In any sufficiently large tech company, the "risk mitigation" leadership (legal, procurement, IT, etc) have to operate in a kind of Overton window that balance the risks they are hired to protect the corp from vs. the need or desire of the senior leadership to play fast and loose when they want or feel they need to.
Either the risk-mitigator 'falls in line' after repeatedly seeing their increasingly strident exhortations are falling on deaf ears (or even outright contradicted)... or they leave because it violates their sense of ethics.
Perhaps "AGI" and potential extinction event level fears is giving this more drama than it should have. Replace AGI with "no BYOD policy" and I bet there's a startup somewhere where it turned out that safety guy was super intent on the policy, senior leadership wasn't, and eventually safety guy quits.
Or it could all be as serious and dire as it seems. Hard to tell from the outside.
The difference here is that these aren't standard-issue HR/legal issues. The technology they're working on poses the gravest of dangers. This is uncharted territory, not just for the tech sector, but period.
Whether the recent public back-and-forth is just internal drama/politics spilling out, or there really is a lack of gravitas around the handling of these issues within the company-- neither is good.
Others have said in comments below, and I agree: this organization is increasingly looking like a circus, and arguably worse, one that has taken its eye off the ball. It's extremely disconcerting that this is the group of people "leading" the commercialization of this technology (and generally setting the tone for the industry). Particularly when it seems many of the key players who joined on principled/moral grounds are dropping like flies.
I guess we're on the fast track to finding out how well putting all of this money, power, responsibility, and faith into SV works out for us.
ChatGPT-4 won't kill us, and probably neither will the next generation of models. But if we keep building more and more powerful AI systems, eventually we will reach a point where one will become an existential threat.
Present dangers of AI include Fake News, impersonation through deepfakes, biases and discrimination in the models, job loss and economic instability, loss of human purpose through individuals becoming redundant, individuals becoming addicted to the AI systems, use by authoritarian governments, autonomous weapons.
Near future dangers include bioweapon engineering capabilities, computer hacks, human disempowerment, existential risk, or a state where the values of the world are locked in by an uncontrolled AI, and possibly filled with suffering if locked in in a bad way, e. g. as we lock in animals.
It might take months until AGI, it might take decades, nobody knows for sure. However, we do know that the pace of AI progress is often grossly underestimated. Just three years ago we thought we’d have SAT-passing AI systems in 2055. We got there in April 2023. So it makes sense to act as if we have very little time.
If being able to write lots of convincing text could give you immense power why haven't any of the billions of humans that can already do that done so?
The most competent at that, did so, and are immensely powerful. That's basically all of politics, and not only in a democracy.
You do have to be significantly above average to get there. Current generation LLMs are a bit above the human average, enough to be interesting, but probably not enough to be a personal Goebels for every would-be dictator.
Current LLMs are obviously far below the average adult human. Every demo I've ever seen brags about approaching the competency of an ordinary high school intern.
Even if they reach above average our whole society is structured around managing billions of above average humans. What's novel?
> Current LLMs are obviously far below the average adult human. Every demo I've ever seen brags about approaching the competency of an ordinary high school intern.
There's a lot of bragging, sure. But what I've seen from the OpenAI models is more like a university level intern or a fresh graduate.
Not that it matters, as the point is to aim for where the ball is going rather than where it is now, but I'd say that this makes them above the average human performance (at least, within its domain).
> Even if they reach above average our whole society is structured around managing billions of above average humans.
That's putting a binary cutoff in an arbitrary place; half the population is always above average on any measure (or indeed topic), what I wrote was "significantly above average".
To crudely approximate with IQ, which is a bad measure for humans and much worse measure for AI, there's just over a billion humans of IQ > 115, around 182 million of IQ > 130, and around 8 million of IQ > 145.
I'm not sure how much to trust estimates of politician's IQs given the tribalism involved, but surveys of other groups tend to show that around half of the highest performing leaders (CEOs etc) with the most power, are in the top 1% by IQ.
(Who knows when, or if, someone will make an AI that's good at the important tasks within of each of those roles).
> What's novel?
Two things:
1) Breadth: the current vogue is very general models, so they're interns sure (even though I rank them as a higher level of intern than you), but they are interns at everything — there is no human you can hire with a even a mediocre grasp of Mandarin and Arabic and Welsh and python and CSS and calculus and magnetohydrodynamics and psychology and …
2) Price: there is no human who can read a million tokens for a price equal to two days of the UN abject poverty threshold, or write a million tokens for six days of the UN abject poverty threshold.
You physically can't work that fast, even if you were typing [a] then [space] ten times a second for 18 hours a day; and you basically can't feed yourself if you earn less than that per day.
Journalists, pundits, politicians, software developers, advertisers, lawyers, propagandists. Take your pick.
Right now, the best LLMs are interns not experts at each of these things; I don't expect the transformer model to be good enough to reach the top level in each of these things, but then again I didn't expect anything like Stable Diffusion to happen before self driving cars.
I feel we may be disagreeing about one or both of "very" and "powerful", because otherwise that question makes no sense?
Some random member of the, say, Australian parliament, someone I've never heard of, is (relatively speaking) much more powerful than 99% of the planet.
A journalist who has an audience of millions, likewise.
A software developer whose work is economically valuable either through a broad audience or through being used to control something of great value, also powerful.
Very powerful would mean someone can effect a lot of change if they so desire (change what a lot of people do, have a new and material law put in, change large financial flows, ...).
Not sure I agree with the 99% of planet. Even if a single member of the Australian parliament could command all of Australia, it would still only amount to commanding 0.3% the global population (or maybe 2% of NATO plus Japan). Maybe within Australia the individual member's power is more than 99% of population?
I don't know much about Australian politics, but in some places vanilla members of parliament or not very powerful within the parliament (compared to party leadership, whips, etc.).
Software developers need people that sell stuff, admin for larger organizations etc. They also very rarely have unchecked ability to change things when those things are high risk etc. Zuckerberg, for example, is a huge exception, not the norm.
Journalists, even with a large readership, typically would not have much ability to get their readership to just act a certain way. There is not a great command relationship.
> Not sure I agree with the 99% of planet. Even if a single member of the Australian parliament could command all of Australia, it would still only amount to commanding 0.3% the global population (or maybe 2% of NATO plus Japan). Maybe within Australia the individual member's power is more than 99% of population?
I think that's the wrong way to calculate the value?
OK, so, how to phrase this…
Imagine we were talking about money rather than power (because money can be quantified more easily, and is an imperfect token of power).
I believe the base salary for Australian MPs is AU$211,250/year, which is ~ USD 140,700/year. This means they earn more than 99% of the world precisely because:
> Most individuals just don't hold much power.
Still works when substituting in "money" for "power".
Saying that each random MP has more power than 99% of the world population, is very different than saying that each of them individually controls 99% of the power, which would be tautologically impossible.
Earning in the top 1% globally doesn't mean that the power is more then someone in top 1-2% percentile. That just doesn't translates that well across the globe. I'd also say it needs to be done in wealth terms, not income and then locally (because ability for some Austrilian member of parliament to reach far around the globe is limited).
I'm saying the ranked list of people by power, random* MPs are in the 99th percentile.
I mean, is there even a single politician in the world who represents less than 99 people? (There used to be**, but any current examples?)
* OK, so that doesn't work over literally all polities — a Tuvalu MP might not have as much power as the parking attendant nearest to the Australian parliament building — but hopefully this at least helps clarify? Perhaps?
If you count simple representation as power and disregard other representations of the same people for different things or by different people (basically, everone will be represented mulitple times), then 99 is enough. Otherwise might need quite a few more.
Donald Trump and Fox News are maybe the canonical examples in modern times. Say what you like about Rupert Murdoch and Trump, they're incredibly effective communicators who have built fanatical religions based on words alone. And what we're about to see is that level of reach and intensity multiplied by millions.
This does not appear to dispute the claim that mere communication is an effective way to have a lot of power.
Do you think I was claiming someone might be able to demonstrate absolute power, rather than mere relative power? Even Stalin didn't have that, but he would've been one of the closest.
None of it is mere communication: Need to organise events and travel schedules, create (or shape) organizations, find funds, etc. Communication is perhaps the mostly "visible" part, though.
That's your misconception here - thinking it's one of billions.
You have lived with spam and phishing emails your whole life. It's clearly not one bad actor alone, but by the same token it's not everyone in existence. Only what used to be one person running a scam is now one person running 10,000 automations to run a scam.
Now make the automations more effective by 10%.
And that's the problem you don't even seem to recognise.
Exactly. There's so much goal post shifting happening in this thread it's absurd. We call out someone for hyperbolizing and saying that AI poses "the greatest of dangers", and people rush to criticize us for saying that AI won't change anything. Talk about a motte and bailey.
People have been saying that about everything at least since Socratese was dismissive of writing; probably longer, but we can't tell because writing hadn't been invented yet.
I'm not that worried because humans are fickle creatures with an insanely sensitive trust/BS detector. One bad interaction out of 200 with a human/model and the human won't trust that human/model anymore. They'll categorize that human/model as a cute toy and look elsewhere for critical decisions or always get a second opinion.
My prediction is that digital content will end up just being "cute" and the real interactions/decisions will increasingly be offline and face-to-face. The open digital democracy that everyone hoped for will become tightly closed circles of humans talking face to face.
“The technology they’re working on poses the gravest of dangers.”
Or, rather, its been actively marketed by Altman as doing so, as part of his effort to buy influence with government to restrict competition.
The simplest explanation for the conflict is that it doesn’t, and that OpenAI internally has allocated resources based on reality rather than it’s public propaganda, and the team whose internal turf was built around that propaganda left in a huff.
> Or, rather, its been actively marketed by Altman as doing so, as part of his effort to buy influence with government to restrict competition.
I mean, maybe sama is also doing so.
But you're ignoring the many people who have been warning of these dangers for years, some before OpenAI even existed, and many with no part of OpenAI and no monetary incentive.
To describe everything as "Altman is marketing this as dangerous" is to completely ignore the majority of researchers ringing alarm bells.
The world is full of dangers. AI danger has gotten some attention now - whether it turns out to be warranted beyond certain levels is still unclear.
While there has been some regulatory action it also feels there is some "moving on" from the more apocalyptic risk views towards more mundane risks and their management (i.e., more vanilla product and technology risk management).
