2020 Survey of Artificial General Intelligence Projects for Ethics, Risk, and Policy
From the Abstract:
This paper presents a survey of AGI R&D projects that are active in 2020 and updates a previous survey of projects active in 2017. Both surveys attempt to identify every active AGI R&D project and characterize them in terms of relevance to ethics, risk, and policy, focusing on seven attributes:
- The type of institution in which the project is based
- Whether the project publishes open-source code
- Whether the project has military connections
- The nation(s) in which the project is based
- The project’s goals for its AGI
- The extent of the project’s engagement with AGI safety issues
- The overall size of the project
Regarding policy, several conclusions can be drawn. First, the concentration of projects in the US and its allies could greatly facilitate the establishment of international public policy for AGI. Second, the large and growing number of corporate projects suggests an urgent need to attend to the corporate governance and political economy of AGI R&D. Third, the smaller but still significant number of academic projects suggests that research policy institutions, such as review boards that evaluate risky research, have an important role to play. Fourth, the large number of projects with open-source code presents a policy challenge because it makes it AGI R&D accessible to anyone anywhere in the world. Fifth, the large difference in size between the largest and smallest projects suggests that policymaking may benefit from a focus on larger projects. Finally, the absence of large government projects suggests that the primary role of governments may be as regulators of private-sector AGI R&D rather than as drivers of AGI R&D.
This study has some limitations, meaning that the actual state of AGI R&D may differ from what is presented here. The survey is based exclusively on openly published information and projects were sought out primarily using the English language. It is possible that this survey missed some AGI R&D projects. ...
PhilNote: The appendices describe every project that they found. The authors acknowledge that their report could be incomplete because it only includes publicly available data.
See the full 150 page report here: http://gcrinstitute.org/papers/055_agi-2020.pdf