Richard Ngo Calls His Alignment Cohort a Lost Generation

Richard Ngo posted that alignment researchers who entered the field between OpenAI's founding in 2015 and ChatGPT in 2022 form a lost generation. He said they had too much ideology and too little curiosity to produce great research and hoped later arrivals would do better. In a follow-up he added that his cohort still holds traits missing from the diluted field today, that the prior generation remains strongest on those traits, and that progress depends on peaks rather than averages.