The speaker is more hopeful than before partly because large language models are better, in the relevant respect, than the reinforcement-learning self-play agents that people had expected.

“Yeah, I think the alignment community did not really expect LLMs. I mean, if you look in Bostrom's superintelligence, there's a discussion of Oracle AIs, which are sort of like LLMs. I think that came as a surprise. I think one of the reasons I'm more hopeful than I used to be is that LLMs are great compared to the kind of reinforcement learning self.”

“self-play agents that they expected.”