Many of the most prominent people in the AI industry all know each other or have deep social ties. Why? Because they all came from the same places. Neural network research was niche circa 2012 and early adopters post AlexNet were few in number, especially compared to today. This by itself does not infer a conflict of interest. If you believe so, then you might be surprised to find that all research is like this in every field. The most prominent players were part of the initial niche. Sub-optimal, yes, but this is the reality.

Now, I do not know METR, and have not interacted with its staff. $120m is pretty normal for these types of groups as I understand. METR clearly has even tighter ties to the AI companies than any of the groups I do know, so I agree that calling them independent is a bit of a joke. Even without the explicit labels from their website, there are shockingly few degrees of separation in this entire field. The conferences are big, workshops are designed to be highly social, and the stakes feel high.

Regarding the timeframe and limited material, that's pretty standard now. You do what you can.

Now, none of this necessarily invalidates what they did. Yes, there is big money in AI, and that money hires people, but there quite a lot of geeky researchers in these groups that genuinely only care about the science. That level of neurodivergence might be difficult for most people to comprehend, especially if you're focusing on the politics, but these are the types of people attracted to this line of work.

Put yourself in the shoes of these researchers. You are really interested in AI and how it works, and you convince yourself that this is potentially moral to work on because of a possible threat to humanity. You apply to work at one of these groups. You find similarly-minded people and work together on trying to figure things out. Maybe your boss is a sleazebag in bed with the industry, or maybe they're not. You do not care. You work on this, you publish notes and papers, you comment on LessWrong or X, and you leave the company if they don't let you do this stuff, because there are dozens of others.

Most of the public don't know these guys or this work, because they only focus on the crappy and irresponsible companies leading the AI development charge, and alignment research is so unbelievably hard and slow. I can go into the why if you're interested, but the reason is that it is extraordinarily difficult to make progress if your objective is only vaguely defined. This is the same problem with the Yang-Mills mass gap, for example, although I would personally bet that Yang-Mills has a much better chance of being solved than alignment. Just a different tier of difficulty altogether.

I also disagree that p(doom) work (I don't think this describes more than 1% of the work out there, closest I can think of is Tegmark's group, which put it pretty high from recollection) advances the pace of AI. I don't believe it is doing anything. Nobody externally believes it anyway (why would they?). These companies are run by narcissists who believe that they should be the ones to reach "superintelligence".