The most important problem (you've never heard of)

When you first read about AI risk, it sounds like science fiction, and I'm used to slowly working my way around to the topic, so that I don't sound like a lunatic. But the past week has really changed the conversation! Some of the highlights: Coxon triggered a preference cascade and discussion about existential risk UN tweeted "We may be the last generation able to set the terms on which humanity and machines coexist" Anthropic pledged unilateral commitment to external auditors OpenAI agreed to follow suit The profile and commitment to "pacing the frontier" has dramatically risen in the past few days! But note that we only can make a deal if we can verify that the deal is being kept. Which, to me, makes it obvious that "compute verification" is the most important problem on Earth, even if you've never heard of it [1] . Don't feel bad; hardly anyone has. I dug through all of the research papers that I could find on it , amounting to ~60 papers total (i.e. you could read literally all accumulated knowledge of the field in a week or so). Depending on how you slice the numbers, there are about 72 researchers actively working on the problem, and most aren't full-time; I estimate that the global population of folks answering the Most Important Question On Earth is around 25 FTE (well, I got serious about it last month, now it's up to 26). I hope you join our ranks! If you, personally, work on a Verification problem for the next 6 months, you could increase what we know and/or have…