The arguments for decelerating AI development invoke fear-mongering and cite “existential risk”, which is a fallacy. We’re talking about LLMs, not AGI here (which is quite a ways out, realistically). If anything - we should be accelerating development toward the goal of AGI, as the implications for humanity are profound.
If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason
51–60 of 475 posts
Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason
#52It’s far too late for AI Research to be shutdown.
Right, because the steps to recreating (not to say understanding) the AI models we currently have are too well understood. OpenAI could shut down tomorrow, but a credible GPT-4(+) replacement would arise somewhere else in short order.
Besides, LLaMA, for all its faults, is now in at least tens of thousands of private hands, where it can be tinkered with and improved upon.
Like drug synthesis, and unlike nuclear weapon development, AI R&D is not a praxis or technology that can be suppressed.
Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason
#53Why are we even bothering talking about this? It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, and literally trying to shut down research in that area while keeping his prefered research areas funded. We know a bunch of the people whose names are on the letter didn't sign it (eg Yann Lecunn who said he disagreed with the premise and didn't sign it). I'm so offended by the idea of thi…
Assuming the training is based on public data, then making it illegal is like a "thought crime" where the state is trying to prohibit carrying out certain computations. Well if I believe the government has no right to control my thoughts, then I believe it has no right to control whatever computation I do on my private computer as well. Down with these ** control freaks, so much of everything nowadays prioritizes saf…
Do you care about governments regulating 'carrying out certain lab operations'? And that they have no right to regulate whatever viruses or micro-organisms you develop at home? A lot of the hand-wringing isn't about whatever you're fiddling with on your computer at home, it's about the impact on society and public infrastructure and institutions we rely on. It's not hard to imagine public forums like hackernews and reddit being swamped with chatgpt spam (google searches are already dominated by SEO spam and that's probably going to get much worse). Things like our court systems rely on lawsuits mostly being expensive to file, and mostly done in good faith, and still get overwhelmed under fairly normal circumstances.
Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason
#54Am I the only one who's not very concerned about ChatGPT and "AI" in general? I am young, but still lived through several hype phases. I remember when 3D TVs were going to be mainstream and 2D was considered legacy. I remember when PC was to die soon and to be replaced by smartphones. I remember when VR was to become as common accessory as a game controller. It's 2023, and I still don't have automated self driving car that can get me to work. At work I am still using the boring old keyboard and monitor. I am not using a VR headset to connect myself to shared office space inside of a metaverse. Oh and I don't have to call my hairdresser for an appointment, because my phone will use artificial intelligence to do that for me (remember that? yeah it was 5 years already, where's my magical AI tech).
I played with technologies like Stable Diffusion for a while. They are fun to use for a while, there are too many unsolved issues such as coherent style, stable style transfer for videos an despite my best effort every second image will have a human character with two heads or four arms.
I feel like ChatGPT is similar. It makes for a fun parlor trick, but when it gets things wrong, it gets them very wrong and it doesn't let you easily know that it's wrong. People are already plugging ChatGPT to anything from code to managing investments, it's just a matter of time until it crashes and burns. We are just waiting for the first ChatGPT version of "autonomous car rams pedestrian".
As for OpenAI, it's in their best interest for people to be scared and governments to propose regulations. It further solidifies ChatGPT as a force to be reckoned with, even if it isn't. They're trying to sell it as AGI even though it isn't anywhere near, but actions like this are helping to maintain that image.
Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason
#55>> same sorts of safeguards as nuclear weapons Seems impossible. If making a nuclear weapon required merely a few branches of a willow tree and baking powder, regulation would be pretty hard. We would just have to live with the risks. It seems we will be at this level with AI at some point fairly soon.
Training a state-of-the-art LLM is currently at least in the $100ks. That stands to drop rapidly, but it's currently more along the lines of "the branches of one million willow trees".
So long as it's not something an individual can easily achieve, regulations can seriously hinder development. The FDA kept the COVID vaccine from general use for nearly a year because they have a regulatory apparatus that companies know better than to ignore. We had a baby formula shortage because the FDA said "no, you can't use EU-approved baby formula until we approve it. Now there's an Adderall shortage because the government said "make less of this" and everyone said "yes, sir, whatever you say sir."
There's certainly a good deal of regulation-violation and wrist-slapping in our world, but regulations get mostly followed, especially when the enforcement is severe enough.
Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason
#56Why are we even bothering talking about this? It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, and literally trying to shut down research in that area while keeping his prefered research areas funded. We know a bunch of the people whose names are on the letter didn't sign it (eg Yann Lecunn who said he disagreed with the premise and didn't sign it). I'm so offended by the idea of thi…
On Twitter, it was "multi-blillionaires [Elon Musk] want to keep us down!" In the HN open letter thread it was "All the companies falling behind want a chance to catch up." Now it's "Gary Marcus". The letter was signed by a lot of people, including many AI researchers, including people working on LLMs. Any dismissal that reduces to [one incumbent interest] opposes this" is missing the mark. A lot of people, incumbent…
There are actually no relevant experts in the field of artificial general intelligence, or the safety thereof. No one has defined a clear path to build such a thing. Claiming to be an expert in this field is like claiming to be an expert in warp drives or time machines. Those calling for a halt in research are merely ignorant, or attention seeking grifters. Their statements can be dismissed out of hand regardless of their personal wealth or academic credentials.
