AI safety researchers often describe their long term goals as building "safe and efficient AIs", but don't always mean the same thing by this or other seemingly similar phrases. Asking about their "success stories" (i.e., scenarios in which their line of research helps contribute to a positive outcome) can help make clear what their actual research aims are. Knowing such scenarios also makes it easier to compare the ambition, difficulty, and other attributes of different lines of AI safety research. I hope this contributes to improved communication and coordination between different groups of people working on AI risk.

In the rest of the post, I describe some common AI safety success stories that I've heard over the years and then compare them along a number of dimensions. They are listed in roughly the order in which they first came to my attention. (Suggestions welcome for better names for any of these scenarios, as well as additional success stories and additional dimensions along which they can be compared.)

The Success Stories

Sovereign Singleton

AKA Friendly AI, an autonomous, superhumanly intelligent AGI that takes over the world and optimizes it according to some (perhaps indirect) specification of human values.

Pivotal Tool

An oracle or task AGI, which can be used to perform a pivotal but limited act, and then stops to wait for further instructions.

Corrigible Contender

A semi-autonomous AGI that does not have long-term preferences of its own but acts according to (its understanding of) the short-term preferences of some human or group of humans, it competes effectively with comparable AGIs corrigible to other users as well as unaligned AGIs (if any exist), for resources and ultimately for influence on the future of the universe.

Interim Quality-of-Life Improver

AI risk can be minimized if world powers coordinate to limit AI capabilities development or deployment, in order to give AI safety researchers more time to figure out how to build a very safe and highly capable AGI. While that is proceeding, it may be a good idea (e.g., politically advisable and/or morally correct) to deploy relatively safe, limited AIs that can improve people's quality of life but are not necessarily state of the art in terms of capability or efficiency. Such improvements can for example include curing diseases and solving pressing scientific and technological problems.

(I want to credit Rohin Shah as the person that I got this success story from, but can't find the post or comment where he talked about it. Was it someone else?)

Research Assistant

If an AGI project gains a lead over its competitors, it may be able to grow that into a larger lead by building AIs to help with (either safety or capability) research. This can be in the form of an oracle, or human imitation, or even narrow AIs useful for making money (which can be used to buy more compute, hire more human researchers, etc). Such Research Assistant AIs can help pave the way to one of the other, more definitive success stories. Examples: 1, 2.

Comparison Table

	Sovereign Singleton	Pivotal Tool	Corrigible Contender	Interim Quality-of-Life Improver	Research Assistant
Autonomy	High	Low	Medium	Low	Low
AI safety ambition / difficulty	Very High	Medium	High	Low	Low
Reliance on human safety	Low	High	High	Medium	Medium
Required capability advantage over competing agents	High	High	None	None	Low
Tolerates capability trade-off due to safety measures	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Some
Assumes strong global coordination	No	No	No	Yes	No
Controlled access	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes

(Note that due to limited space, I've left out a couple of scenarios which are straightforward recombinations of the above success stories, namely Sovereign Contender and Corrigible Singleton. I also left out CAIS because I find it hard to visualize it clearly enough as a success story to fill out its entries in the above table, plus I'm not sure if any safety researchers are currently aiming for it as a success story.)

The color coding in the table indicates how hard it would be to achieve the required condition for a success story to come to pass, with green meaning relatively easy, and yellow/pink/violet indicating increasing difficulty. Below is an explanation of what each row heading means, in case it's not immediately clear.

Autonomy

The opposite of human-in-the-loop.

AI safety ambition/difficulty

Achieving each success story requires solving a different set of AI safety problems. This is my subjective estimate of how ambitious/difficult the corresponding set of AI safety problems is. (Please feel free to disagree in the comments!)

Reliance on human safety

How much does achieving this success story depend on humans being safe, or on solving human safety problems? This is also a subjective judgement because different success stories rely on different aspects of human safety.

Required capability advantage over competing agents

Does achieving this success story require that the safe/aligned AI have a capability advantage over other agents in the world?

Tolerates capability trade-off due to safety measures

Many ways of achieving AI safety have a cost in terms of lowering the capability of an AI relative to an unaligned AI built using comparable resources and technology. In some scenarios this is not as consequential (e.g., because it depends on achieving a large initial capability lead and then preventing any subsequent competitors from arising), and that's indicated by a "Yes" in this row.

Assumes strong global coordination

Does this success story assume that there is strong global coordination to prevent unaligned competitors from arising?

Controlled access

Does this success story assume that only a small number of people are given access to the safe/aligned AI?

Further Thoughts

1. This exercise made me realize that I'm confused about how the Pivotal Tool scenario is supposed to work, after the initial pivotal act is done. It would likely require several years or decades to fully solve AI safety/alignment and remove the dependence on human safety, but it's not clear how to create a safe environment for doing that after the pivotal act.
2. One thing I'm less confused about now is why people who work toward the Contender scenarios are focused more on minimizing the capability trade-off of safety measures than people who work toward the Singleton scenarios even though the latter scenarios seem to demand more of a capability lead. It's because the latter group of people think it's possible or likely for a single AGI project to achieve a large initial capability advantage, in which case some initial capability trade-off due to safety measures is ok, and subsequent ongoing capability trade-off is not consequential because there would be no competitors left.
3. The comparison table makes Research Assistant seem a particularly attractive scenario to aim for, as a stepping stone to a more definitive success story. Is this conclusion actually justified?
4. Interim Quality-of-Life Improver also looks very attractive, if only strong global coordination could be achieved.