AI's impact will be bottlenecked by institutions more than by capabilities

Sayash Kapoor, Rishi Bommasani and Arvind Narayanan announce STABL, a new non-profit research organization arguing that AI's societal impact will be limited more by the pace of institutional and organizational change than by capability progress. STABL outlines four research directions: empirically testing recursive self-improvement claims (including open-ended evaluations via CRUX), expanding AI safety beyond alignment and non-proliferation toward control, downstream defenses and societal resilience, measuring AI's economic impacts and steering toward augmentation, and studying how knowledge work and institutions should adapt.