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Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

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Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#821
post #813

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…

> Climate change mitigation, which more closely resembles AI safety in both complexity and (lack of) barriers to entry, has been sporadic, inconsistent, and only enacted to the extent... Climate change mitigation is the perfect example. Nobody is doing anything, nobody seems to care, everyone cheats with ridiculous carbon credits or carbon offset vouchers made out of thin air, etc. It's likely the planet will become…

>It's likely the planet will become hostile to (human) life long before AI will be able to do us any harm.

Sure, because the planet is already hostile. However, AI could potentially do much more harm much more quickly if we're not careful. In the pessimistic scenario we could all be dead in 10 years from now due to AI or experience a modern society ending event literally tomorrow. Climate change never posed such an immediate and complete risk

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#822
post #737

Best response to the current "AI" fad driven fear I've seen so far (not my words): These AI tools cannot do things. They create text (or images or code or what-have-you) in response to prompts. And that's it! It is impressive, and it is clearly passing the Turing Test to some degree, because people are confusing the apparent intelligence behind these outputs with a combination of actual intelligence and "will." Not o…

I mostly agree with what you said, and I'm also skeptical enough about LLMs being a path towards AGI, even if they are really impressive. But there's something to say regarding these things not getting ideas or self-starting. The way these "chat" models work reminds me of internal dialogue; they start with a prompt, but then they could proceed forever from there, without any additional prompts. Whatever the initial i…

You can totally do that with most prompts and lists of continues

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#823

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…

This is the first time I've actually seen game theory applied to an actual real life scenario rather than just a theoretical academic problem. What's the best resource to learn more game theory and to be able to applying it like you to a more general setting?

Shelling's Theory of Conflict:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1258092948/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch...

(Well-crafted hardcover and quality Kindle edition available)

Easy and amazing read, written in 1960s - it builds on the game theory, it was used as a basis for MAD and nuclear strategy in general. The author won a Nobel Prize in Economics for the ideas presented in this book.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#824
post #395

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…

>This is merely an attempt to buy time because they're behind and want to have a chance to catch up. Doesn’t Elon Musk continue to hold stake at OpenAI?

He's furious at them because they didn't make them CEO. He withdrew his funding and parted ways.

Source: https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-histor...

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#825
post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A river has no will, but it can flood and destroy. A discussion whether AI does something because it "wants" to or not, is just philosophy and semantics. But it may end up generating a series of destructive instructions anyway. We feed these LLMs all of the Web, including instructions how to write code, and how to write exploits. They could become good at writing sandbox escapes, and one day write one when it just ha…

A river kinda has access to the real world a little bit. (Referring to the other part of the argument.)

That makes me think, why not concentrate the effort on regulating the usages instead of regulating the technology itself? Seems not too far fetched to have rules and compliance on how LLM are permitted to be used in critical processes. There is no danger until it's plugged on the wrong system without oversight.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#826
post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Climate change mitigation, which more closely resembles AI safety in both complexity and (lack of) barriers to entry, has been sporadic, inconsistent, and only enacted to the extent... Climate change mitigation is the perfect example. Nobody is doing anything, nobody seems to care, everyone cheats with ridiculous carbon credits or carbon offset vouchers made out of thin air, etc. It's likely the planet will become…

>It's likely the planet will become hostile to (human) life long before AI will be able to do us any harm. Sure, because the planet is already hostile. However, AI could potentially do much more harm much more quickly if we're not careful. In the pessimistic scenario we could all be dead in 10 years from now due to AI or experience a modern society ending event literally tomorrow. Climate change never posed such an i…

Sorry, how exactly is AI supposed to do that? Unless somebody has already built Skynet and is planning to give it the nuclear codes?

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Run amusk.

I suspect Elon is pissed he wasted ~40 billion on Twitter when he could have sunk it in to OpenAI

He is indeed: https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-histor...

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#828
post #426

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…

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?

He was furious because they didn't make CEO and withdrew his funding/left: https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-histor...

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#829
post #826

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's likely the planet will become hostile to (human) life long before AI will be able to do us any harm. Sure, because the planet is already hostile. However, AI could potentially do much more harm much more quickly if we're not careful. In the pessimistic scenario we could all be dead in 10 years from now due to AI or experience a modern society ending event literally tomorrow. Climate change never posed such an i…

Sorry, how exactly is AI supposed to do that? Unless somebody has already built Skynet and is planning to give it the nuclear codes?

Perhaps there is no need to build Skynet and give it the nuclear codes if a super-intelligence iterating at the speed of a computer can escape and gain access itself?

I personally don't subcribe to the AI fear-mongering, perhaps I don't understand it quite well enough, but personal feeling is LLMs aren't close to AGI super-intelligence, and nor will they be in a 10 years time-frame.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#830
AI is not a weapon. It's ultimately a synthetic brain running inside a machine. It can be used for good, or it can be mounted on a killer drone with deadly lasers. If you use it for evil, you go to jail. It should be as simple as that.

Don't Use AI for Evil. Make that into law.

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