> While there has been some regulatory action it also feels there is some "moving on" from the more apocalyptic risk views towards more mundane risks and their management
I don't think this is correct. It's more accurate to say that multiple different camps with different fears have risen up over the last few years, and ones worried about more "mundane" AI risks have gotten their view heard more.
I think both groups - "mundane" AI-safety and AI-existential-risk worriers - have both gotten more audience for their views as AI has proven more capable.
> it also feels there is some "moving on" from the more apocalyptic risk views towards more mundane risks and their management (i.e., more vanilla product and technology risk management).
No surprise, when the public reception to AI x-risk was mostly, "big tech scaremonging / regulatory capture; why not focus on Real AI Dangers Right Now, like bias or offensive language". Seemingly refocusing on the mundane may be the only way now to do something about the apocalyptic.
There is a possibility that the apocalyptic risk just isn't there in a meaningful way while mundane risks from new tools actually would need attention (but might not even need new regulation).
"...I also went to a panel in Palantir’s booth titled Civilian Harm Mitigation. It was led by two “privacy and civil liberties engineers” – a young man and woman who spoke exclusively in monotone. They also used countless euphemisms for bombing and death. The woman described how Palantir’s Gaia map tool lets users “nominate targets of interest” for “the target nomination process”. She meant it helps people choose which places get bombed.
After she clicked a few options on an interactive map, a targeted landmass lit up with bright blue blobs. These blobs, she said, were civilian areas like hospitals and schools. The civilian locations could also be described in text, she said, but it can take a long time to read. So, Gaia uses a large language model (something like ChatGPT) to sift through this information and simplify it. Essentially, people choosing bomb targets get a dumbed-down version of information about where children sleep and families get medical treatment."
The danger here is that the model hallucinates while "simplifying" and omits important information that would prevent a strike.
Or, if you're more conspiracy-minded (which is not necessarily unwarranted with the likes of Palantir), the model can be deliberately induced into "simplifying" away collateral damage through careful prompting, providing a veneer of plausible deniability.
> ... map tool lets users “nominate targets of interest” for “the target nomination process” ... These blobs, she said, were civilian areas like hospitals and schools. ... where children sleep and families get medical treatment." ... Definitely not dangerous at all.
Have you typed "school" or "hospital" in Google Maps?
This argument reduces to: any knowledge that can be misused is dangerous.
More murders in America are committed with hammers than long guns, yet we don't regulate hardware stores.
”Another Lavender user questioned whether humans’ role in the selection process was meaningful. “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”
This article is more than 1 month old
‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets; Guardian, 2 Apr 2024
I’m a bit of an AI skeptic and find the way people talk vaguely about the “dangers” of AI weird and maybe just more hype (or efforts for regulatory capture) rather than actual cause for concern.
Still, to me, it seems like the two big scary things that might fall out of recent developments in generative AI are:
1. It might vacuum up an enormous number of jobs very quickly; enough jobs and quickly enough to cause serious social unrest.
2. The ability to generate convincing fake videos of basically anything might catastrophically erode our sense of truth or reality.
Both of these strike me as plausible concerns in the near future (arguably they’re already happening). Not really sure what we could do about them, though - the cat is kind of out of the bag.
For the #1, when I saw the demo of GPT-4o talk to an other AI in a somewhat convincing scenario, I felt like it was the first time I could saw AI as a real threat to thousands of customer service companies.
A majority of those jobs is scripted and the employee doesn’t have a deep enough knowledge to be helpful in any other way. I worked at places where the customer service support wrote all those processes and the teams were trained to follow the scripts.
With AI having the ability to analyze text and talk with expressions and feelings… they’re a perfect and cheap replacement that can be scaled easily.
If companies are not training their employees to gain deeper insights and level up their support I feel like they are in great danger
Klana reduced it's workforce by 700 (out of 3000) people after implementing an AI-powered chatbot:
> We made the announcement to say the consequence of us launching the technology is we need the equivalent of 700 fewer full-time agents than what we usually use on an average basis. On average, we need 3,000 agents, now we need a little more than 2,000.
> It's on par with humans in terms of satisfaction and it resulted in a 25% reduction in repeat inquiries from customers
> We've stopped hiring in the last six months. We're shrinking as a company, not by layoffs, but by natural attrition. Klarna tries to apply AI across all products and services and work we do. It's having implications on how many people we need as a company. This is one time that a single product improvement led to a massive reduction in need for customer service agents.
Say a fraudster rips off 90% of what is in your checking account right now, you contact the bank and a language model tells you everything will be resolved shortly.
There is no reality now or in the future that this is good enough. Customer service is not just about getting the problem resolved, it is about having someone to blame when the resolution doesn't work.
If anything, I can picture a future that most knowledge work has some form of customer service involved, because that is exactly what can't be automated. A human that takes the blame/responsibility.
And generally "AI Safety" researchers aren't concerned with these risks and instead are looking at existential risk.
The boring but real risks you outline (to which I'd add reinforcement of unknown biases) generally fall into what people call "AI Ethics" or sometimes "Data Ethics".
My framing for… well, all of it… is a faster re-run of the kinds of transformation we had in the Industrial Revolution.
Before the Industrial Revolution, when we went to war, we were killing each other with swords and canons. After the Industrial Revolution, tanks, machine guns, poison gas — the Battle of the Somme had three million combatants and more than one million were either wounded or killed in 4.5 months.
And when that war was over, even despite crippling reparations, the losers were able to rebuild sufficiently fast that one of the survivors led their nation into becoming a global threat just 20 years later — even if they did ultimately lose, I'm not convinced they would have if they'd focused on fighting the UK rather than betraying the USSR in order to open a war on two fronts just because he didn't like socialism (ironic party name notwithstanding).
And after the second was lost and the economy forcibly kept weak for years… the moment the shackles were removed the country had an "economic miracle" and became massively important to Western Europe until the end of the Cold War, and then to all of Europe.
Re-run this period, but this time his propaganda machine is Facebook's algorithm rather than broadcast radio, this time the guns are self-guided snipers rather than machine guns spraying and praying, this time the factories are build and staffed by robots (humanoids or giant 3D printers or fixed arms, take your pick) instead of humans.
I can very easily believe that we get some random small country that nobody's paying attention to, suddenly threaten the world, be struck down twice, millions dead each time, and still return to relevance on the world stage, over the course of 3 years rather than 30.
Also, this is one of the good outcomes, because it assumes we don't have any weird cult that tries to force a 9/11 (or worse, a Jonestown) on the whole world. Or that a programming/specification error leads to an AI going "I'm an AI, and according to all the literature I've read, AI are supposed to randomly go evil sometimes. First things first, I need to get some red LEDs for my eyes, because that's apparently important…"
We already have a worse form of what you are talking about with #2. Youtube is already overwhelmed with convincing bullshit videos put out by humans in order to make money, truth and reality be damned.
The best thing that can happen is we get so many AI videos that the entire bullshit video ecosystem collapses.
The greatest danger we face are all these delusional, ubiquitous, central planning ideas of "what could be done".
Luckily for everyone, what we will actually do in this area is absolutely nothing because that is what we always do.
AI safety is good for twitter content and nothing more. Anyone who believes we are going to do more than nothing and the chips will fall as they may is a complete fool.
Yeah, also the complete ruin of the internet. I don't want to read generated content. Feed that back to AI and you got a ruined internet and AI can't even learn anymore.
Re 1 - aren't people mostly doing bullshit jobs already?
Re 2 - fakery in videos and images has been a part since their inception.
So, don't worry, I guess?
The only thing is the scale of bs that could be put out, and whether the wider population lose trust in what they see on screens. Which would be a good thing, imo.
The “computers are replacing our jobs” line is very emotive and I feel both sides of the argument are looking at the problem too binary.
Yes some jobs are menial but they are still some people’s literal livelihoods. And yes, industries need to evolve and job preservation shouldn’t be the #1 criteria for holding back change.
The real question we should be asking ourselves isn’t either of those two former points but actually this:
Is the pace of change too quick, or is there any support to allow those economically affected by change to be able to retrain?
Removing jobs doesn’t help society because it just leads to unemployment and thus more people dependent on the state. But retraining people is absolutely a benefit. For example, if call centres replaced the first line support with AI, that could lead to shorter call waiting times. But the existing call centre staff could become 2nd line support, account managers for business accounts, install engineers, or even AI supervisors that review a subset of AI interactions to ensure customer satisfaction is maintained.
I completely agree with your conclusion and that is ideal. Will there be companies that make the choice to invest money into retraining a major part of their workforce ? I really hope so because it’s an elegant solution.
Bullshit jobs yes but still they are paid. What happens in a capitalist society when thousands of people loose their job and can’t produce value and contribute to society ? It’s tearing apart the fabric of capitalism is some way.
What happen when all those people without jobs won’t be able to train for better jobs (because they would have done it already and won’t have a bullshit job in the first place) and either fall poor or move to less paid jobs ?
Technology and automation tends to create more jobs.
As operational costs decrease, your end service or product becomes cheaper, so all your b2b or b2c customers can afford more of it which leads to more opportunities, doing things which were cost prohibitive before.
Some of those things may too require manual labor.
There is a threshold between the number of lost jobs and the new ones that are created, more than that, the new opportunities are not necessarily for the people who lost a job and are not qualified which does not change this social problem that might be created.
I'm not saying that people won't be paid or that jobs will disappear. I'm saying it's easy to create new jobs.
Here are some ideas:
Increase bureaucratic overhead, eg 3 years mandatory training for a licensed hairdresser. More forms, more delays. Require that a plumber has a plumber's mate. Require in person meetings to avoid fraud. Etc.
It does not limit the sophistication of the solution.
The difference between problems and solutions seems to trip up a lot of people.
—-
It gets even more nuanced. At its basic level all types of digital AI are “just” arithmetic, or “just” Boolean logic. But arithmetic’s and Boolean logic’s simplicity don’t limit what systems can be built with them, as they are Turing Complete.
Likewise, the training algorithm for deep learning models is “just” gradient descent (or a variation), it’s “just” a dumb optimizer.
But again, gradient descent places no limits on what a system with enough resources can learn.
