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Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

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Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#941

Post by slg »

staunton wrote: post #777
slg wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For a coordination game like this to succeed, the consequences to any defecting party must be extreme. And the only consequences that extreme would end up harming the cooperating parties too. For example, would anyone go to war over this? Would western nations stop trading entirely with China over this? Almost certainly not because it would harm us only slightly less than it would harm them. We have seemingly moved…

> we are in a world of mutually assured cooperation. That argument has been made many times before since WW1 to argue that war between major powers is impossible. It has never proven true yet.

How common are wars between major powers of roughly the G20 level? The Falklands War is the only one in almost 80 years by my estimation. That is a drastic and notable decrease compared to the preceding centuries.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#942

Post by worldsayshi »

dmz73 wrote: 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…

When there's intelligence adding a will should be trivial. You just tell it to do something and give it some actuator, like a web browser. Then let it run.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#943

Post by trinsic2 »

belter wrote: post #841
bambax wrote: 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…

"...The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some a…

Yep we are just a spec of dust compared to the forces at work in our lives.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#944

Post by cs702 »

In one camp, we have people at organizations like Microsoft/OpenAI, Google, Facebook, and maybe Baidu that have successfully trained large-scale AI systems with hundreds of billions to trillions of parameters. People in this camp say they are worried about societal risks, but they keep moving forward nonetheless. I wonder if it's because to them the rapid improvement in AI capabilities looks like a shiny rainbow with a big "pot of gold" (money, fame, glory, etc.) at the end.

In the other camp, we have people at other organizations, including every academic institution, who cannot or so far have not been able to train a large-scale AI system with hundreds of billions to trillions of parameters. People in this camp are the ones writing open letters about societal risks. These people sound sensible, but I wonder if they're worried because the rainbow is protected by a giant wall, and they see themselves as being outside that wall (e.g., they lack the budget or expertise).

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#946

Post by kanzure »

yyyk wrote: post #204
tambourine_man wrote: post #170

A few decades ago human cloning was irreversible, inevitable, the cat was out of the bag and you couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. Yet we managed to legislate that. We need a change of atitute towards AI, recognize its danger and legislate accordingly.

It's not remotely comparable. Few people had anything to gain from cloning; These few people had a simpler, cheaper route via IVF; Cloning requires specific technical equipment easily controlled and specific technical expertise few other people had.

Human cloning isn't that difficult. The machines are well known and understood and easy to build. Tell me this: if you were producing genetically modified embryos or human clones, would you be broadcasting this to the entire world? There's actually low incentive to be very vocal about this kind of activity, especially for the sake of the child and its privacy going forward in life.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#947

Post by ngngngng »

jakeinspace wrote: post #58
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…

I’m not sure I’m looking forward to the politics that would come out of 10-20% of the previously middle class becoming instantly redundant and out of (middle-salary) work. That’s the fast path to fascism, unless we’re able to quickly implement UBI and other major societal overhauls.

How would we keep it as low as 10-20%? 60% of employees in the US are knowledge workers. That number is similar for most wealthy nations.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#948

Post by machiaweliczny »

lannisterstark wrote: post #411
tgv wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop/slow down publications. It's what motivates researchers. They need them for tenure, and it's how the tech improves. Companies keep their methods more private.

Why stop here? Why not apply this logic to the internet too? "Oh no it's too dangerous, we cant give billions access to the internet. Better shut it down."

They are trying all the time

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#949

Post by staunton »

slg wrote: post #941
staunton wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we are in a world of mutually assured cooperation. That argument has been made many times before since WW1 to argue that war between major powers is impossible. It has never proven true yet.

How common are wars between major powers of roughly the G20 level? The Falklands War is the only one in almost 80 years by my estimation. That is a drastic and notable decrease compared to the preceding centuries.

Yes. However, people made the same argument before WW1 and were wrong. Why was the argument wrong then but is right now?

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#950

Post by machiaweliczny »

dmarchand90 wrote: post #343
zug_zug wrote: post #69

I understand that some people find this a hopeless gesture. But I think anybody who thinks "losing jobs" or "China" is a bad outcome from AI is hopelessly lost. The upside of AI if done right - nobody ever having to work again The downside of AI if done wrong - end of humanity It doesn't take a rocket scientist to determine we've made AIs go from thinking like an ant to thinking like a 6-year-old in a few years. Anyb…

Maybe not as fast as you'd think. Imagine if you dropped a human off in a time machine with a bunch of chimps... Ultra high iq people do better on average, but correlation with success drops down after 120 or so I'm also very skeptical that there will be an exponential takeoff as the energy costs are immense and increases proportionately with intelligence. So until it solves fusion power for us I'm not super worried

Correlation with success drops because you need to convince chimps that your idea is better and they don’t reason in Nth order. But given capacity to force them one could succeed. Stalin after all wasn’t that stupid neither was Hitler. We just portray them as crazy to feel better about being humans. I mean they were quite capable intellectually just optimising for weird goal (from perspective of bread eaters). Nothing has changed as one can see on Ukraine.
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