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Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

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Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#321

Post by joenot443 »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #238
joenot443 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think Musk is "simply paid by the Chinese"? I'm not a fan of his antics or public persona, but it's a pretty huge claim to make with 0 backup that he's in the pocket of the CCP. Where did you get that idea anyway?

It's not a totally outrageous theory. He has major interests (a Tesla factory) in the PRC and so would presumably be susceptible to influence by the state ("Sure would be a shame if Tesla China went the same way as ARM China.") Of course, my personal zero-hard-evidence theory is that he is a US intelligence asset.

You're right - it's one of those theories that makes sense in that the motivations make sense (CCP cooperation is advantageous for Musk : CIA felt threatened by JFK) but unless there's some tangible evidence, the null hypothesis has my vote.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#322

Post by bloppe »

permo-w wrote: post #315
Havoc wrote: post #235

And I’d like world hunger to be ended. Frankly my wish seems more plausible.

yes so let's not bother trying to stop an existential threat. have you considered the possible consequences of all this?

Very hard to say how threatening AI really is. We need more research to determine that. Even if it is an existential threat, a moratorium will not make it go away. That's why we still have nukes.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#323

Post by hooande »

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…

> In the next 10 years, AI/robots will generate wealth at an unprecedented scale.

Would love to see the reasoning behind this. Nothing I've seen about LLMs makes me think they will produce any kind of bounty for anyone.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#324

Post by EForEndeavour »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #310
walkhour wrote: post #251

Breaking: the runners lagging behind in the AI race demand openAI to stop right on its tracks; this is very unsafe; it will be much safer once we catch up and openAI is on the rear view mirror.

This is frankly a bad and cavalier take on an extremely important subject. Many on the list are Academics outside AI/ML and/or leaders of AI orgs at the very top of the field that have no need to catch up to or slow down OpenAI to benefit themselves. Risks from AI are very real and Sam Altman himself has said so numerous times. He also in fact advocated for slowing down AI progress on Lex Fridman's podcast this month…

How do we reconcile Sam Altman's position as CEO of OpenAI with his repeated calls to slow down AI progress? Is the expectation that his conscience, sense of ethics, and concern for his own company's impact on society will temper the opposing urge/pressure to maintain OpenAI's lead in the AI market?

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#325

Post by thomastjeffery »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #316
thomastjeffery wrote: post #302

The dumb criticize the blind. What an absurd situation! How did we get here? Here are the steps: 1. Large Language Models have been presented as "AI", which personifies them instead of describing how they work. 2. Goals for LLM development were set for the personified attributes, and not the actual functionally of the real thing. OpenAI brags about how GPT4 scores at human tests: as if that has any bearing on the mod…

At no point in your rambling, incoherent comment were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this site is now dumber for having read it. May God have mercy on your soul.

My point is that this fear is irrational: based on a misunderstanding about what LLMs can do, which itself is based on a misunderstanding of what LLMs are.

Is there a way I could have been more clear? Are you disinterested in the content of my comment, or the presentation? The only thing I can learn from your comment is that mine didn't live up to your mysterious standards.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#326

Post by pc_edwin »

codeulike wrote: post #293
pc_edwin wrote: post #250

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…

But he's been consistently saying this for almost a decade, and thats one of the reasons he was involved in OpenAI in the first place (back when it was genuinely open) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/27/elon-musk... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/17/elon-musk... https://www.wired.com/2016/04/openai-elon-musk-sam-altman-pl...

I've been following his takes and predictions on AI for the better part of a decade and I tend to agree with him.

From what I heard, Elon wanted to take over OpenAI and the other founders refused. This is why he left the org and backed away from further committed funding.

Theres been an ongoing rumour that he brought together a bunch of people to develop a alternative (BasedAI) and to me this campaign looks like an attempt to slow down competition rather than an act of genuine concern.

I cant come up with any other reason to have OpenAI pause research for 6 months other than providing competition time to catch up.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#327

Post by stuckinhell »

permo-w wrote: post #314
stuckinhell wrote: post #244

The genie is out of the bottle. It's never gonna happen. Even my husband and I went out and paid $20k to create a homelab for AI training. My firm fast tracked 2 million just for hardware to create their own internal Chatgpt style AI.

if governments across the West came out now and made laws to stop this, then sure a few thousand experts on hacker news that can afford to drop $20k on hardware could keep developing them illegally, but all the universities and corporations would stop. and it's the universities and the corporations, openAI especially, that have capacity to develop the dangerous AIs

Then the West would fall behind other countries as well. It would be how like the US tried to ban stem cell research under Bush.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#328

Post by Ancapistani »

4k3aa4 wrote: post #268
Quarrel wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, in an alternate universe where atomic weapons were a little easier to manufacture at home would it not have made sense for governments to aggressively crack down on anyone doing anything even remotely resembling building them? I guess the second question is - would they have succeeded or would we all just have died?

There is a conspiracy theory out that that nuclear weapons are easier to manufacture - that uranium enrichment is the "difficult path" to creating them, that the easier path is via the accumulation of heavy water, and that the Powers That Be™ have hidden that fact because uranium enrichment provides a plausible means of suppressing proliferation.

To be very clear, I do not believe the above to be true. If it were, though, the implications on nuclear proliferation would be similar to trying to control AI research. Basically everyone has to insist that the only way to do it is to through nation-state levels of resources at a corpus to train a model, while knowing full well that it can be done with much more meager resources.

... honestly, I'm not sure where I'm going with this thought, it just seemed an interesting parallel to me.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#330

Post by slowmovintarget »

EForEndeavour wrote: post #324
adamsmith143 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is frankly a bad and cavalier take on an extremely important subject. Many on the list are Academics outside AI/ML and/or leaders of AI orgs at the very top of the field that have no need to catch up to or slow down OpenAI to benefit themselves. Risks from AI are very real and Sam Altman himself has said so numerous times. He also in fact advocated for slowing down AI progress on Lex Fridman's podcast this month…

How do we reconcile Sam Altman's position as CEO of OpenAI with his repeated calls to slow down AI progress? Is the expectation that his conscience, sense of ethics, and concern for his own company's impact on society will temper the opposing urge/pressure to maintain OpenAI's lead in the AI market?

"Obviously everyone else should slow down. We're fine."
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