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Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

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Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Virtue signalling"? Please. There are a lot of very smart experts on that signatory list who definitely don't need to, or care about, virtue signalling. Fine, ignore Musk's signature, but I don't think luminaries like Stuart Russell, Steve Wozniak, Jaan Tallinn or John Hopfield are doing this for "virtue signalling". You can fairly argue that this will be ineffective, but a lot of experts in this field have real, "h…

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Seriously, why do people do this? It's so useless and unhelpful.

Wozniak is just one of the people I mentioned, and as a tech luminary who is responsible for a lot of visionary tech that impacts our day-to-day, I think it makes sense to highlight his opinion, never mind that his name was sandwiched between some of the "founding fathers" of AI like Stuart Russell and John Hopfield.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#442
post #430

Not sure why people think AI development can’t be paused. A letter alone probably won’t do it, but a movement — perhaps coalescing around the principles laid out in letter signed by influential people — can. Governments can regulate it. Consumers and companies can, if they want, punish companies that keep moving forward on AI. People can keep making AIs but would have difficulty releasing them, which greatly reduces…

The publicly released AIs are not the ones we need to worry about. Pushing research underground will worsen the situation

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Virtue signalling"? Please. There are a lot of very smart experts on that signatory list who definitely don't need to, or care about, virtue signalling. Fine, ignore Musk's signature, but I don't think luminaries like Stuart Russell, Steve Wozniak, Jaan Tallinn or John Hopfield are doing this for "virtue signalling". You can fairly argue that this will be ineffective, but a lot of experts in this field have real, "h…

There are plenty of bigger "human ending" concerns on the table right now than AI and we certainly aren't pausing anything for those.

Like what ? Climate change ? The EU just voted for petrol and diesel car ban. Are we really single-threaded ?

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#444

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…

And add in just one peer-level war where one side has their back against the wall. Then give it 100 years where anyone can create such a model on their phone.

We’d need a constantly evolving inoculation function to compete. And it would probably lose because the other side has fewer restrictions. In my darker thoughts about this, this is why we see no aliens.

To get this to work we need a far smarter entity with no physical limitations to still want us around, indefinitely, despite us having an internet library of reasons why not to. It’ll have to be a lot more forgiving than we are. Let’s hope enlightenment is the outcome of this adventure. It’s possible because it didn’t grow out of angry monkeys who needed to fight to survive, but it’s not guaranteed. There are no indefinite guarantees.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#446
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…

>since they trained on a huge chunk of web text

What did they trained it on? Why is it unprobable to train on a better/bigger dataset any time soon?

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#447
post #430

Not sure why people think AI development can’t be paused. A letter alone probably won’t do it, but a movement — perhaps coalescing around the principles laid out in letter signed by influential people — can. Governments can regulate it. Consumers and companies can, if they want, punish companies that keep moving forward on AI. People can keep making AIs but would have difficulty releasing them, which greatly reduces…

The publicly released AIs are not the ones we need to worry about. Pushing research underground will worsen the situation

It’s wide AI use that will disrupt society. Underground AI will not be widely used.

Let’s not imbue individual underground AI with magical abilities.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#449

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…

hook up the AIs to nukes? /s

The dark forest is here.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#450

People are talking like it's impossible to do slow things down. In fact, simple measures like forbidding deployments of models with more than a certain number of parameters would probably slow things down a lot. Sure, people and companies could still continue development in secret, but without the funding and experience from products like ChatGPT, it would be harder. People also say China wouldn't follow, but general…

>In fact, simple measures like forbidding deployments of models with more than a certain number of parameters would probably slow things down a lot.

Are we even sure GPT-4 has dramatically more params than GPT-3? They have stopped revealing the parameter counts with 3.5.

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