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Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

futureoflife.org

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Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#281

Elon thought AI would enslave us, but turns out it empowers us. Now he wants to shut it down and have it all to himself. It's getting to be that whatever the opposite of what Musk wants is the correct course of action for the people.

> Elon thought AI would enslave us, but turns out it empowers us.

I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion. GPT3 is 2 years old. It has ample time to enslave us. I'm also still waiting for the "empowering" bit. Haven't really noticed it, I must say. Or are you referring to a few code completion tricks?

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#282
post #247
post #231

In a way, this seems like sour grapes to me. I bet if it was their own company/institution that released gpt-4, they wouldn't be calling for this pause.

In a corporate drama ('Succession', 'Silicon Valley'?) the plot could be that the likes of Goog is secretly funding this.

Actually one of the founders of the "Future of life" institute that organized this is a DeepMind "AI safety" employee Victoria Krakovna (who also signed it), and I'm guessing she'd not be doing this without DeepMind's approval. DeepMind's whole raison d'etre was of course building AGI, which they were initially pursuing via RL before belatedly joining the LLM bandwagon. I'm sure they'd welcome a 6-month catch-up period!

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#283
"The Dark Forest" is a science fiction novel by Liu Cixin, which introduces a concept called "suspicion."(“猜疑链”) In this concept, the interaction between civilizations is viewed as an ongoing game of suspicion, where each civilization is worried that the other civilization may pose a threat to it. This kind of suspicion makes it difficult for civilizations to establish trust, thereby making the universe a dark forest full of war and suspicion.

We can apply this concept of suspicion to the phenomenon in the field of modern artificial intelligence research. In AI research, some researchers believe that humans should pause the development of AI technology because of the potential unforeseeable risks it may bring. However, another group of researchers believe that we should not stop because we cannot be certain whether those who are trying to catch up with us will use the advancement of AI technology as a hidden weapon. This suspicion leads to a chain reaction, where people continue to worry about each other's motives and abilities, making it difficult for all parties to establish trust. Therefore, although there are good intentions, such proposals are unlikely to be implemented.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#284

For Sake of Argument lets say you pause US from doing anything on AI, how will you control China, Germany or other Countries.. This will only lead to US Lagging behind other countries.

Forget countries? How will you stop me? I have models on my local computer. I can and will use them. They will get better. You don't put tech genie's back in their bottles, that's not how it works.

so what do you suggest? more lack of caution? stumbling into an AI apocalypse because “oh fuck it, it’s too difficult to do anything about, why bother?”

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#285
Musk is such a hypocrite, here he is in 2014 calling AI 'probably our biggest existential threat':

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/27/elon-musk...

...and now nine years later he's calling for caution and a pause. Well he certainly changes his tune whenever it suits him.

... Oh wait ...

But yeah I mean if he was so worried about it why didn't he use his fortune and influence to try and make sure AI was developed in a responsible way by getting together with other like minded people and launching a foundation or a non-profit or something ...

... Oh wait ... https://www.wired.com/2016/04/openai-elon-musk-sam-altman-pl...

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#286
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Don't you think this is needlessly argumentative? It's not relevant to the parent topic. His only purpose in stating the part you quoted was to say, "so me disagreeing with him now should really say something."

Maybe argumentative, but you really have to go out of your way to take at face value anything that narcissistic manchild says. It’s simply a questionable thing to do, the same way I couldn’t help but question every opinion of someone who is a flat-earther/takes ivermectin against COVID/insert another braindead conspiracy theory.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#288

I've been a staunch supporter of Elon throughout all his scandals, especially the Twitter ones but I'm unable to come up with any justification for this. Everything leads to him (and others) pressuring OpenAI to pause so they could catch up. It doesn't take much smarts to deduce the cats already out of the bag. There is no stopping this, only pressuring/slowing-down/targeting certain players (OpenAI) as a competition…

this is the one where you draw the line? this is the one where I finally agree with him.

is this your area of interest/research?

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#289
post #156

Stopping now would be extremely dangerous and borderline stupid. If you stop now, you're just left behind, because there's no way everyone will stop. At this point the only logical course of action in an adversarial situation is to double down and keep researching, otherwise some other country or culture with different (and possibly worse) values ends up dominating the technology and you're left behind in the dust. T…

I don't agree at all. It's totally fair for rival "countries or cultures with different values" to coordinate on matters that threaten everyone's survival. There are many examples of international agreements on technologies that fit this description. For example: - International treaties to avoid nuclear proliferation and development, as other commenters have pointed out - National moratoriums on gain-of-function res…

it's orders of magnitude easier to regulate and observe large scale nuclear projects then thousands of hackers spread all over globe.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#290

Elon thought AI would enslave us, but turns out it empowers us. Now he wants to shut it down and have it all to himself. It's getting to be that whatever the opposite of what Musk wants is the correct course of action for the people.

the opposite of what Musk wants is the correct course of action for the people. Ok so you want to move back to gas combustion engines, stop deploying internet to rural and third world countries, clamp down on free speech, and make sure there are no tunnels, just elevated highways dividing cities. Is that about right?

That guy didn’t do anything useful, he has money and some of his companies made a few successful products in spite of he being there.

You honestly couldn’t mismanage a company more than what he currently does with twitter - a goddamn cabbage would have done a better job, by literally not doing anything.

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