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Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

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Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#111

Post by ElijahLynn »

s1mon wrote: post #80

I was a bit baffled my Elon Musk's (apparent) signature on this letter, as I thought he still had a connection to Open.ai. Then I did some basic research and realized that this is likely just jealously and frustration from his failed takeover of Open.ai. https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/23654701/openai-elon-musk...

As Sam Altman (co-founder of OpenAI) said on a recent podcast, and someone who knows Elon well enough, he thinks Elon really cares, and really wanted to highlight that he is a human who cares.

source: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/on-with-kara-swisher...

Swisher: Right. So Elon used to be the co-chair, and you have a lot of respect for him.

Altman: I do.

Swisher: I’m sure you thought deeply about his critiques. Have you spoken to him directly? Was there a break, or what? You two were very close, as I recall.

Altman: We’ve spoken directly recently.

Swisher: And what do you make of the critiques? When you hear them from him, I mean, he can be quite in your face about things.

Altman: He’s got his style.

Swisher: Yeah.

Altman: To say a positive thing about Elon —

Swisher: Yeah, I’d like you to.

Altman: … I think he really does care about a good future with AGI.

Swisher: He does.

Altman: And … I mean, he’s a jerk, whatever else you want to say about him. He has a style that is not a style that I’d want to have for myself.

Swisher: He’s changed.

Altman: But I think he does really care, and he is feeling very stressed about what the future’s going to look like —

Swisher: For humanity.

Altman: For humanity.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#112

Post by archon1410 »

Some "alignment folks" have suggested the government try to start treating GPUs like Uranium or nuclear reactors to stop anyone from developing AIs. Not sure if that's implementable though—cuttig edge GPUs are all manufactured in China. I doubt they'll be able to coordinate with the CCP on this issue. Do GPUs use those fancy chips that only made in Taiwan using equipment only a single Dutch company makes? It might be possible to a put stop to AI development then.

> Emad Mostaque, CEO, Stability AI

Et tu?

Anyway,

> Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#113

Post by paulryanrogers »

petilon wrote: post #81
musicale wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI & robots will generate wealth at unprecedented scale, and humans will reap the benefits, the same way Alaskans reap the benefits of their natural resources. Vast wealth will certainly be delivered to owners of the robots and AI systems. What reason is there to believe that they would share the wealth with ordinary citizens? A typical alternative to the Alaska model is one where oil companies extract all of the w…

A lot of people are already benefiting from ChatGPT. I know I am, and I am only paying $20 a month for a digital assistant that is expert in everything.

An expert that bullshits part of the time. You get to figure out when it's the expert and when it's the bullshitter.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#114

Post by andrewmutz »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #67

I'm really disappointed to see the HN reaction of straight up scoffing at this like it's irreversible and so let's just step on the gas. It's some weird combination of techno-utopianism and nihilism and good old elitism.

You can accuse everyone of *isms, but there are a lot of us who have just never been persuaded by the many articles written to scare us about the effects of AI.

The concerns about all the jobs going away have been persistent but the labor market continues to be extremely strong. As long as entrepreneurship is creating new business opportunities and new ways to turn labor into value, it's completely possible that the effects of automation are drowned out by new applications of labor. In fact, this is what we've seen throughout the industrial revolution: constant anxiety about automation that fails to materialize in to mass unemployment.

The concerns about polluting the information space are still hypothetical as well. The current information space is a complete garbage fire and it's not due to generative AI. Might it get worse if bots start spamming people with GPT generated text on social media? Yeah it might. But social media is already terrible and we need to do something about it regardless of that.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#115

Post by fwlr »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #67

I'm really disappointed to see the HN reaction of straight up scoffing at this like it's irreversible and so let's just step on the gas. It's some weird combination of techno-utopianism and nihilism and good old elitism.

“Sir Roger L'Estrange tell us a Story in his Collection of Fables, of the Cock [Rooster] and the Horses. The Cock was gotten to Roost in the Stable, among the Horses, and there being no Racks, or other Conveniencies for him, it seems, he was forc'd to roost upon the Ground; the Horses jostling about for room, and putting the Cock in danger of his Life, he gives them this grave Advice; Pray Gentlefolks let us stand still, for fear we should tread upon one another.”