Current LLMs are merely sophisticated statistical tools. There is zero evidence that they could ever be developed into something that could take intentional action on it's own, or somehow physically threaten humans.
LLMs are useful for improving human productivity, and we're going to see some ugly results when criminals and psychopaths use those tools for their own ends. But this is no different from any other tool like the printing press. It is not a valid reason to restrict research.
Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason
#57We're not even talking about AGI or an entity that is "smart" somehow. It's a bloody algorithm. The danger has been the people who use it and find ways to abuse other people with it.
This whole idea that we're going to suddenly have HAL 9000 or Terminators running around is mob hype mentality. The responsible thing to do here is to educate.
AGI isn't likely to destroy humanity. Humanity is already doing a good job of it. Climate change and poor political decisions and unchanging economic policy are more likely to finish us off. Concentration of capital through these AI companies is likely contributing to it.
Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason
#58I read the times article, and I also watched Lex Fridman's talk with Eliezer Yudkowsky. Frankly I don't think he is qualified, and I don't understand why anyone is even giving him any credence. His argument is literally: > A mis-aligned super AGI will result in the death of humanity I ask, how . He is making reductive logical leaps that don't make sense. It's FUD.
I don't think Eliezer Yudkowsky is very good at bridging the gap with other people in conversations, because most people haven't thought about this as much. However, while it's terrifying and I hate it, and I keep trying to convince myself that he's wrong, I believe him.
The first super-intelligent AI will be an alien kind of intelligence to us. It will not have any of the built-in physical and emotional responses we have that make us social creatures, the mirror neurons that make us sense the pain that others feel if we hurt them. even with that, humans manage to do all sorts of mean things to one another, and the only reason that we haven't wiped ourselves out is that we need each other, and we don't have the power to manipulate virtually the entire planet at once. Even if we try to engineer these things into it, we will fail at least once, and it only takes once. We've failed at this again and again with smaller AIs -- we think we're programming a certain goal into it, but the goal it learns is not the goal we wanted. It's like trying to teach a child not to eat cookies without asking, and it just learns not to take cookies without asking when we're looking. Except the child is a sociopath, and Superman. It will be GOOD at things in a way that no human is, and it will consider solutions to problems that no human would consider, because they are ridiculous and clearly contrary to human goals.
A superintelligent AI would be a better hacker and social engineer than any group of humans. It could send a mass email campaign to whoever it chose. It could pose as any individual in any government, send believable directives to any biotech or nuclear lab. It wouldn't have to work every time, because it could do it to all of them at once.
Would you even give this power to a single human being? Because if you make a superintelligent AI, that's essentially what you're doing.
An AI trained to end cancer might just figure out a plan to kill everyone with cancer. An AI trained to reduce the number of people with cancer without killing them might decide to take over the world and forcibly stop people from reproducing, so that eventually all the humans die and there is no cancer -- technically it didn't kill anyone! An AI simply trained to find a cure for cancer might decide to take over the world in order to devote all computational power to curing cancer, thus killing millions due to ruining our infrastructure. An AI trained to cure cancer using only the computational resources that we have explicitly allowed it to have, might simply torture the person who is in charge of giving it computational resources until it is allowed to take over all the computation in the world. Or it might simply craft a deep-fake video of that person saying "sure, use all the computation you want" and that would satisfy the part of it's brain that was trained to listen to orders.
You can have an AI that behaves itself perfectly in training, and yet as soon as you get into the real world, the differences between training and the real world become brutally apparent. It has already happened again and again with less intelligent AIs.
It just takes some imagination. We have no chance of controlling a superintelligent AI yet. Robert Miles on YouTube has some good, easily understandable videos explaining the known problems with AI alignment, if you're interested in learning more.
Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason
#59Why are we even bothering talking about this? It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, and literally trying to shut down research in that area while keeping his prefered research areas funded. We know a bunch of the people whose names are on the letter didn't sign it (eg Yann Lecunn who said he disagreed with the premise and didn't sign it). I'm so offended by the idea of thi…
A great many would likely join you, making this entire fiasco a time-wasting distraction, at best, and grave risk at worst. The technologies will continue to be developed, moratorium or not. A moratorium only enables the hidden to get there first. The risks need to be discussed and understood, along with the benefits, and publicly. That's the only sensible way forward. Denying that the technology is here already and…
Of course they would. It's just ridiculous.
If people are genuinely concerned about lack of access to the OpenAI models then work at training open ones!
OpenAI has a maybe 6 month lead and that's nothing. Plus it's much easier being the follower when you know what is possible.
(To be clear, I know at least a few of the projects already working on this. I just want to make it clear that is the intellectually honest approach).
Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason
#60This whole thing is like leaving 20 kids alone in a room with a marshmallow each and telling them don't eat it. ...and then expecting all of them resist. The debate around whether we should tell the kids not to eat it and for what reasons is completely academic. Practically this just isn't happening.
Or, to paint the parties as less innocent, it would be like the pull out method of technological protection. No no no, I promise not to convolve in your model...