some challenges (the invasion of Ukraine and being sick a lot). Some highlights in this review are improving digital habits, reviewing sleep data from the Oura ring since 2019 and calibration of predictions since 2014, an updated set of Lights habits, the unreasonable effectiveness of nasal spray against colds, and of course baby pictures.
2022 review
Life updates
I am very grateful that my immediate family is in the West, and my relatives both in Ukraine and Russia managed to stay safe and avoid being drawn into the war on either side. In retrospect, it was probably good that my dad died in late 2021 and not a few months later when Kyiv was under attack, so we didn’t have to figure out how to get a bedridden cancer patient out of a war zone. It was quite surreal that the city that I had visited just a few months back was now under fire, and the people I had met there were now in danger. The whole thing was pretty disorienting and made it hard to focus on work for a while. I eventually mostly stopped checking the news and got back to normal life with some background guilt about not keeping up with what’s going on in the homeland.
AI alignment
My work focused on threat models and inner alignment this year:
- Made an overview talk on Paradigms of AI alignment: components and enablers and gave the talk in a few places.
- Coauthored Goal Misgeneralization: why correct rewards aren’t enough for correct goals paper and the associated DeepMind blog post
- Did a survey of DeepMind alignment team opinions on AGI ruin arguments, which received a lot of interest on the alignment forum.
- Wrote a post on Refining the Sharp Left Turn threat model
- Contributed to DeepMind alignment posts on Clarifying AI x-risk and Threat model literature review
- Coauthored a prize-winning submission to the Eliciting Latent Knowledge contest: Route understanding through the human ontology.