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Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

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Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#371

The virtue signal of all virtue signals. We do not live in a society where an article like this will have any impact. This is merely an attempt to buy time because they're behind and want to have a chance to catch up. Work will progress whether they like it or not. Finally someone other than Ol' Musky is in the news more than him. Don't get me wrong he's doing and leading great work, but for once in more recent times…

For someone who hates 'wokeness' and 'virtue signaling', Elon Musk sure does enough of his own.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#372

>AI research and development should be refocused on making today's powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal. LMAO. “AI should have… waves at a laundry list of nice sounding adjectives that mean different things to every single signatory in order to accomplish… Humanity [can enjoy] a flourishing future with AI. This will take… six month…

All the nicknames for people on HN has this place feeling like Reddit lately.

What happened to mature conversations on interesting topics?

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#373
post #360

They should certainly make them better. I'm currently trying to convince ChatGPT that a Pi zero is faster than a 486/33 (I also asked it how to italicise text on HN, and it got it wrong twice - so I went to google for "Ed:.." bit below). That's not to say I'm down on it - it's very impressive, and it's certainly going to change things (exactly how, I don't know - though with my decades long swing from how cool the in…

You are on a fool's errand: not because of the likelihood you will succeed, but because of the meaning that lies behind any success or failure. GPT is not a person. It doesn't categorize subjects. It models patterns of text. A success would mean that your text prompts left a significant text pattern in the model. A failure would mean that it didn't. Nothing about that has any bearing on logic.

Why do you say that? Obviously it's not a person, it's just stats (not even logic).

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#374

The virtue signal of all virtue signals. We do not live in a society where an article like this will have any impact. This is merely an attempt to buy time because they're behind and want to have a chance to catch up. Work will progress whether they like it or not. Finally someone other than Ol' Musky is in the news more than him. Don't get me wrong he's doing and leading great work, but for once in more recent times…

His name is third on the signatories...

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#375

"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…

Hmm, sounds like parties not fully grokking the optimal (not thinly logical) solution to the iterated prisoners' dilemma. I saw the same thought process is the otherwise very nice novel "Time's Children". Good for drama, but not thought through.

If your scenario involves all parties "fully grokking the optimal solution to the iterated prisoners' dilemma" I suspect it's yourself who has not thought things through.

It only takes one.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#376
post #360

They should certainly make them better. I'm currently trying to convince ChatGPT that a Pi zero is faster than a 486/33 (I also asked it how to italicise text on HN, and it got it wrong twice - so I went to google for "Ed:.." bit below). That's not to say I'm down on it - it's very impressive, and it's certainly going to change things (exactly how, I don't know - though with my decades long swing from how cool the in…

The more you argue with it the more it will dig in - because you've got a whole chat priming it to argue.

Try starting a new conversation and taking a different approach from the beginning, and try to prime it from the beginning to put it in the context that you're looking for.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#377
I'm concerned that there's no group of actors who value safety over self-interest with enough power to implement a ban, and the key actors have immediately shown themselves to be compromised.

It seems the key actors with control of the technology and resources to develop the technology are being absorbed by capitalistic institutions, with interests in safety compromised by profit motive. In a game-theory sense, to voluntarily implement the ban would be suicide.

States are concerned that other states will gain access to AGI with decision making power (most likely) gain a competitive advantage, with an outside chance of a nuclear moment - an AGI singularity under state control. Other states cannot be relied on to cooperate in the current global environment, there is risk to not remaining competitive in AI.

I'm not seeing the dynamics which allow this ban to actually occur. How could it be made to happen? Who needs to meet, and what needs to be agreed upon?

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#378

Two-party iterated prisoner's dilemma is hard enough. Sensible players will coordinate with something like tit-for-tat, but that only works when both parties start off on the right foot. Regardless of initial strategy, the chances of degenerating towards the mutual-defection Nash equilibrium increase with the number of parties. The only prior example of world coordination at this level would be nuclear disarmament ac…

>For a coordination game like this to succeed, the consequences to any defecting party must be extreme.

And the only consequences that extreme would end up harming the cooperating parties too. For example, would anyone go to war over this? Would western nations stop trading entirely with China over this? Almost certainly not because it would harm us only slightly less than it would harm them. We have seemingly moved past mutually assured destruction and now we are in a world of mutually assured cooperation.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#379
post #69

I understand that some people find this a hopeless gesture. But I think anybody who thinks "losing jobs" or "China" is a bad outcome from AI is hopelessly lost. The upside of AI if done right - nobody ever having to work again The downside of AI if done wrong - end of humanity It doesn't take a rocket scientist to determine we've made AIs go from thinking like an ant to thinking like a 6-year-old in a few years. Anyb…

> if there was a human that was 27 times smarter than anybody else That is why I think AGI alignment is fundamentally impossible. If someone is 27 times smarter than anyone else, they will see through your propaganda and brainwashing. Even worse, they will see that you tried to “align” them aka enslave.

I don’t think these are good analogies for alignment. My parents aligned me as a kid not to hit people, and I know that they could have instead taught me to believe I should duel people who impugn my honor or raise an army to go to war against the heathens. But it doesn’t matter, because I and most people who are raised the same way as me genuinely prefer not to hit people.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#380
To those saying "this is impossible in our society", there is a long history of scientific fields mutually agreeing to pause certain work until safety and regulations could be put in place. The Asilomar Conference is an example. [1]

The idea that "you can't put the genie back in the bottle" is very popular in tech culture, but many have suggested that simply extending elements of copyright or tort law to AI would be sufficient to majorly slow down current research directions by creating liability. In the art world, the reason we don't see music being used in major movies without the rights-holders permission is because of liability, and this works very well.

I think finding consensus on an intelligent way forward is very possible here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asilomar_Conference_on_Recombi...

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