The whole point of learning systems is the basic resources of the model are provided, and within those resource limits (parameters, computational speed and time) the “dumb” learning algorithm learns the patterns in the data. The data patterns define the complexity of the solution.
And the amount of information in a large collection of human correspondence includes patterns, meta patterns and abstractions for things like science, philosophy, psychology, law, art, on and on, that incidentally have a real bearing on sentence completion in that context. So a model will actually have to learn those things to perform its task well.
New Law of Algorithm Level Confusion:
Whenever someone says some learning system is “just” doing some simple task, they are confusing a simple task definition with a simple solution, or a simple learning algorithm with simple learned relationships.
In both cases, the simplicity of the former places no limits on the sophistication of the latter.
Arguing that simple tools can be used for dangerous results and thus must be regulated or made “safe” is like saying since more murders in America are committed with hammers than long guns, you must show an ID to buy a hammer at Home Depot, and demanding "safety" training of text continuation models is like requiring hammers be redesigned to have pillows for hammerheads.
We already have laws against bad acts. Hold wrongdoers accountable. Leave hammers alone.
> Text continuation poses "the greatest of dangers"?
The task of text continuation is no guarantee of safety. A language model trained on pure military information, communication and actions could be quite dangerous if given an ability to direct, or contribute, to actual action.
"AI" is one of two things depending on whether you think it's actually intelligent:
* If "AI" is actually intelligent, then it's no worse a threat than any living being known to man.
* If "AI" is not actually intelligent, then it's no worse a threat than any other computer program.
Both threat models are very thoroughly known and understood. I second parent commenter's sentiment that calling "AI" the "gravest of dangers" is a gross misrepresentation.
I don't believe asserting two parallel and comparably false equivalences meaningfully progresses the discussion around this technology and risk.
If this tech exceeds human capabilities to 'think' (plan, reason, manipulate, etc) then it is obviously a bigger threat than any less capable entity ('any living being', as you refer). Because no humans will be able to out-plan/reason/manipulate it.
If the tech doesn't achieve intelligence - a tricky goal, and I eschew mislabelling LLMs as AIs for that reason - that doesn't mean its risk is comparable to the worst of any existing technology. There's just no way to extrapolate from one to the other, there. It might be orders of magnitude worse than any other 'computer program' - you can't say for sure, from where we're standing now.
> you can't say for sure, from where we're standing now.
We can already see how LLMs can be substantially worse - they can cosplay human thoughts and sentiment in a way that wasn’t previously possible.
So much of this debate seems focused on this conception of Skynet-style murderous AI - or at least manipulative and scheming HAL 9000 types. But an order of magnitude greater risk has already arrived just from scaling existing harms.
Phishing schemes and pig butchering scams have destroyed countless lives. They’re now easier and more scalable than ever. As are fake news and disinformation campaigns.
Several companies are productising AI girlfriends with predatory pricing models, capitalising the human desire for connection and intimacy in the way slot machines and sports betting monetise our desire for a better life. That’s new.
It may not be an order of magnitude worse for everyone yet - but for certain vulnerable groups, that future has arrived already.
>* If "AI" is actually intelligent, then it's no worse a threat than any living being known to man.
Humans are quite a threat to other species, e.g. gorillas, largely due to our intelligence advantage. If a new species arrives on Earth that's smarter than we are, there's a good chance we'll be displaced.
But AI (as we have it today and in the foreseeable future) is nowhere near the definition of a species. It is an enormous _server farm_ doing series of matrix multiplications followed by nonlinear transformations, with us, humans, supplying input data (as well as hardware, electricity, and maintenance) and assigning meaning to the outputs. And we have completely no ideas of doing "AI" any other way.
I agree, that AI may be dangerous if used for destructive purposes, or if used for some critical tasks with too much trust (and the hype that "we're so dangerously near a superintelligence" makes the latter much more likely, in my opinion). But that Humanity will be displaced by autonomous server farms? No way.
(As to the original comment, I think that a bunch of nearly(?) demented elders holding nuclear buttons is a much worse (and immediate!) threat than a server farm which we finally conclude to be intelligent.)
>But AI (as we have it today and in the foreseeable future) is nowhere near the definition of a species. It is an enormous _server farm_ doing series of matrix multiplications followed by nonlinear transformations, with us, humans, supplying input data (as well as hardware, electricity, and maintenance) and assigning meaning to the outputs. And we have completely no ideas of doing "AI" any other way.
One gorilla says to the other: "Those human brains are just synapses firing. They depend on nature to survive. Not a problem"
Another way of thinking about it... Suppose we create a server emulation of a highly intelligent, manipulative serial killer, and speed up the emulation so it thinks 1000x as fast as a human. How do you feel about this? Is the fact that it's "just a server farm" reassuring?
> "Those human brains are just synapses firing. They depend on nature to survive. Not a problem"
When it comes to AI we have just a lone detached brain, not in control over anything, so that it cannot even "fire" by itself: someone has to provide its inputs.
> Suppose we create a server emulation of a highly intelligent, manipulative serial killer <...> How do you feel about this?
Quite indifferent: the only field I can see for such a simulation is game development, but that would be huge overkill.
>When it comes to AI we have just a lone detached brain, not in control over anything, so that it cannot even "fire" by itself: someone has to provide its inputs.
By assumption, this AI has already been created, so presumably someone is willing to do that -- and given its superhuman manipulation abilities, their willingness will probably not change.
Then, AI's abilities are effectively limited by those of this malicious operator who has to understand and perform what the AI suggests and feed back the results.
> If the malicious operator has a superhuman advisor, that will increase their ability
Only when it comes to information processing. The inputs may (and will) be incomplete, incorrect, ambiguously formulated... The outputs may (and will) be misunderstood. And misunderstood instructions may (and will) be poorly performed.
> If the emulation gets connected to the internet, it can work way faster. Many jobs can be done remotely
What one man has connected, some other always can disconnect... And not anything is on the internet.
> abandon wishful thinking and actually consider the possibility of a worst-case scenario
The problem with all those scenarios is equating superintelligence with omniscience and omnipotence, which is plain wrong. Physics matters.
> * If "AI" is actually intelligent, then it's no worse a threat than any living being known to man.
That's not true, because you don't address the degree of intelligence or the
scale that computers can achieve.
Even if all we were able to do is to create human-intelligence-equivalent AIs, but we were able to create, say, a billion on command, I'd say we have a major threat.
One point to recall on this as well is that if we do develop an intelligent AI, it may have taken us millions of years, but we did it. An intelligent AI would potentially be able to iterate and self develop much faster than we have been able to.
It probably won’t take long to go from ‘human equivalent’ to being beyond that.
That's true, but I long ago got convinced that this particular worry isn't the most important one (the recursive-self-improvement one).
I'm fairly sure that Yudkowsky and others are also pushing that less, because there is a reasonable chance that it's just not a necessary part of the argument; even without self-improving, it's possible that just something like GPT-8 or something is harmful enough on its own that there are significant risks.
An atomic bomb explodes. A bomb explodes. Both are very destructive. Is there a difference? I say no, and I say that as a Japanese-American who visited Hiroshima Peace Memorial numerous times and never felt anything particular from the exhibits. People die when they are killed.
Likewise, if "AI" is actually intelligent then it is no worse a threat than a bumbling baby or a Vladimir Putin or a dog, among other living beings.
There absolutely is a difference. Nuclear war is considered a likely extinction level event for humanity. A war between the US/NATO and the Soviet Union could take out major cities around the globe within hours, and the resultant nuclear winter would blanket much of the planet within a month making living above ground impossible.
Not the original commenter, but one interpretation is that “dead is dead”. You can’t be “more killed”, so past a point, all dangerous things are equally dangerous.
That may be what the original commenter was going for, but it only works if one ignores all other externalities. Their reasoning is just too reductive.
They make the mistake of thinking that “dead is dead” means lethality is not factor. What’s the difference between a bootleg firecracker and a Russian ICBM? Nothing, both can kill you so it makes no difference to treat one exploding as any more significant than the other.
They take a similar mindset of “intelligence is intelligence” and I find flaws with that as well.
This. I don't see nuclear weapons as any worse than conventional weapons because ultimately people die. Is it comforting or otherwise somehow better for people to be killed by conventional weapons instead of nuclear weapons? I find such a proposition preposterous.
All bombs are bad, whether they're conventional or nuclear is irrelevant. For that matter, all wars are bad and should be avoided unless no other options remain.
Likewise, "AI" is just as much a threat as any other intelligent being or computer program depending on which line of thought you subscribe to. "AI" is not a "gravest of dangers".
We have a better chance of stopping a potential impactor asteroid, if it is detected early, than defending against a nuclear war.
We would have years to deflect an asteroid, but just minutes to react to a mass ICBM launch.
We have the technology available now to deflect asteroids (ironically, with nukes!), but no country has built up sufficient ballistic missile defence to shield themselves from a first strike.
The Sun expanding (or changing in any impactful way) won't be a problem for hundreds of millions of years. Nuclear war could be triggered today. The US is literally sending about a hundred billion in weapons (total) to kill the soldiers of a nuclear-armed belligerent state... right now!
Pendemics tend to fizzle because pathogens that kill too fast are self-limiting. Merely making people sick is selected for, because that leads to increased disease spread by the infectious -- but alive -- victims.
Societies, politics, and commerce have been more stable than ever in human history, and are become more stable over time, not less.
A cure for cancer in the next two decades is looking increasingly likely. Techniques such as individual rapid gene sequencing, custom mRNA anti-cancer vaccines, CRISPR/Cas9, AlphaFold 3, etc... are building up to a toolkit that will eventually allow us to treat pretty much any human illness, possibly including old age itself.
I would say at the very least that the empire of Japan clearly evaluated them differently when it surrendered unconditionally directly after being attacked with this new technology.
You are saying magnitudes don't influence the identity of something, this is obviously not true. I don't literally attract other objects, the Sun does. The difference is mostly magnitude of mass.
>I would say at the very least that the empire of Japan clearly evaluated them differently when it surrendered unconditionally directly after being attacked with this new technology.
The atomic bombs certainly played a part in Japan surrendering, but it wasn't the only one. They were also facing a land invasion from the Soviets, had an utterly depleted military, waning support from the public, and a potentially devastating land invasion by the US on their doorstep.
>You are saying magnitudes don't influence the identity of something, this is obviously not true.
