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Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

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Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#641

Post by Raemon777 »

Eliezer Yudkowsky's written a response to this arguing that a six month ban is woefully insufficient. A thing I found particularly compelling is that there's a significant game-theoretic difference between "shut down some projects for six months" (which is easy to see as a political game between different AI players who want to get ahead in the race) and "humanity collectively decides to actually take the difficult actions necessary to solve problem, and sees it as a join endeavor of survival."

https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no...

See comments on hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35364833

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#642

Post by thih9 »

streptomycin wrote: post #634
reso wrote: post #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…

I had a professor who was involved in that kind of research at the time of the Asilomar Conference. He said it was all very good, everyone agreed to pause their research until people established guidelines for safety. And then once the guidelines were established and research was allowed to resume, everyone immediately published all the research that they had never stopped working on during the "pause".

How long was the waiting period? Was not publishing the research for that duration enough to improve the safety?

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#643

Post by amelius »

jongjong wrote: post #620
zamalek wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that anyone with sufficient money could rent out the infrastructure required to train GPT5 or what-have-you. They need not share it publicly, they can use it for their nefarious purposes privately. The analogous scenario would be preventing your military from experimenting with TNT, when the recipe for TNT is public knowledge. You can't copyright away public knowledge.

Good point. As always, it's always the good guys who follow the rules and the bad guys who don't. This pause would just allow the bad guys to catch up. The solution is to allow as many different entities as possible to develop their own AIs so that they end up competing with each other and providing alternatives. What we don't want is a single AI which dominates our entire belief system.

It's wishful thinking that the good uses of tech and the bad uses of tech will always result in a net zero or good outcome.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#644

Post by jasongill »

ilaksh wrote: post #640
xianshou wrote: post #355

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…

What nuclear disarmament?

Nuclear disarmament means the reduction of nuclear weapons. The size of the global nuclear stockpile has fallen like 80% since the height of the Cold War, which is disarmament (but not elimination, of course)

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#645

Post by kreeben »

Microsoft just nuked their LLM with ads and we all know ads are the plague. That's one down and just a handful more to go. I actually can't believe everyone, their aunt and Max Tegmark throw such a hissy fit over a language model, however large.

"These darn language models will ruin us!"

How?

"Bing told a teenager they should kill themselves!!!"

Ah, yes. Think of the children. That'll do it.

"ChatGPT told someone they should get a divorce!"

Well, maybe they should.

I'm on Chompsky's side when he says we're not even close to being close to AGI. We're not even on the right track.

Microsoft's solution to everything is "more compute". Word is slow. "More compute". Windows is slow. "More compute, please". This language model sucks. "More compute!"

That's not the way.

Are you guys worried about Bing Chat? Really?

OpenAI is already working behind shut doors. If LLM's become stigmatised, then everyone will start doing it the OpenAI way. Is that better?

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#646

Post by dudeinhawaii »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #413
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…

"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…

Where the pause for self-driving cars? How many people have died from that relentless push versus ChatGPT? Very convenient and at the same time silly.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#647

Post by [deleted] »

gandalfgeek wrote: post #366

This would be totalitarian. This is arguing for a group of people to have the power to decide some field is "unsafe" as per some vague, unverifiable criteria, then set up a police structure to verify compliance, all outside the safeguards of democratic or judicial norms. Precautionary principle run amok.

[deleted]

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#648

Post by flangola7 »

antihipocrat wrote: post #604
illiarian wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only prior example of world coordination at this level would be nuclear disarmament achieved via the logic of mutually assured destruction Or eradication of infectious diseases such as polio

There are only negative consequences for not participating in polio eradication, and those consequences require no effort from complying participants. Refusing to participate in a ban on AGI research could be very lucrative, and imposing negative consequences would require a lot of effort for complying participants.

It's lucrative up until someone leaves their fine tuned "make me money" LLaMA instance running over night and it decides to cash out on its airline puts by simultaneously encrypting every ATC system.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#649

Post by Teever »

goatlover wrote: post #615
Teever wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Von Neumann Probe, and the consequences are potentially discovering alien life, colonizing the universe, and exploring the frontiers of science.

Or creating a hegemonizing swarm.

Either way it's going to be one hell of a ride.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#650

Post by drdeca »

dudeinhawaii wrote: post #646
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #413

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…

Where the pause for self-driving cars? How many people have died from that relentless push versus ChatGPT? Very convenient and at the same time silly.

Do you have a story about how self-driving cars could lead to an x-risk?
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