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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

#501

Post by pastor_bob »

lend000 wrote: post #481

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…

> lacks creativity on things outside of its training set

What's the definition of creative here? It can come up with any solution it sees fit for a problem, even ones people wouldn't think of. I've seen it make up quotes, legal cases, and scientific studies. One can say that's creative.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#502

Post by pc_edwin »

permo-w wrote: post #288
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…

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?

No I don't work on AI but as a dev, I would say I'm heavily invested in the outcome like everyone else on HN.

I fully agree with his concerns, but I believe that he is misleading the public about the motives behind this campaign and the recent petty tweets.

It is a competition tactic aimed at slowing down OpenAI so that he and others can catch up. Due to the exponential nature of the work involved, there is a reasonable chance that OpenAI will maintain its lead for some time and with each iteration the gap between OpenAI and its competitors will widen.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#503

Post by quonn »

ren_engineer wrote: post #184
juancn wrote: 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…

this is basically the same logic behind nuclear weapons, and AI could potentially be even more dangerous if it kept advancing at the rate we've seen in the last few years. In theory the massive amount of compute needed to train and run these at scale could be tracked/regulated similarly to how nuclear refinement facilities are your suggestion is that stopping nuclear proliferation shouldn't have even been attempted,…

But that would only buy us 10 years. Eventually that massive amount won‘t seem very massive anymore compared to what will be available in consumer devices.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#504

Post by pazimzadeh »

lewhoo wrote: post #443
time_to_smile wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

- Lack of representation in government means big companies fuck up the planet if it's profitable

- People are mostly incentivized to compete, not to cooperate

- Antibiotic resistance

- Clean water supply

- etc..

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#505

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

> Goals for LLM development were set for the personified attributes, and not the actual functionally of the real thing.

Well, this is for honest reasons. The goal of a chatbox is to beat the Turing test. It has always been.

Those chatboxes didn't actually beat it, but it's clear that it's due to a technicality (they are easy to spot). They can do empty chats on the same level as a human.

(And so it turns up that the test wasn't as useful as it was believed to be at first.)

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#507

Post by _y5hn »

drtz wrote: post #489
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 pr…

1. AI as a service to be sold to highest bidder.

2. Weapons and armament deals to stay relevant in a decaying world order.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#508

Post by noodlesUK »

KidComputer wrote: post #495
lend000 wrote: post #481

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…

Hey GPT-5, write the code implementing a bioinformatics workflow to design a novel viral RNA sequence to maximize the extermination of human life. The virus genome should be optimized for R-naught and mortality. Perform a literature search to determine the most effective human cellular targets to run the pipeline on. Use off the shelf publicly available state-of-the-art sequence to structure models and protein free-e…

I dunno, this sort of scenario really doesn’t worry me too much. There are thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of subject matter experts who could probably develop dangerous weapons like you describe, but none of them seem to just wake up in the morning and decide “today’s the day I’m going to bring the apocalypse”.

I don’t think that this really changes that.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#509

Post by quxbar »

People have no idea what AI is, they seem to go entirely off of the name. An intro course in Natural Language Processing reveals that while impressive, GPT-4 is a reflection of the training data. It is not conniving, it does not cause harm. The medical benefits alone are staggering.

What we are about to do, as a self-inflicted wound, is let a lot of simple algorithms make real decisions as cover for plain human cruelty. The software platforms landlords are using to collectively raise rents are already an obvious example.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#510

Post by dumbaccount123 »

bbor wrote: post #385
JohnFen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The industrial revolution didn't make human lives miserable, it made it better. I think this is a point that is genuinely debatable. At least, it's pretty easy to argue both sides of that proposition.

… it is? Medicine, food, entertainment, rationalism? You’d trade all of that for… what, agriculture work in a feudal society? I’d love if you could elaborate or link to a good argument on this (besides the Unabomber…) I’m curious.

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/international-mental-il...
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