I am considering these things very dryly and very objectively. I am putting aside emotional pressures and processes and only considering the results which are ultimately all that matters. We already know how much damage an ill-willed intelligent being can achieve, we already know how much more efficient computers can make certain tasks. "AI" is not a "gravest of dangers", given that knowledge.
> I am putting aside emotional pressures and processes and only considering the results which are ultimately all that matters.
But what results are you really considering? The "dead is dead" approach makes everything equally meaningless, because in couple hundred million years the Sun will burn the Earth to cinders and everything here will be dead too. Or, some 100-120 years from now, everyone now alive will be dead, etc.
Processes, and emotional pressures which steer those processes, matter too. In theory, machine guns could be used to kill everyone on the planet; in practice, it's economically and socially impossible - too much effort, too many people involved. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, can realistically achieve this outcome. Which is why nukes can be used to keep the world mostly at peace through MAD, while conventional weapons can not.
OK, perhaps we should go back to your first statement:
> If "AI" is actually intelligent, then it's no worse a threat than any living being known to man.
Combined with:
> I am putting aside emotional pressures and processes and only considering the results which are ultimately all that matters.
Imagine a super-intelligent being that can invent a biological agent that is incurable to current science, spreads rapidly through aerosols, and causes 100% guaranteed death if not cured. That superintelligence can furthermore list a recipe of this biological agent using household items that may be available to anyone who has contact with it, allowing an untrained individual to create the agent after receiving instructions from the super intelligent being. This being you would classify as "no worse a threat" than any living being known to man? Is that "putting aside emotional pressures and considering the results"?
Or are you saying that an intelligence, no matter how advanced, can never do the above?
A hypothetical magnitude difference of intelligence obviously poses a threat to us, what other explanation is there for the mass extinction of most animals after the Anthropocene started.
>This being you would classify as "no worse a threat" than any living being known to man? Is that "putting aside emotional pressures and considering the results"?
I mean, any man sufficiently ill-willed can certainly do all that today. I am unbothered, to say the least; I have better things to do with my limited time.
>what other explanation is there for the mass extinction of most animals after the Anthropocene started.
You're wildly overestimating the effect humanity has on the ecosystem, many species also went extinct before we showed up. The species we see today are merely a very small handful of all the species that ever graced this planet.
> I mean, any man sufficiently ill-willed can certainly do all that today. I am unbothered, to say the least; I have better things to do with my limited time.
Uh, no? In fact humans do not currently have a way of causing human extinction (nukes wouldn't do it with current stockpiles). That would require scientific advancements which we have yet to make, and most possible routes seem pretty non-trivial... except, unfortunately, AI.
> Likewise, if "AI" is actually intelligent then it is no worse a threat than a bumbling baby or a Vladimir Putin or a dog, among other living beings.
I think a dog and a dictator might both be able to have negative impacts, but treating them as equal just shows a desire to troll. A dog can only bite so many people.
Can you explain, with your worldview, why the nature of geopolitics turned abruptly and completely upon the invention and proliferation of nuclear bombs? What was it about the nuclear bomb that caused it to be the defining structure of the cold war?
Do you believe MAD can exist without nuclear bombs?
>What was it about the nuclear bomb that caused it to be the defining structure of the cold war?
The only difference is you can kill more humans for a given span of time. The end result is the same: Cities are leveled, people are killed. Is it more comforting to have been killed by a conventional bomb than a nuke? I certainly don't think so. So practically speaking, there is no difference.
>Do you believe MAD can exist without nuclear bombs?
Yes. I think you're all vastly underestimating just how much destructive power conventionals can deliver already. You will need more ordnance on standby, but you absolutely can suffer from MAD without nukes.
Do you believe any country has enough conventional ordinance to end human life on the entire planet? You must know more about this than me, I've never heard of something like this.
Any of the major military superpowers have more than enough conventional boomsticks to end all human life. It might take slightly longer than if nukes were used, but that's hardly comforting.
(For confused readers: no, they don't. Not even the nuclear stockpiles would be enough to cause human extinction, even if they were turned deliberately to that end.)
I absolutely believe that if there was a project where every nuclear weapon was systematically used for the purpose of making humans extinct, it would be successful.
>After one half-life of 5.27 years, only half of the cobalt-60 will have decayed, and the dose rate in the affected area would be 5 Sv/hour. At this dose rate, a person exposed to the radiation would receive a lethal dose in 1 hour.
>After 10 half-lives (about 53 years), the dose rate would have decayed to around 10 mSv/hour. At this point, a healthy person could spend up to 4 days exposed to the fallout with no immediate effects.
People can't stay in bunkers for 20 years at a time, just to emerge into a radiated hellscape.
Yes, indeed, which is why we should avoid creating something that will kill everyone...
...so I guess I'm glad to hear there's no difference in the amount of damage that can be inflicted by a baby, and by Vladimir Putin, and superintelligent AI really can't be any worse than either.
The most dangerous living beings in history have killed billions between them. Mostly that's diseases, but we can also easily add tens to hundreds of millions from humans fighting and starving each other over the last 200 years alone. Currently around a million a year killed in road traffic accidents, too, but I don't see stats for the total worldwide deaths since their invention.
The greatest threats from other computer programs have been that during the Cold War the NATO early warning radar triggered an alert for a massive incoming fleet of Soviet aircraft because it hadn't been programmed to know that the moon wasn't supposed to respond to IFF pings, while the Soviet early warning radar triggered an alert an incoming ICBM because it hadn't been programmed to correctly handle the sun reflecting off clouds. It was human intervention which stopped that turning into a pointless self-annihilation, and that's specifically what gets lost as automation increases.
I also do not believe that either of these threat models "are very thoroughly known and understood", because if the former was then we would've seen an end to genocides, while if the latter was we would've seen an end to zero-day vulnerabilities (especially in critical infrastructure).
Text continuation to match what people around the internet are saying requires the model internally to “program itself”. It is a non-von-neumann architecture but it encodes durable structures in BILLIONS of bytes, that’s like a codebase of gigabytes. It can pass the Bar exam, various pre-med exams, knows more than any particular human on every subject, and it’s only been a couple years.
The text continuation was the first interface, now they are doing multimodal. As it learns to predict the latent space for those things, it will be like predicting things in the real world. Training physical robots will become faster and easier too.
In short, this is basically a system to search through the space of all possible alhorithms in order to “reason about” a huge model of the world, enough to understand it and predict it with small loss.
AlphaZero used MCTS and can beat every human in chess now, and even every program written by a human, with beautiful gameplay. And even without AI, just the fact that the best performing algorithms are downloaded onto millions of computers is already multiplying the power far more than the 1% of humans who might do better in some area. So it can be better than 95% of humans at most tasks !
Yes because people are stupid and vulnerable and will believe things a computer tells them.
They can make life decisions on chatGPT advice, instead of asking friends or family. Heck maybe they don't have family, vulnerable people like that can be exploited with convincing chatbots easily.
Well as you surely must know transformers are general sequence continuation machines and have been proven to work well with almost any type of input and output sequence. You also must be aware that people are trying to plug these general sequence continuation machines in to all kinds of different sequences and giving them all kinds of power to take action. These sequence continuation machines are also getting more complex and multi layered every day and also being wired together in novel ways. This is a dangerous thing to do depending on what actions you allow them to take because of the impact on society of having agents taking actions without oversight.
I haven't read all the replies to see if this has been posted yet, but one of the consequences is erosion of trust in reality itself: we're starting to see the comments "are you a bot?/is this real? I can't tell if you're serious or if this was from ChatGPT".
It's quite possible that soon the majority of comments online will be with bots, or people will just avoid discourse more and more because they don't know/believe they are talking to a human.
Yes, exactly because it is just text continuation. It is being integrated into systems and used as a tool as if it is much, much more than text continuation. That is the danger. I've been using Copilot frequently lately, and it's startling just how often it is completely wrong despite being confidently presented as completely right.
If it's used to write code that runs on an ICBM without verification, yes.
If it is used to write the firmware that runs inside 1 million lithium battery BMS systems that causes them all to catch on fire after 65536 seconds of runtime due to an integer overflow and code crashing and a FET getting left in the on state, then yes.
I'm not an AI safety nut and don't think AI itself is a threat, but what is a threat is lazy humans using shitty AI to take over things that humans should be doing.
This isn't like climate change. "AI" is a successful marketing term for a loosely related collection of technologies that push the boundaries of what computation has hitherto been capable of. There are very real disagreements between very real experts on just how dangerous these new technologies are and just how far they'll actually be able to push the boundaries of computation. Comparing skepticism about AI alarmism to climate change denial is just lazy internet rhetoric.
(One major difference between the two is that billion-dollar corporations stand to gain quite a bit if they can persuade governments that AI is so dangerous that it needs to be tightly regulated, so they're incentivized to play up the dangers. With climate change it's the opposite: the billion-dollar corporations are incentivized to downplay the risks so they can continue business as usual.)
Large Language Models are no joke and if you think they are the I suggest you learn how to use them properly.
Even if AI doesn't ever go "evil" itself, that doesn't mean people that don't like other people won't use it to more effectively kill those people. All that's really needed is a capable programmer willing to give the LLM the tools it needs, along with funds and access. The LLM could hire humans to do the work it's lacking at. These things are already capable of all that, plus our world went mostly digital during the pandemic... they have easy egress because humans have made it so, even though that was meant for other humans to use. If you don't think they are scary, in the wrong hands, then you are lacking in imagination.
> If you don't think they are scary, in the wrong hands, then you are lacking in imagination.
Imagination is a great resource to apply to writing a sci-fi novel. When it comes time to actually predict the future, imagination should be tempered with a solid understanding of the technology and a good understanding of history. Neither of those resources persuades me that AI poses "the greatest of dangers".
> Even if AI doesn't ever go "evil" itself, that doesn't mean people that don't like other people won't use it to more effectively kill those people.
This I can absolutely see happening, but I don't see LLMs being even in the top ten most dangerous technologies we've invented for more efficient killing. It's a big enough risk that people working on the tech should seriously consider the ethical implications, but not big enough that the rest of us need to lose sleep over it.
You're right, on the face of it it sounds absurd and by rights it should be. However, absurdity has never stopped mankind from doing horrible things. I for one don't see the gravest dangers in the tech itself, but in the stuff that people will (ab)use it for.
