The speaker believes that alignment research using 2016-era computer budgets would have made almost no progress and would not have produced the useful discoveries made later.

“that much progress on relevant questions on alignment or something like i think like imagine you were trying to make progress on alignment uh in 2016 uh with the computer budgets of 2016 and the like well you would have gotten nowhere basically like you would have discovered none of the things that people have today discovered and that turned out to be useful and i think if you pause today then we will be in a very similar position uh in 10 years”