Scaling Trust, Not Just Models: Why AI Safety Must Be Quantitative
As artificial intelligence surges toward superhuman capabilities, one truth becomes unavoidable: the strength of our oversight must grow just as fast as the intelligence of the systems we deploy. Simply hoping that “better AI will supervise even better AI” is not a strategy — it’s wishful thinking. Recent research from MIT and collaborators proposes a bold new way to think about this challenge: Nested Scalable Oversight (NSO) — a method to recursively layer weaker systems to oversee stronger ones1. One of the key contributors, Max Tegmark, is a physicist and cosmologist at MIT renowned for his work on AI safety, the mathematical structure of reality, and existential risk analysis. Tegmark is also the founder of the Future of Life Institute, an organization dedicated to mitigating risks from transformative technologies. ...