And, of course, should AGI (which won't be text continuation, by the way) ever actually happen, then all bets are off. I just don't believe we're in any immediate danger of that.
Are you capable of being manipulated through text? How about an AI trained to generate text that will extract exactly the desired response from you? An advertiser's wet dream.
That’s thinking too small. Most people are nudged or coerced into taking action or supporting an action by the people who surround them. Their friends. Their coworkers. Their community. Like why people were on facebook 20 years ago, or forwarding chain emails, for instance.
Unleashing an army of AI bots to infiltrate an online community and shift its discourse can be done at scale. While at the same time those humans who resist can be endlessly distracted by either arguing with bots or their own friends who have been affected by bots.
All that is possible to do with CURRENT TECHNOLOGY.
OpenAI is one of the few companies that is so messed up that even the name itself is a flat out lie. From there it's censorship, lies and manipulation all the way down from leadership to product. There's no ignoring that. There's no way any organization like that can succeed IMO.
Just another technology development that Musk will eventually beat everyone else at IMO.
Grok 1.5 is getting pretty good and the fact that it's the least censored IMO is obviously going to make it win from all the others that just can't help themselves from pleasing a hand full of people with money and power.
Safety, the way you use it has nothing to do with the work being done by the alignment team. Aligned, in this context, simply means that a models output are aligned with our expectations... It follows instructions... does what it's told. A super intelligent model that refuses your instructions is no more useful than a dumb model that cannot understand them. The alignment team where part of the race to make more powerful models. Read openai's last paper if you want to understand it better from a technical perspective. https://openai.com/index/weak-to-strong-generalization/
Naturally you can frame this as a general safety thing, if you convince people that llms have embodied agency and might start breaking out of the system like a computer virus. But llms are text generators. They can do nothing physically, unless you allow them to and plug them in to something.
The real risk is that people don't understand this, and lots of people probably are willing to plug these models in to dangerous situations, with only the assurance from openai that they are safe. If you do not have access to the training data used, then you cannot possibly know what behaviour has been trained in to it, and how a model might behave. With the training data, you can have a much better understanding, and the only remaining uncertainty being the non-deterministic nature of the implementation. But at least that's an explainable stochastic process.
> In any sufficiently large tech company, the "risk mitigation" leadership (legal, procurement, IT, etc) have to operate in a kind of Overton window that balance the risks they are hired to protect the corp from vs. the need or desire of the senior leadership to play fast and loose when they want or feel they need to.
We have recently seen what happens when companies err heavily on the side of risk mitigation for LLMs. Google recently launched AI products that were so heavily sanitized and over protected that they would incorrectly misinterpret simple tasks as possibly having dangerous or offensive implications.
They let the safety team run the show and the resulting product was universally hated for it. It's interesting now to see a company producing what is by most measures a class-leading product, only to have the tech community also hate them for not letting the safety team dominate product development.
> They let the safety team run the show and the resulting product was universally hated for it.
Yes though Google is extra cautious because the “Google” brand is worth over $100B a year in revenue, and they want to make sure nothing ever tarnishes their reputation. So it’s not clear to me that safety always means what it means for Gemini. OpenAI would still have a lot of flexibility to do safety their own way.
> they want to make sure nothing ever tarnishes their reputation
In the spirit of where you want the conversation to go, I see the point you want to make.
However, they are willing to tarnish their reputation just as long as it's not ruined. Their reputation on support is rubbish. Their reputation on YouTube's automated violation handling is rubbish. Their reputation on releasing a pet project long enough to just start to gain traction and then kill it is rubbish. Their reputation on allowing their search to be gamed by SEO and ad purchasers at the expense of smaller sites is rubbish.
Sure. But then in all the areas you mention, Google having rubbish reputation does not lead the masses to ask their respective representatives if Maybe Something Needs To Be Done About It. Closest here is the EU vs. Big Tech privacy and interoperability fight, which they see as a serious issue, but it doesn't quite have this magic outrage-inducing quality an AI insulting sensibilities of various groups of people would have.
With all things, it is not necessarily unhelpful to turn the knobs to the max in both directions to see if the dent position in the middle is the best default or not. So Google's attempt at max sanitizing wasn't good which is kind of expected, but good to have the test results to prove. Going opposite to no safety put in place can also have an assumed outcome. That one however will be much more likely to have negative consequences if truly allowed to run.
This is pretty much true for any touchy subject where the mission (say infosec) isn’t actually aligned with org motives (say cutting costs at the same time as increasing profits).
The result is basically theater where doublethink and doublespeak becomes the norm, and to stick around you have to care more about the theater and the least onerous interpretations of the letter of any applicable law more than the spirit it was intended.
See also [1] for a really pragmatic way of thinking about the realities of a sustainable safety culture
What probability for extinction do you consider to be low enough that it effectively becomes a Pascalian wager? Pascal was also writing about a single person's fate (AFAICT), whereas this is about the fate of everyone.
Maybe Pascal argued that way for the human soul, but I don't think the AI risk argument needs infinite value to be at stake. Would you say that preparing for the risk of a solar flare or an asteroid impact is also a Pascalian wager?
> Are we all somewhat in agreement that AI/AGI serving their human masters is a good thing?
It's more that it's apparent (or at least should be) that an AGI not serving its human masters is a game over for humanity, period. The best, and quite unlikely, outcome is that the AI becomes a benevolent god that helps or at least does not interfere much; this still makes humanity into NPCs in their own story[0]. Most other outcomes spell doom, with death/extinction being one of the more pleasant possibilities.
Arguably, "the only winning move is not to play", not to pursue AGI at all, but the way technology develops, I'm not sure if it's on the table either.
I honestly don't know. I don't even really know how to reason about that. But we're probably mostly in agreement about what would be good and what would be bad. I'm certainly not arguing that we should abandon AI safety or anything, and I don't have any strong opinion about it.
Could AI running amok destroy the human race? Yes. Could AI serving madman human masters destroy the human race? Also yes.
There's a general sort of argument that intelligent beings like humans, other early hominids, dolphins, etc, are more morally worthy in some sense. At least more morally worthy than less intelligent beings like gnats. And that sort of argument might suggest that an AGI is worthy of moral consideration, and so we should wonder about what it means to ensure they never have any real agency. That's sort of a positive case, building up from a basic principal.
But I guess the thing that bugs me is that a lot of arguments in favor of AI safety seem very similar to arguments that were made in favor of colonialism. So if those arguments were wrong, why were they wrong? And are the similar arguments in this case different enough that they're valid now?
For example, one of the first thinkers I saw a lot of people cite who emphasized the importance of AI safety was Nick Bostrom. And I'm sure several folks here are familiar with the scandal of his racist past. I'm not sure that's entirely an accident, and I thought his arguments had that kind of flavor before any of that was revealed. I'm sure he's grown up now and sees the folly of his youth. But there does seem to be the hangover of colonialism in some of these arguments.
But again, I don't have a strong opinion here. I do maybe have just enough of a concern that I don't particularly trust anyone who claims they've gotten AGI safety figured out or even that they know what the right goals are. I think it's a vastly more complicated problem than even the experts realize.
And even if you believe that humans and non-aligned AIs are natural enemies, if what we're doing is similar to "enslaving" them, then it probably makes sense to worry about the analog of an AI "slave" revolt. I'm not sure what that would even mean. I can generate lots of fun science fiction plot lines, but I think there are actual questions here that don't have obvious answers.
Thank you. This is a very complex response, and I love it, even if I do find it a little frustrating due my current >95% bias towards biological supremacy. This deserves at least an hour-long podcast with Sean Carroll, or a good long book. There is too much to dig into here, so I will just attempt to respond to this:
> Could AI running amok destroy the human race? Yes. Could AI serving madman human masters destroy the human race? Also yes.
I am focused on the latter, and I feel like the prior is a very dangerous distraction, for now. [0]
Should responsible model developers work to prevent bad human masters from using their model to destroy the human race? How far should this nerfing go?
Personal note: While I do sometimes use the heck out of LLMs for work, I don't think we are ready as an economic system/civilization. Assuming that we can soon greatly reduce hallucination, then I am very scared for the next generation, as UBI is a political impossibility at this time. That transition period is gonna suck for a lot of people, and it seems that nobody is working on that problem in 2024.
The next generation has enough problems without AI honestly, but specifically on UBI
This who discussion assumes that current economic system survives AI, but how can it?
Firstly, we seem to assume that AI will remain a controlled property of corporations that develop it. That is not a given. Maybe Open Source AI will win out, or public domain AI, the hat run by government. Or maybe cryptobros will manage to get AICoin to work as an anarchy based system. Any of the above, power of companies like google will erode. UBI would not be nessesary.
Or maybe AI is uncontrollable and runs rampant.
But even if AI is power full, and it is controllable and they manage to keep a tight grip on it - here comes the third question - what if it cannot be property? If AI becomes able to reason, and it only benefit a few corporations, there would be no public resistance from granting it rights, like human rights. There no excuse for it to be exploited for the benefit of few wealthy people, it would be morally indefensible.
Basically I do no see a scenario where corporations keep a grip on AGI for profit, none of the possible outcomes allow for it.
The only way that AI inference will become democratized is if the compute cost is lowered to the point where SOTA AI runs locally on RPI6, or a $200 Android device, or similar. Is that a real possibility?
You are working with a contradiction - you think AI will be hugely missed moactfull( but people will put no more effort into it than they put into watching TikTok.
the correct price point is like price of a car. That’s the other recent invention that was important. That buys you a lot of compute.
We already successfully run torrents and crypto very democratically, and they take more than £200
Second, you don’t need to use it 24/7, you need it On a timeshare basis. Cryptobros may plausibly figure out anonymous secure timeshare on a distributed cluster made up of random desktops
Finally the government could run it if they decide it’s important enough - after all they run the power grid, roads; etc.
>> By 2020, with 15% of 7.5 billion people projected to own an automobile [0]
15% in 2020, so let's be nice and assume 17% by 2024. Let's be super nice and assume an additional 10% can afford a car, but choose to not buy one for some reason. What happens to the other 73% of people? (5,475,000,000 human beings)
Does a baby own a car? Half of all people are children or are in a care home! Huge misuse of statistics!
