How much will conceptual reasoning training transfer to ML research abilities?

Recently the Conceptual Reasoning Capabilities (CRC) team at Redwood released a post arguing that we should accelerate AI’s conceptual reasoning abilities. This post was very controversial. In particular, people are worried that improving AI’s conceptual reasoning abilities will accelerate both their ability to do ML research and the capabilities they need for takeover. I am going to address just one chunk of this controversy: how much does training conceptual reasoning on AI safety questions translate to general ML research abilities? As a reference point for conceptual reasoning training, we

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