HN is scoffing because the timing of this petition is suspicious. To borrow your metaphor of “step on the gas”, this is as if the race had already started, several competitors are out ahead of the rest of the field, and now someone is yelling “step on the brakes!”.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#117

Post by sp527 »

davesque wrote: post #90
sp527 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everyone here will be fine in a world in which only certain non-renewable scarce resources have any value, combined with impending massive currency deflation. Even a rank and file tier 2/3 engineer will manage to live a princely life in that new reality assuming (s)he saved up enough. Hardly anyone in the tech community is capable of truly empathizing with the vast majority of people, who are born with none of…

> Hardly anyone in the tech community is capable of truly empathizing with the vast majority of people This is a gross exaggeration.

Well that's not a counterargument, but you're also missing the point completely, which is that you have to have a very low capacity for empathy in order to push ahead towards AGI when you know society is not prepared for this and that it's going to induce considerable pain.

Americans (let alone people elsewhere in the world) are already struggling. Recent reporting suggests a great many have to work multiple jobs. Almost all of us work an absurd number of hours per week. Many if not most can't afford homes. Plenty are ending up on the streets. Healthcare can literally bankrupt people. A vacation out of the country is an impossible luxury for most. The majority of Americans still don't send their children to college, usually because of affordability.

And I haven't even touched on what life is like in most of Africa or Asia.

This is the world we're bringing AI into. You have to be something adjacent to a sociopath to be okay with that. So long as our system is predicated on capitalism, AI may very well induce more downstream suffering than anything else humans have ever conceived.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#118

Post by m_ke »

jakeinspace wrote: post #58
m_ke wrote: post #41

GPT-4 might be close to the best we'll get on the general LLM model front for a while since they trained on a huge chunk of web text. Next real advances will probably be in tuning them for specific applications in medicine, law, accounting, marketing, coding and etc. As someone running a one man company I can't wait for the cost of accounting, legal and copywriting to approach 0. Cost of shipping products will also g…

I’m not sure I’m looking forward to the politics that would come out of 10-20% of the previously middle class becoming instantly redundant and out of (middle-salary) work. That’s the fast path to fascism, unless we’re able to quickly implement UBI and other major societal overhauls.

Yeah I share these concerns as well (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35305791).

My hope is that some countries will see this as an opportunity to expand their safety nets and reduce the work burden on their citizens, which might convince citizens of countries that don't to demand similar policies.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#119

Post by versteegen »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #67

I'm really disappointed to see the HN reaction of straight up scoffing at this like it's irreversible and so let's just step on the gas. It's some weird combination of techno-utopianism and nihilism and good old elitism.

It's striking how on AGI, the common opinion here on HN is the complete opposite to the one in the AI alignment field. There, people are angry with OpenAI for being too open, here people are angry with it not being open enough. For example, Eliezer Yudkowsky:

> Ryan: OpenAI [...] It's kind of a completely open-source AI project?

> Eliezer: That was the original suicidal vision, yes. But...

> Ryan: And now they're bent on commercializing the technology, is that right?

> Eliezer: That's an improvement, but not enough of one, because they're still generating lots of noise and hype and directing more resources into the field, and storming ahead with the safety that they have instead of the safety that they need, and setting bad examples.

> [...] I would change the name to "ClosedAI". Because right now, they're making it look like being "closed" is hypocrisy. They're, like, being "closed" while keeping the name "OpenAI", and that itself makes it looks like closure is like not this thing that you do cooperatively so that humanity will not die, but instead this sleazy profit-making thing that you do while keeping the name “OpenAI”.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/e4pYaNt89mottpkWZ/yudkowsky-...

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#120

Post by Raemon777 »

When I think about AI through an optimistic lens, I still think pausing to get a better handle on what's going on and how to evaluate it still seems like a useful step. GPT4 represents a substantial increase of capabilities we still don't fully understand.

I don't think it's a crazy luddite position to think "let's actually see how this initial experiment plays out" before racing ahead to the next even large blackbox advance.

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