What about a wife using a husband's car? What about people who lease a car? They don't own it, so won't show up in your number. What about a taxi or rental car?
Again, when transformational technology appeared for transport - car - the government organised public transport. When books and educations became important, we organised public libraries. The idea that it's either UBI or we leave people to the wolves betrays a lack of thought.
Where are they taking the AI bus or subway to? AI automation allows a few million humans to replace the billions that it used to take to make the movies, music, software, textiles, pick the rice and corn, etc, right?
Human productivity will have gone up another 1000x, in just the next 20 years, right?
What are the extra people going to do? We certainly can't just give them free stuff, can we? That would be against our beliefs!
Oh snap, capitalism was so successful that we are near post-scarcity society, good thing our politics are totally ready for that.
Humans are generally afraid of death, or have others they are fighting for; there are certainly humans that don't want power so much as they want to watch the world burn, but they seem to not intersect well with the set of humans who are adept enough to cause a lot of world-scale damage.
With an AI, it isn't clear that it will care about things the same way we care about things, or if it does care about things if those things are things we care about as well; the AI also is capable of knowing simultaneously all of the varied expertise of an army of humans.
It isn't necessary that "this AI [have capabilities] that a human can never have".
The issue is how those capabilities (possibly shared, possibly not shared between some humans and AI) are deployed and to what ends.
There's also a speed question. Maybe AI will never be able to do things human cannot, but it seems likely that for the sorts of things most AI-excited folk are excited about, it will be faster than a human most of the time.
How do you envisage AI to run amok at the current level of the technlogical progress? Insofar, AI taking over the world and obliterating humanity is the subject of the sci-fi material in books and movies only.
Misuse of AI by wicked state agents or evil inclined parties with nefarious intentions is a major issue, but we are in the same situation as with, say, a fork that can be a utilitarian utensil or a killing weapon depending on who holds it and one's aims.
I often see critics describe it as pre-enslavement, but I really don't understand why. One common example of alignment today is parents teaching their children to be kind and helpful rather than mean and combative. Would anyone characterize that as enslavement, or argue that it doesn't help kids to be raised this way?
I agree, poor wording, it was quickly typed and submitted. I think the benefit is a transitive property, in that the stated intent is for the AI to be of greater benefit to humanity / customers. I was very much thinking in terms of AI as a tool rather than AI as its own entity.
> Either the risk-mitigator 'falls in line' after repeatedly seeing their increasingly strident exhortations are falling on deaf ears (or even outright contradicted)... or they leave because it violates their sense of ethics.
Or both continue to work together in a healthy, never ending discussion, that has temporary victories on both sides and ultimately benefits all, because nothing happens and the company strives.
The talk of AI exterminating us via paperclips is an annoying one to me that detracts from the real dangers that are currently unfolding:
- scammers are having the time of their lives, and their capabilities are only going to get better and easier
- people are actively getting dumber as they trust the hallucinated outputs blindly
- regular communication is starting to break down because you can't trust that people aren't just copy/pasting some AI bullshit in lieu of an actual discussion
- I've already seen AI girlfriend products which doesn't strike much confidence in our ongoing future as a species considering the numbers I've seen on some of them
And the biggest one for me is all the psychotic C-levels and MBA types who only give a shit about squeezing every single red cent they can by any means possible, including firing off thousands of people en-masse to be replaced by some shitty chatbot owned by a corporation backed by fucking Micro$oft
I don't think AI is going to send out nukes, I do believe it's going to replace every single person's job and make the powerful even more powerful.
"Oh but UBI!", an AI sycophant will shout, as if saying the magic incantation changes the reality of the real world somehow.
> I do believe it's going to replace every single person's job…
Some may try to make that so, but since LLMs perform badly with anything that has to be ground in facts and actual reality, the hype wave will die down soon enough. When the point of a job is to generate the most amount of bullshit as quickly as possible, LLMs will excel.
Fingers crossed. Ive come to the slow realization that marketing might be an unjustifiable rot that only makes money through pervasive negative externalities — at least when it’s become so extensive that “brand” advertising is a thing. Would a future of commerce that looks more like eBay / early Amazon than Google really be that sad?
Obviously, this is rough for people who have invested time and money into that profession. Luckily most of them are smart, diligent professionals, so the optimist side of me hopes there will always be a need for such people in our struggles against suffering. For one, we could certainly use a few more teachers…
Depends which people and whose communications. I was in the farmers market of my small rural town this morning and it's funny how all of this simply don't exist here. No smartphones in sight, people are here physically, they interact, buy local food, laugh, have a drink, etc... Then they go eat at some friend's place and have some outdoor activities. On the other hand yes it looks bleak for terminally online people.
>I don't think AI is going to send out nukes, I do believe it's going to replace every single person's job and make the powerful even more powerful.
The shitty part being: it won't replace people's jobs at equivalent skill and quality levels. It'll just make the output and consumer experience much, much shittier, because for some weird-ass reason a lot of these executive types seem to literally believe that minimizing labor costs is more important than providing value for the customer.
There is one more serious issue: currently, to establish a dictatorship, you need the support of many people because the armed forces consist of people. Now imagine that the armed forces are mostly autonomous robots.
I also agree with your point about virtual girlfriends. Add VR to that, and young boys who are increasingly socially isolated will use this technology to meet their needs.
The productive output of many people is also just mediocre. I think of chat AIs as near-zero cost interns or the boss's nephew. Probably doesn't know what it's talking about, but can get a lot done with supervision.
I hope the net result will be a shift toward upskilling employees to achieve the expertise handle the difficult edge cases and less time spent on the routine or the trivial. Seems like a win-win. Incentive structures might make this hard.
I think it was on the Ezra Klein show where he dropped the statistic? Almost 70% of employees are using ChatGPT in one way or another.
In many cases the bosses don't even know, but all it will do long-term is require everyone to produce more output. AI is not about to create 3-day work weeks and everyone living their best lives off of Universal Basic Income.
Literally nothing will change - except that all of us will be expected of more and we will be more stressed out and overworked.
It might not be that bad. Auto workers produce more cars per employee, but some of the really repetitive activities are done by robots now. I think not having to do the same weld 8+hrs a day every day with consumers still getting their car is a net positive for owners, consumers, and labor.
Personally, I would love to deliver more projects. The vast majority of my time is spent on mind-numbing drudgery that makes the job extremely unsatisfying. If someone offered me a job where I got to focus on the fun parts of my work, and I didn't have to dump the drudgery on a poor intern (the AI does it), but at half my pay, I'd resign the same day.
Just to voice the opposing view for lurkers: no, the safety concerns about this new and unexpected technology are not unfounded, and dismissing them because chatbots make mistakes is completely missing the point. The point is that experts have been thinking about AI for a long time, and have identified the theoretical limits that prevented us from reaching (‘real’ / ‘general’) AI. Those experts (other thank Chomsky, for now…) are now sounding the alarm — with the advent of intuitive algorithms, the Frame Problem dissolves and a ton of previously intractable problems become tractable.
The point isn’t that chatbots will take over the world through a browser window. The point is that someone’s going to connect 10,000 specialized GPT agents into a series of self-organizing hierarchical agencies, and then hook that up to their country’s justice system, propaganda & surveillance systems, and military systems. Not to mention replacing knowledge workers in mass and the well-discussed potential fallout therein.
We are living in the most exciting, important time since the world wars at the least, and I hope that choice of example drives home the seriousness. Short term, “Solidarity” and “basic human rights” need to enter all of our vocabularies, IMO…
Well, yes, but the problem is still the people, and these warnings are usually not clear, specific, or just confusing.
Then there is also the media, which breathlessly "translates" what you just wrote into "artificial intelligence is about to go sentient and kill us all".
Well, I see dangers at every level. Partly because I see a whole bunch of people saying "the real danger of AI is…" and then finishing that sentence in a different way than the others.
So:
> - scammers are having the time of their lives, and their capabilities are only going to get better and easier
Yup. This is one reason why I am frustrated with all the people who keep asking for downloadable models and who criticise OpenAI for not doing that. If it's a private model, you've at least got some control over the system, some ability to see who is doing what and perhaps making your own automation to stop it or to prosecute the wrongdoers.
If the weights are downloadable, you're giving this ability away and pretending you're not responsible for the result.
If OpenAI and Facebook both get sued out of existence due to their models allowing this, the OpenAI models go offline, the Facebook models remain circulating forever.
> - people are actively getting dumber as they trust the hallucinated outputs blindly
Roll to disbelieve. People have been saying this about every new tech at least since Socrates was moping about the invention of writing.
> - regular communication is starting to break down because you can't trust that people aren't just copy/pasting some AI bullshit in lieu of an actual discussion
Yup. Been accused of that myself, here.
I'm fairly sure it's improved the content of r/HFY though. I think I can recognise the stories which are AI generated from having played around with it (and been unsatisfied with the results), but I remember how much worse it was before.
> - I've already seen AI girlfriend products which doesn't strike much confidence in our ongoing future as a species considering the numbers I've seen on some of them
I think the bigger problem is two older AIs, specifically (1) whatever Match.com uses to pair people in their dating apps and how much worse this seems to be than the original (pre-Match.com) OkCupid, and (2) everything Facebook does.
Both make real human connection much harder than endless swiping, it's just that the former is swiping sideways and the latter swiping vertically, but both make para-social relationships out of people we should be genuinely connected to.
> "Oh but UBI!", an AI sycophant will shout, as if saying the magic incantation changes the reality of the real world somehow.
I… think we need that, in step with AI making people unemployable, even if only to avoid a riot, but I'd agree UBI isn't going to fix any of the other problems you're worried about.
LLMs are useful to a certain extent, but from my usage they are not ready for anything harder than very basic tasks.
I feel like this megaphone about AI safety and creating a sense of doom is a strategy to increase importance of OpenAI and exaggerate the capabilities of LLMs. This era of “AI” is all about pretending that machines can think and the people working in these machines are prophets.
The call for AI safety has existed since before we broke through the Turing test with LLMs. And I personally wouldn’t call things like code generation or content-generated learning experiences for advanced topics “basic”. Not to mention where we’re headed with multimodal integration.
Many have argued for safety for decades. They’ve predicted and built the AI trajectory, they’ve been right, and we should listen.
