I'm replying here because I can no longer edit my comment, and I think I interpreted the statement too narrowly. After parsing it more carefully and expanding

I'm replying here because I can no longer edit my comment, and I think I interpreted the statement too narrowly. After parsing it more carefully and expanding some of the weasel words/implications, I think it goes something like this: > There are potential benefits to AI and there are potential risks ("safety challenges"). We're not focusing on the safety challenges because we believe it's a foregone conclusion that they outweigh the benefits, but because further work is required to adequately measure safety, to identify mitigations to safety issues, and to provide assurance that such mitigations are sufficient. We believe that the current level of motivation for such research is not sufficient. I took the most liberty with the last sentence, but I put it there because it seems that if the primary motivation is to generate interest, there must be a belief that the current motivation is not there. I think this is ultimately a more charitable interpretation than what I had initially drawn, but also seems deeply disturbing that the company at the forefront of this research is in the stage of trying to generate motivation to build the tools to measure safety. That still terrifies me. And I also find it worrisome that such a consequential sentence has clearly been run through many levels of PR/Legal/Marketing/etc. It shouldn't be necessary to read tea leaves on this issue. I do find it encouraging that this paper exists, and I hope it has the desired effect.