Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter • Hacker News Board

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#481

Post by lend000 » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 9:06 PM UTC

If intelligence is all you need to dominate the world, why do some of the most powerful world leaders seem to not be more than a standard deviation above average intelligence (or at least they were before they became geriatric)?

Add in the fact that GPT-4 does not "think" very fast, has no arms or legs, needs to run on expensive specialized hardware, and essentially seems like a search algorithm that lacks creativity on things outside of its training set, and I just do not see the concern. Maybe GPT-42 will actually be more creative and adaptable than a human genius, but even then, this seems like a hypothetical problem for the 2050's, less pressing than "accidentally igniting the atmosphere with nuclear chain reactions".

Hollywood has instilled the idea that the first time an artificial intelligence becomes self aware and decides it wants to take over the world, it will immediately be successful.

The serious concern and scrutiny should only start stifling progress once we have some evidence of half-baked attempts by non-super-intelligent AI's attempting to subvert their boundaries.

I for one am very excited to use GPT-5 and see more useful tools coming from OpenAI.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#482

Post by barking_biscuit » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 9:09 PM UTC

jmull wrote: 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…

>Not sure why people think AI development can’t be paused.

My suspicion is that if heavy regulation were to be put on it and all the corporate entities involved backed off, there are enough motivated and capable individuals that have home labs that would continue to work on it in private. It might be more difficult and slower, but distributed training protocols/methods (or advancements in them) might make it possible to pool a few thousand (or tens of thousand) high end consumer GPUs to continue to push the envelope.

My gut feel is that just as there are certain books, games and movies that get banned and become illegal to posses, there are probably (or potentially) going to be certain models that you're not allowed to be in possession due to what they can do. So... grab a copy of them while you can.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#483

Post by panarchy » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 9:09 PM UTC

We could have said the same thing about not building GPT-4 this just feels like--- "Now that we have our model built and monetized please don't compete with us so we can milk it!" ~ OpenAI and Others

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#484

Post by biscottigelato » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 9:10 PM UTC

nuancebydefault wrote: post #464

How striking is it that everybody has so much to say about the dangers of AI. What if we look at it this way: there are already real-known dangers coming at us: climate change and a change of instability of the world order. What if we only have one shot to solve these known dangers and what if an exponential growing corpus of smartness could teach us how? We need to grab that chance, the stakes are too high. Pausing…

Climate change and instability of world order doesn't end humanity. They are barely considered an extinction event.

AI Alignment is consistently voted the top potential cause to extinct the human race.

They are not even close.

https://riskfrontiers.com/insights/ranking-of-potential-caus...

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#485

Post by ushakov » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 9:10 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #441

revelio wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

Wozniak is also a crypto shill

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steve-wozniak-launches-own-to...

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#486

Post by biscottigelato » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 9:11 PM UTC

ksherlock wrote: post #432

yreg wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Elon continue to hold a stake in OpenAI? Do you think Tesla wants to compete with OAI in building an LLM? Make use of Dojo?

Elon musk was a founding member, a board member (resigned in 2018), and a donor, but not an owner (it's a non-profit so there aren't owners exactly).

It WAS a non-profit. I am not sure if it still is one today.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#487

Post by sarchertech » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 9:13 PM UTC

yreg wrote: post #446

m_ke wrote: 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?

Because they trained it on a huge percentage of the existing web. There's isn't a (much) bigger and better data set available.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#488

Post by dia80 » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 9:14 PM UTC

longitudinal93 wrote: post #212

Those that have any doubts about the necessity of this initiative should take the time to watch the Center for Humane Technology's "The AI Dilemma" from March 9th. https://vimeo.com/809258916/92b420d98a

Great video, thoughtful and persuasive. Highly recommended to broaden your perspective, it did for me.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#489

Post by drtz » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 9:14 PM UTC

puma_ambit wrote: post #365

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…

Ask yourself two questions:

1. What is the ultimate AI are we trying to eventually build? 2. What are the consequences if we eventually succeed in building such an AI?

For me, the answers would be

1. A general AI that would equal and surpass human intelligence. 2. God only knows.

Will we get there? Who knows. We do know, however, that the consequences are great enough that only a fool would not at least attempt to prepare by putting some safeguards in place beforehand.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#490

Post by kromem » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 9:14 PM UTC

nuancebydefault wrote: post #464

How striking is it that everybody has so much to say about the dangers of AI. What if we look at it this way: there are already real-known dangers coming at us: climate change and a change of instability of the world order. What if we only have one shot to solve these known dangers and what if an exponential growing corpus of smartness could teach us how? We need to grab that chance, the stakes are too high. Pausing…

EXACTLY!

The relative surface area AI represents in the existential threats pile is notable but only a slice of the pie.

But there's not much in the pile for mitigation of all those other human-driven threats other than pulling a deus ex machina out of our rear ends.

So while we should definitely discuss the inherent risks, we should also be discussing the risk of opportunity costs in delaying greater scalable intelligence being added to the mix.

This letter seems a bit like myopic fear mongering by people still more caught up in 70s thought experiments about paperclips than the realities facing us in the present day.