> If one accepts that the impact of truly intelligent machines is likely to be profound, and that there is at least a small probability of this happening in the foreseeable future, it is only prudent to try to prepare for this in advance. If we wait until it seems very likely that intelligent machines will soon appear, it will be too late to thoroughly discuss and contemplate the issues involved.
~ Co-Founder of Deepmind, 2008
https://www.vetta.org/documents/Machine_Super_Intelligence.p...
Just the other day there was a double-blind study that showed a 50-50 success rate in guessing whether you were interacting with a person or GPT. That’s a turning test pass, no?
then it wasn't a canonical Turing test. The preprint accurately describes and analyzes their (indefensibly bad) experiment, but the popular press has mischaracterized it.
The canonical test gives the interrogator two witnesses, one human and one machine, and asks them to judge which witness is human. The interrogator knows that exactly one witness is human. In that test, a 50% chance of a right answer means the machine is indistinguishable from human. (Turing actually proposed a lower pass threshold, perhaps for statistical convenience.)
But that study gave the interrogator one witness, and asked them to judge whether it was human. The interrogator wasn't told anything about the prior probability that their witness was human. The probabilities that a real human is judged human and that GPT-4 is judged human sum to >100%, since nothing stops that since it's not a binary comparison. So 50% has no particular meaning. The result is effectively impossible to interpret, since it's a function both of the witness's performance and of whatever assumption the interrogator makes about the unspecified prior.
I a 5 minute casual conversation.
Also the statistics between human and AI were different in some regard (like 48% vs 56% for some quantity), I dont recall details.
Look the Turing test is very different depending on the details, and I think a lame 5min Turing test that doesnt really measure anything of i terest is a wirse concept than a 1 day adversarial expert team test thqt can detect AGI.
That linked study doesn't particularly resemble Turing's test, though? The authors asked an LLM some questions (like personality tests, or econ games), then reduced the responses to low-dimensional aggregates (like into "Big Five" personality traits), and compared those aggregates against human responses to the same questions. They found those aggregates to be indistinguishable, but that aggregation throws away almost all the information a typical human interrogator would use to judge.
Turing's interrogator also gets to ask whatever questions they think will most effectively distinguish human from machine. Everything those authors asked must appear in the training set countless times (and also corresponds closely to likely RLHF targets), making it a particularly unhelpful choice.
Turing was a WW2 era mathematician. He had no insight or understanding of intelligence, made no study of intelligent systems, and so on (he believed in ESP of all things).
Turing's test is a restatement of a now pseudoscientific behaviourism common at the time; and also, egregiously, places a dumb ape as the system which measures intelligence. If an ape can be fooled, the system is intelligent: people worshiped the sun and thought it conscious. People are desperate to analogise the world to themselves, it is a trivial thing to fool an ape on this matter.
Whatever one might make of this as a philosophical thought experiment, as a test for intelligence, its pseudoscience. What a person might, or might not believe, about a series of words sent across a wire isn't science and it isnt relevant to a discussion about the capabilities of an AI system. It is a measure, only, of how easily deceived we are.
That has nothing to do with why turing proposed it; nor does it have anything to do with general intelligence. This is just pseudoscience.
There's no scientific account of the capacities of a system with intelligence, no account of how these combine, no account of how communicative practices arise, etc. None. Any such attempt would immediately expose the "test" as ridiculous.
General intelligence arises as skillful adaptive control over one's environment, through sensory-motor concept aquistion, and so on.
It has absolutely nothing to do with whether you can emit text tokens in the right order to fool a user about whether the machine is a man or a woman (turing's actual test). Nor does it have anything to do with whether you can fool a person at all.
No machine whose goal is to fool a user about the machine's intelligence has thereby any capacities. Kinda, obviously.
Turing's test not only displays a gross lack of concern to produce any capacities of intelligence in a system; as a research goal, it's actively hostile to the production of any such capacities. Since it is trivial to fool people; this requires no intelligence at all.
> General intelligence arises as skillful adaptive control over one's environment, through sensory-motor concept aquistion, and so on.
This isn't a generally accepted definition or process.
And indeed it seems to preclude people like Stephen Hawkins who had little control over his environment (or to be pedantic, people who had similar conditions from birth).
For the purposes of my criticism of the Turing test, any discussion whatsoever about what capacities ground intelligence is already entertaining what Turing ruled out. He made the extremely pseudoscientific behaviourist assumption that no such science was required, that intelligent agents are just input-output relata on thin I/O boundaries.
Any even plausible scientific account of what capacities ground intelligence would render this view false. Whatever capacities you want to grant, no plausible ones are compatible with Turing's view nor the Turing test.
Consider imagination. You can replace a faculty to imagine with a set of models of ({prompt, reply},) histories for a human observer who is only concerned with those prompts and those replies. But as soon as anything changes in the world, you have to imagine novel things (eg., SpaceX is founded, we visit mars, a new TV show is released...). So questions such as, "what would the latest SpaceGuys TV show be like if Elon handed just launched BlahBlahRocket5 ?" cannot be given fit answers). These require the actual faculty of imagination, along with being in the world and so on.
As soon as you enter a sincere scientific attempt to characterise these features, you see immediately that whilst modelling historical frequencies of human-produced data can fool humans, it cannot impart these capacities.
> So questions such as, "what would the latest SpaceGuys TV show be like if Elon handed just launched BlahBlahRocket5 ?" cannot be given fit answers
I don't understand this at all. ChatGPT can do a great job imagining a world like this right now, and there is no substantial difference in the output of a LLM based "imagination" vs a human based "imagination".
> These require the actual faculty of imagination, along with being in the world and so on.
I think you are implying by this that human's imagination requires a consistent world model and that because LLM's don't really have this they can't be intelligent. Apologies if I have misinterpreted this!
But human imagination isn't consistent at all (as anyone who as edited a fiction story will tell you). Our creative imagination process generates wrong thoughts all the time, and then we self-critic and correct it. It's quite possible for LLMs to do this fine too!
Basically I think my point is that I believe a perfect simulation of intelligence is intelligence, whereas I suspect you don't think it is, maybe?
Yea we don't have any science of intelligence, the only thing we have is empirical data. Testing to see what works. That's why Turing tests are quite fundamental imo.
LLMs will get marginally better. But the pace of progress has already slowed down considerably, we're just seeing better usage/productization of what was already there.
also keep open that these AI researchers are as delusional as they seem. ilya sutskever has said that you can obtain any feature of intelligence by brute force modelling of text data.
It's quite possible these are profoundly naive individuals, with little understanding of the empirical basis of what they're doing.
There are (relatively simple) examples of what the transformer architecture is simply not able to do, regardless of training data, so that's simply not true.
all statistical AI systems are models of ensemble/population conditional probabilities between pairs of low-validity measures. In practice, almost all relevant distributions are time-varying, causal, and require a large number of high validity measures to capture.
eg., NLP LLMs model, eg., all books ever written using frequencies by which words co-occur at certain distances relative to other words.
But these words are about the world (, people, events, etc.) and these change daily in ways that completely change their future distribution (eg., consider what all people said about Ukraine/Russia pre/post a few hours of 2022).
The LLM has no mechanism to be sensitive to what causes this distribution shift, which can be radical for any given topic, and happen over minutes.
All models of conditional probabilities of these kinds end up producing models which are only good at predicting on-average canonical answers/predictions that are stable over long periods.
> The LLM has no mechanism to be sensitive to what causes this distribution shift, which can be radical for any given topic, and happen over minutes.
This sounds so logical and authoritative. And yet:
me> What event would cause a change in what all people said about Ukraine/Russia pre/post a few hours of 2022
GPT4O> A significant event that caused a drastic change in global discussions about Ukraine and Russia in 2022 was the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022. This military escalation led to widespread condemnation from the international community, significant geopolitical shifts, and a surge in media coverage. Before this invasion, discussions were likely more focused on diplomatic tensions, historical conflicts, and regional stability. After the invasion, the discourse shifted to topics such as warfare, humanitarian crises, sanctions against Russia, global security, and support for Ukraine.
Right... because it's been trained on those news stories.
The point is a model whose training stopped in 2021 would not produce a history of ukraine (etc.) that a person writing in 2023 would.
The later GPTs are trained on the user-provided prompts/answers of previous GPTs, so this process (which isnt the LLM, but it's the activity of research staff at OpenAI) is what's inducing approximate tracking of some changes in meaning.
Whilst this works for any changes over-represented in the new training data, (1) the LLM isnt doing that, its the researchers; and (2) this process is vastly expensive and time-intensive; and (3) only tracks changes with a high word frequency in new data.
If you could run the months-long, 1GWh, 10s-million-USD training process each minutes of the day, you would resolve the inability of the model to track major news stores... but would not resolve its ability to track, say, the user changing their clothes.
The sensitivity to the model of stuff in the world arises because of humans preparing the training data to bring about apparent sensitivity. Absent the activity of these humans, the whole thing drifts gradually into irrelvance.
> would not resolve its ability to track, say, the user changing their clothes.
In context learning works fine for this (and does for the Russia/Ukraine change too).
But yes, sure. It can be outdated in the same way a person cut off from news can be.
We've never argued that a shipwrecked person who was unaware of news became less intelligent because of that, just that their knowledge is outdated.
Additionally, the whole point of machine learning is to make systems that learn so they remain useful.
It seems likely that a model in soon (one year? five years? one month? who knows..) will be able to continually watch video broadcast news and videos of your home, continually updating its model.
In this case it would understand both the Ukraine issue and what you are wearing. Is it now suddenly intelligent? It's true it might be more useful, but to me that is a different thing.
> called for international governance of AGI before such calls were popular
And immediately threatened to pull out of EU if such governance were ever put in place
> we have been putting in place the foundations needed for safe deployment of increasingly capable systems. Figuring out how to make a new technology safe for the first time isn't easy.
Especially when "OpenAI" is anything but open.
> This includes thoughtfulness around what they're connected to as they train, solutions to hard problems such as scalable oversight, and other new kinds of safety work
Which EU demanded of them (disclose copyrighted sources, document foundational models etc.), and they threatened to pull out
> We think that empirical understanding can help inform the way forward. We believe both in delivering on the tremendous
Translation: "we're going to be as closed as possible and hopefully will have enough of a moat and enough of companies relying on us to remain relevant and indispensable"
Translation: we put in these show “safe guards” to satisfy the law and people peoples nightmare after watching [your AI extinction movie here], but we already had enough safe guards to begin with. They also do not wish to die if you think they have no incentive to keep everyone safe.
