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Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

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Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#231
post #175
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite. Meanwhile on the rest of the internet people are gleefully promoting AI as a means of firing every single person who writes words for a living. Or draws art.

GPT is so far from threatening “every single person who writes words for a living” anyway. Unless you’re writing generic SEO filler content. Not sure who is claiming that but they don’t understand how it works if they do exist at scale. Writing has always been a low paid shrinking job well before AI. Besides a tiny group of writers at the big firms. I took a journalism course for fun at UofT in my spare time and the…

You say that... then we encounter cases like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35919753

While AI isn't going to put anyone out of a job immediately (like automation didn't), there are legitimate risks already in that regard -- in both fiction and nonfiction sites, folk are experimenting with having AI basically write stories/pieces for them -- and the results are often good enough to have potentially put someone out of the job of writing a piece in the first place.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#232
Basic Fact. In the US, we have our Constitution with our First Amendment which guarantees "freedom of speech".

Some Consequences of Freedom of Speech. As once a lawyer explained simply to me, "They are permitted to lie". They are also permitted to make mistakes, be wrong, spout nonsense, be misleading, manipulate, ....

First Level Defense. Maybe lots of people do what I do: When I see some person often be wrong, I put them in a special box where in the future I ignore them. Uh, so far that "box" has some politicians, news media people, Belle Lettre artistic authors, ...!

A little deeper, once my brother (my Ph.D. was in pure/applied math; his was in political science -- his judgment about social and political things is much better than mine!!!) explained to me that there are some common high school standards for term papers where this and that are emphasized including for all claims good, careful arguments, credible references, hopefully primary references, .... Soooooo, my brother was explaining how someone could, should protect themselves from junk results of "freedom of speech". The protection means were not really deep but just common high school stuff. In general, we should protect ourselves from junk speech. E.g., there is the old, childhood level, remark: "Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see and still will believe twice too much".

Current Application. Now we have Google, Bing, etc. Type in a query and get back a few, usually dozens, maybe hundreds of results. Are all the results always correct? Nope. Does everyone believe all the results? My guess: Nope!!

How to Use Google/Bing Results. Take the results as suggestions, possibilities, etc. There may be some links to Wikipedia -- that tends to increase credibility. If the results are about math, e.g., at the level of obscurity, depth, and difficulty of, say, the martingale convergence theorem, then I want to see a clear, correct, well-written rock solid mathematical proof. Examples of such proofs are in books by Halmos, Rudin, Neveu, Kelley, etc.

AIs. When I get results from AIs, I apply my usual defenses. Just a fast, simple application of the high school term paper defense of wanting credible references to primary sources, filters out a lot (okay, nearly everything) from anything that might be "AI".

Like Google/Bing. To me, in simple terms, current AI is no more credible than the results from Google/Bing. I can regard the AI results like I regard Google/Bing results -- "Take the results as suggestions, possibilities, etc.".

Uh, I have some reason to be skeptical about AI: I used to work in the field, at a large, world famous lab. I wrote code, gave talks at universities and businesses, published papers. But the whole time, I thought that the AI was junk with little chance of being on a path to improve. Then for one of our applications, I saw another approach, via some original math, with theorems and proofs, got some real data, wrote some code, got some good results, gave some talks, and published.

For current AI. Regard the results much like those from Google/Bing. Apply the old defenses.

Current AI a threat? To me, no more than some of the politicians in the "box" I mentioned!

Then there is another issue: Part of the math I studied was optimization. In some applications, some of the optimization math, corresponding software, and applications can be really amazing, super smart stuff. It really is math and stands on quite solid theorems and proofs. Some more of the math was stochastic processes -- again, amazing with solid theorems, proofs, and applications.

Issue: Where does AI stop and long respected math with solid theorems and proofs begin?

In particular, (1) I'm doing an Internet startup. (2) Part of the effort is some original math I derived. (3) The math has solid theorems and proofs and may deliver amazing results. (4) I've never called any of the math I've done "AI". (5) My view is that (A) quite generally, math with solid theorems and proofs is powerful technology and can deliver amazing results and that (B) the only way anything else can hope to compete is also to be able to do new math with solid theorems, proofs, and amazing results. (6) I hope Altman doesn't tell Congress that math can be amazing and powerful and should be licensed. (7) I don't want to have to apply for a "license" for the math in my startup.

For a joke, maybe Altman should just say that (C) math does not need to be licensed because with solid theorems and proofs we can trust math but (D) AI should be licensed because we can't trust it. But my view is that the results of AI have so little credibility that there is no danger needing licenses because no one would trust AI -- gee, since we don't license politicians for the statements they make, why bother with AI?

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#233

OpenAI willing to bend the knee quite deep. If they want to do licensing and filtering and do that without fundamentally bricking the model, then by all means go ahead.

This needs regulation before we end up creating another net negative piece of tech that we seem to have done in the past decade quite often.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#234
Reminds me of SBF calling for crypto regulations while running FTX. Being seen as friendly to regulations is great for optics compared to being belligerently anti-regulation. You can appear responsible and benevolent, and get more opportunity to weaken regulation by controlling more of the narrative. And hey, if you get end up getting some regulatory capture making competition harder, that's a great benefit too.

OpenAI != FTX, just meaning to say calling for regulation isn't an indication of good intentions, despite sounding like it.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#236

I think the logic at OpenAI is: * AGI is going to happen whether they do it or not, and it's dangerous unless properly safeguarded * OpenAI will try to get there before everyone else, but also do it safely and cheaply, so that their solution becomes ubiquitous rather than a reckless one * Reckless AGI development should be not be allowed It's basically the Manhattan project argument (either we build the nuke or the N…

Right, I’m surprised to see so few engaging at the level of the actual logic the proponents have.

Many people on HN seem to disagree with the premise: they believe that AI is not dangerous now and also won’t be in the future. Or, still believe that AGI is a lifetime or more away.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#237
post #211
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't get how the average HN commenter thinks (and gets upvoted) that they know better than e.g. Ilya Sutskever who actually, you know, built the system. I keep reading this "it just predicts words, duh" rhetoric on HN which is not at all believed by people like Ilya or Hinton. Could it be that HN commenters know better than these people?

The thing is, experts like Ilya Sutskever are so deep in that shit that they are heavily biased (from a tech and social/economic) perspective. Furthermore, many experts are wrong all the time. I don't think the average HN commenter claims to be better at building these system than an expert. But to criticize, especially critic on economic, social, and political levels, one doesn't need to be an expert on LLMs. And fi…

srslack above was making technical claims why LLMs can't be "generalized and adaptable intelligence". To make such statements, it surely helps if you are a technical expert at building LLMs.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#238
post #143

This is quite incredible Could you imagine if MS had convinced the govt back in the day, to require a special license to build an operating system (this blocking Linux and everything open)? It’s essentially what’s happening now, Except it is OpenAI instead of MS, and it is AI instead of Linux AI is the new Linux, they know it, and are trying desperately to stop it from happening

I bet OpenAI is using MS connections and money for lobbying, so it's basically MS again.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#239

I'm sad that we've lost the battle with calling these things AI. LLMs aren't AI, and I don't think they're even a path towards AI.

I started at this perspective, but nobody could agree on the definition of the A, or the I; and also the G. So it wasn't a really rigorous technical term to begin with.

Now that it's been corraled by sci-fi and marketers, we are free to come up with new metaphors for algorithms that reliably replace human effort. Metaphors which don't smuggle in all our ignorance about intelligence and personhood. I ended up feeling pretty happy about that.

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