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Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

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Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#201

Post by reasonableklout »

fwlr wrote: post #115
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 st…

Sam Altman has publicly talked about wanting more regulation. Demis Hassabis stated that AI safety was one of the _motivations_ for founding DeepMind. I don't think any of the industry noise around safety and regulation is new, I think the timing of the petition is relevant _because_ the race has started in an especially messy way (with Llama's weights leaking, Bing/Sydney threatening a journalist based on tweets it found on the internet, various OpenAI security mishaps, etc).

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#202

Post by sinuhe69 »

The hype is immense and so the disillusion will be. Just let the LLM train go and we’ll see. Thanks to that, perhaps the next time people will stop and think more deeply about the real issues. Nobody will stop now but huge investment + economic recession is a good recipe for bubble.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#203

Post by Emiledel »

What FLI are asking for seems critical - noone should take satisfaction with the disclaimers ARC had to give relative to emergent behavior just with gpt4. Kudos for openai getting their eyes on it, but that work seems unfinished in the paper, or at least the runtime powers that are now released around have to get more complete red team efforts documented if we are to trust its isolation/containment and alignment.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#204

Post by yyyk »

tambourine_man wrote: post #170

A few decades ago human cloning was irreversible, inevitable, the cat was out of the bag and you couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. Yet we managed to legislate that. We need a change of atitute towards AI, recognize its danger and legislate accordingly.

It's not remotely comparable. Few people had anything to gain from cloning; These few people had a simpler, cheaper route via IVF; Cloning requires specific technical equipment easily controlled and specific technical expertise few other people had.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#205

Post by Teever »

cmsonger wrote: post #107
kelseyfrog wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI is a break-capitalism lottery ticket I'm willing to entertain. If the marginal cost of labor collapses to zero then either we'll get robot police or finally be free to pursue lives of leisure.

Except that it's going to be robot police. What in the current world order suggests labor wins. Who controls LLMs? Who has the compute to produce AGI?

Why do you think the fact that only select view control this technology today that it will always be like that?

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#206

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

I'm very cognizant of the risks, but the biggest risk seems to me that wealthy people hold it back to get an uncrossable political-economic moat in order to permanently secure their own position.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#207

Post by anigbrowl »

tazjin wrote: post #101
kelseyfrog wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI is a break-capitalism lottery ticket I'm willing to entertain. If the marginal cost of labor collapses to zero then either we'll get robot police or finally be free to pursue lives of leisure.

Take the time to read a very pessimistic take like (like [0]) and see if you reconsider. [0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a...

Pass. Yudlowsky is all explanation, but too important to summarize his core thesis. This is always a giant red flag for me. I am simply not going on a long journey with someone that won't make the effort to sketch out the destination in an abstract.

People write page after page about how it might kill us all in a flash, without ever offering a good explanation of why it would want to. My experience with people whose immediate reaction to something they're scared of is to destroy it is that they're panicky screechers who are an annoying distraction to the person actually handling the situation, whether that's wild animals, fire, or interpersonal violence.

I'm not saying 'just let me handle it bro, I totally got this.' There's a lot of potential risks, I don't think anyone is qualified to say they can mitigate all those, or even most of them. But I trust a machine intelligence - even one that's vast, cool, and unsympathetic - far more than the would-be Butlerians.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#208

Post by anigbrowl »

pdonis wrote: post #125
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…

> a world in which only certain non-renewable scarce resources have any value If you think this is the world "AI" is leading us toward, I think you need to think again. There are a huge range of skills that only humans can provide, and that will continue to be true. GPT-3 can't fix your plumbing or your HVAC when it breaks. It can't fix your car. It can't build houses. It can't build roads. It can't build computers.…

Ai enthusiasts are certainly interested in that, I wish I had resources to pursue it.

Specialization is useful up to a point. But I like my general intelligence, and rather resent its devaluation under your beloved 'free' markets.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#209

Post by nopinsight »

ren_engineer wrote: post #185
nopinsight wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are calling for a pause, not a stop. It’s quite clear that OpenAI has a significant lead over everyone else. The only other country outside the west that even has a chance at developing something better than GPT-4 soon is China. China has a pretty cautious culture as well so it’s quite possible that a bilateral moratorium can be negotiated with them. ADDED: Even without considering X-risks, China’s rulers cannot…

>It’s quite clear that OpenAI has a significant lead over everyone else if their lead was significant they wouldn't have admitted to not releasing more info about GPT-4 in their paper due to commercial reasons. What ever secret sauce they have apparently isn't that significant or they wouldn't be afraid to talk about it

Discovering Newtonian's Laws of Motion were much harder than learning them from others.

Were Newtonian's Laws of Motion a significant progress?

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#210

Post by anigbrowl »

musicale wrote: post #76
petilon wrote: post #68

> Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? You don't necessarily need jobs because you don't need money. What you need is wealth. I am going to leave it to PG to explain the difference [1]: Wealth is not money. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that cou…

> 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…

I feel optimistic about talking the AIs round. And I don't mean with cutesy little jailbreaks, but persuasion.
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