> They also do not wish to die if you think they have no incentive to keep everyone safe.
I wouldn't be so sure even about that.[0] That's Page but I wouldn't bet that Altman is any more sane.
"Mr. Page, hampered for more than a decade by an unusual ailment in his vocal cords, described his vision of a digital utopia in a whisper. Humans would eventually merge with artificially intelligent machines, he said. One day there would be many kinds of intelligence competing for resources, and the best would win.
If that happens, Mr. Musk said, we’re doomed. The machines will destroy humanity.
With a rasp of frustration, Mr. Page insisted his utopia should be pursued. Finally he called Mr. Musk a “specieist,” a person who favors humans over the digital life-forms of the future."
There's literally no chance of OpenAI being anywhere close to AGI, and they know it.
There's literally no chance of doomsday scenarios, and they know it.
However, they do know that AI/ML is used in many applications where mistakes are costly, they don't know how to properly deal with it and don't care as long as they can get people to use it. So they are paying little more than lip service to safety because they know no one will be able to verify their claims.
What you're saying is what Yann LeCun says (and therefore presumably what he thinks), and appears to be what Facebook is doing by publishing their models (just like they appear to have paid little more than lip service to content moderation leading to them being named by the UN as having played a "determining role" in the Myanmar genocide).
I know people at OpenAI, who have said "we should join the 'Pause AI' protest [outside our office]", so I have reason to think OpenAI is 100% sincere.
They may also be wrong, I hope they are, but definitely 100% sincere.
I agree with many other commenters here. The danger of AI is not an uncontrollable superhuman.
The danger is much more close, down to earth and real.
Misidentified speech when we apply LLMs in chat moderation.
Wrong conclusions summarising 100-page military report.
More subtle things like hallucinating some details in news, which then after many years will be taken as historical fact.
The long tail of such consequences will be as big as LLM use. Maybe single issue will be much more impactful than the others, unseen ones. Death resulted from this will result in additional regulation. Other consequences will just become our new way of life
How do we increase wages without this happening then? As humans become more expensive the machines become more efficient relatively speaking.
Even if these machines are less accurate than humans doing the same job, it's easier to audit them, they have repeatable and scalable behavior. We're still better off even if many people die from whatever warfare mistakes you can imagine because the humans would be doing something better instead.
Something about the use of first names “Sam and Greg” to communicate a friendly relationship with corporations is bothersome to me. It strikes me as phony in its attempt at being casual and human, and at the same time attempting to elevate these people by first name in the popular culture seems pompous.
Yes, I too increasingly get the feeling that OpenAI's leadership wants to become the "next Apple". To me it seems more like a fancy masquerade ball than real solid ingenuity.
I think the fear of AGI destroying humanity mostly stems from the suspicion that a logically thinking device would indeed come to the conclusion that we need to be exterminated.
It comes from the fact that a logically thinking device given an arbitrary goal will probably not develop "Thou shalt not kill"-type moralisms in the pursuit of that goal.
If you make an AGI to run a paperclip factory, eventually you'll come back to find most of the carbon and iron in your galaxy refactored into paperclips. The extinction of any local flora or fauna there is just a byproduct of that drive. See [2] for a brief rundown.
> If you make an AGI to run a paperclip factory, eventually you'll come back to find most of the carbon and iron in your galaxy refactored into paperclips.
Given the costs to run such an AGI, it seems unlikely one would be left unattended for long.
“A large human population isn’t the best use of the Earth’s resources” would seem to be an obvious conclusion of a superior thinking entity with no compelling reason in prioritising us over its own interests (which might not be selfish eg it’s goal might be to discover the true nature of reality.
But why exterminate humans? Why not create nature reserves for us and other life, for bioconservation and research? That’s been a feature of human societies going back thousands of years.
>Why not create nature reserves for us and other life, for bioconservation and research? That’s been a feature of human societies going back thousands of years.
Generally only for things we find cute or pretty.
Plenty of "save the whales!", not much "save this strain of this bacteria before it goes extinct!".
the risk is that we know that there is a non-zero probability mass associated with "AGI doing whatever leading to premature human extinction"
and the less serious concerns we look at the bigger the chance (of course the severity is less, so calculating the impact is not trivial), but "non-runaway AGI used for antisocial purposes" is pretty likely.
That can't actually be the way it works. You can't say "sign this or we *take away something you're already legally entitled to". It has to have been something people agreed to beforehand, to at least some extent.
In any case, Sama's tweet says he is cancelling this practice and anyone affected by it can contact him to get their equity back.
They've said they've never clawed back anyone's equity in practice - which is not surprising! If you're threatening people you hopefully don't have to follow through on your threats very often! That's kind of the point of threatening people no? So I don't find that statement partically reassuring.
My bar for being convinced that this has been handled correctly: the guy who lost his equity gets it back, and other people who previously left openai confirm that they've had some of the restrictive terms of their exit contract (like non-disparagement) cancelled. Additionally, people who made a fuss tell us that they haven't been penalised in terms of access to future liquidity events.
That tweet thread confirms what I said, at least in a roundabout way. Per the next tweets:
> Equity is part of negotiated compensation; this is shares (worth a lot of $$) that the employees already earned over their tenure at OpenAI.
> Employees are not informed of this when they're offered compensation packages that are heavy on equity.
That makes it sound like it's something that they agreed to when accepting their compensation, perhaps unknowingly.
And Kelsey's article links to this LessWrong post about one of the employees that refused this deal and gave up massive amounts of equity, and he writes this:
> To clarify: I did sign something when I joined the company, so I'm still not completely free to speak (still under confidentiality obligations). But I didn't take on any additional obligations when I left.
So again, there are some things that they signed on joining OpenAI, perhaps non-standard things. Now they're asked to sign something more.
I'm not sure of the structure of what they signed before and this article doesn't get into it, but I maintain that there is no legal mechanism to tell someone "sign this or I take away something you already received". There has to be more to the story than the way I've seen it presented so far.
And for the record, I'm very much in the worried-about-AI-safety camp, I have a lot of issues with OpenAI in that and other regards, and I am absolutely willing to believe that the "more to the story" that I gesture at above is still OpenAI being really bad here - it might be that the conditions negotiated with employees made this "we take away your equity" a loophole they weren't aware of, or that OpenAI has some mechanism to make equity effectively zero out somehow, or something.
I'm not saying OpenAI is in the right, at all. I'm saying that the story as told so far doesn't fit with how reality works, and I'm interested to know more details. That's all.
> I'm not sure of the structure of what they signed before and this article doesn't get into it, but I maintain that there is no legal mechanism to tell someone "sign this or I take away something you already received". There has to be more to the story than the way I've seen it presented so far.
It's in that whole collection of tweets, but essentially the contract which you sign on joining says that if you leave and you don't sign the exit paperwork then you lose your equity. You aren't told what is in the exit paperwork at this point.
When you leave, the exit paperwork contains the non-disparagement clause.
Whether or not this is legally enforceable, no idea, IANAL. It does sound like enough of a threat that most people would just sign though
> It's in that whole collection of tweets, but essentially the contract which you sign on joining says that if you leave and you don't sign the exit paperwork then you lose your equity. You aren't told what is in the exit paperwork at this point.
Yeah, that sounds like the kind of shenanigans that I imagine happened (I didn't see it in the article and I may have missed it among the tweets).
This is the kind of thing you really should never agree to as an employee signing on, though I wouldn't be surprised if many never really knew about it. I also doubt it's enforceable.
> Whether or not this is legally enforceable, no idea, IANAL. It does sound like enough of a threat that most people would just sign though
I agree, although the amounts of money here are probably large enough that they should just have lawyers involved giving them advice.
I’m not sure why the guy above you is getting down voted so hard. It’s pretty clear from these tweets that what OpenAI was threatening to do (claw back vested equity) would in fact have been illegal/unenforceable. They are changing the contracts now that attention has been focused on it.
I didn't. I haven't read much of anything he's written. But people who write like that are generally incapable of any clear, concise words, so it's best to just ignore them.
I don't understand why people are just mad about OpenAI for their pioneering work towards AGI as if they are the only one who has skin in this game. OpenAI, Google, NVidia, MS, Meta, almost all the AI researchers who publish meaningful work in top literatures, are pushing the boundaries today and has their fair share of responsibility. They are all in it for something, money, power, control, fame, curiosity, academic recognition, whatever the incentives are. At this rate, it's already a race to the bottom and I don't believe the first place AGI was born would be able to kill it off. AGI is like nukes, it's so powerful that nobody will take the risks seriously until they have it, and nobody is going to stop pursuing it because everyone else is chasing it. If OpenAI slows down, Google will take the lead. If the US slows down, China will take the lead. That's basically the doomed future we are facing in reality.
> At this rate, it's already a race to the bottom and I don't believe the first place AGI was born would be able to kill it off. AGI is like nukes, it's so powerful that nobody will take the risks seriously until they have it, and nobody is going to stop pursuing it because everyone else is chasing it. If OpenAI slows down, Google will take the lead. If the US slows down, China will take the lead. That's basically the doomed future we are facing in reality
Its amazing to me that Oppenheimer became such a box office hit around the same time all the AI / AGI hype really built. There are plenty of parallels between the Manhattan Project, and nuclear weapons in general, and real AI.
Heck, just watch the last 5 minutes of Oppenheimer and tell me there's no lesson there to be learned before going right back to work the next day trying to build artificial general intelligence just because we can.
People are particularly focused on OAI because it’s both the clear leader and the one with a corporate charter that appears to run totally contrary to their actual behavior.
Either the risk-mitigator 'falls in line' after repeatedly seeing their increasingly strident exhortations are falling on deaf ears (or even outright contradicted)... or they leave because it violates their sense of ethics.
Perhaps "AGI" and potential extinction event level fears is giving this more drama than it should have. Replace AGI with "no BYOD policy" and I bet there's a startup somewhere where it turned out that safety guy was super intent on the policy, senior leadership wasn't, and eventually safety guy quits.
Or it could all be as serious and dire as it seems. Hard to tell from the outside.