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Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

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Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#61

Post by famouswaffles »

edgyquant wrote: post #55
chpatrick wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When OpenAI started I don't think anyone would have thought that AI this powerful was around the corner.

This is just more openAI marketing at work. ChatGPT is a chatbot, and it’s good at language for sure, but it isn’t some huge breakthrough that people were expecting would take a century. Its literally just a fancy RNN which we’ve had for awhile

No offense but this comment just shows a lack of understanding of the development that's happened with transformers.

"Fancy RNN" is a pretty ridiculous assertion.

And no, researchers didn't expect what GPT-3/4 has been shown to do to be around the corner at all.

GPT's aren't chatbots. That's just a neat natural consequence that's happened. They're machines that reason, understand and follow instructions in plain language. And their abilities go far beyond what any expected language modelling to provide.

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#62

Post by JohnFen »

kyledrake wrote: post #59
joe_the_user wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "it hasn't killed people yet" is a very good criteria. There are a lot of plausible dangers that existing and imaginable large-machine-learning could involve. I can't see how one could do the regulating of AI but I don't think one can limit the worry-area to "clear and obvious" situations.

> plausible dangers Name three. There are 50,000 gun related deaths in the United States per year, are any of them a bigger threat than gun violence? I struggle to find a single thing AI can do, sans being hooked up to nuclear weapons and time travelling robots with german accents, that's even imaginatively more dangerous than what this country already allows and decides doesn't require useful regulations. I'm sorry…

So, because we haven't been able to resolve a highly political and divisive issue (gun deaths), that means we shouldn't try to resolve other dangerous issues?

> I struggle to find a single thing AI can do

How about job loss? If AI can do what proponents say, then it's easy to see that a large amount of job loss will result. If even 20% of people can no longer earn a living, people will die.

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#63

Post by NumberWangMan »

JohnFen wrote: post #49
bostonsre wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it also possible that Sam is being genuine about his concerns and his statements because he wants what is best for humanity?

It's certainly possible. I can't read minds. But his statements on these issues sound more to me like "Yes, this is really dangerous stuff and we're taking a huge risk in developing it, but too bad! You can't stop us."

His point of view, that he's stated on the Lex Friedman podcast, is that AGI is potentially dangerous and inevitable, but safer to develop as soon as possible and try to make it safe by studying real-world models empirically, rather than waiting until computing power is much greater and risking a "fast takeoff".

I don't know that I agree with this strategy, but I can respect that it's a consistent viewpoint.

So what I hear from him is "Yes, this is dangerous stuff, and we're trying our hardest to make it safe, but we can't control everyone, so we need regulation ASAP because market forces are going to push everyone to race and release unsafe AIs".

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#64

Post by fragsworth »

kyledrake wrote: post #59
joe_the_user wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "it hasn't killed people yet" is a very good criteria. There are a lot of plausible dangers that existing and imaginable large-machine-learning could involve. I can't see how one could do the regulating of AI but I don't think one can limit the worry-area to "clear and obvious" situations.

> plausible dangers Name three. There are 50,000 gun related deaths in the United States per year, are any of them a bigger threat than gun violence? I struggle to find a single thing AI can do, sans being hooked up to nuclear weapons and time travelling robots with german accents, that's even imaginatively more dangerous than what this country already allows and decides doesn't require useful regulations. I'm sorry…

I won't name three but the one everyone's really afraid of is the theoretical fast/hard "take-off" runaway problem. It is plausible that a smart enough AI given any instruction, without guardrails, will ultimately destroy the world in its attempt to do that thing. See the wiki on Instrumental Convergence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence and in particular, read about the "paperclip maximizer". Paperclips are just an example.

It remains to be seen if this is ultimately a real problem. If it turns out that it is, then not regulating the development of these systems in advance may be a huge mistake.

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#66

Post by otterley »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #53
bostonsre wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article makes assertions about Sam's intentions being negative without acknowledging the possibility that he actually meant what he said and wants regulation because he thinks it is best for humanity. I don't understand all of the one sided hate for his statements. Say he did actually want to do what was best for humanity, how should he have acted differently in that meeting with congress? It seems entirely plaus…

He might be convinced of his own discourse, but this is strangely aligned with the interests of his own company. We should remember how "open" OpenAI really is. The funny business started at this point.

> He might be convinced of his own discourse, but this is strangely aligned with the interests of his own company.

To be fair, that's not uncommon - people often choose to work for or lead companies whose values they are aligned with personally.

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#67

Post by NumberWangMan »

greyman wrote: post #54

I see two possible motivations: 1) he is truly scared AI can become dangerous and try to distribute the responsibility to more people 2) he anticipates that there will be some regulation anyway, and when that's the case, it is better to be involved and act friendly.

Here as a post on his blog from 8 years ago: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-software-revolution

"...development of an AI that could end human life may only require a few hundred people in an office building anywhere in the world, with no equipment other than laptops.

The new existential threats won’t require the resources of nations to produce."

and

"The fact that we don’t have serious efforts underway to combat threats from synthetic biology and AI development is astonishing."

So (2) could be a factor, for sure. But (1) is consistent with what seems to have been his viewpoint for a long time. It's possible he's updated his viewpoint and is faking concern about safety, but given how recent advances have seemed to make a lot of people more concerned, I don't think that's likely.

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#68

Post by elemos »

chongli wrote: post #16
stephc_int13 wrote: post #3

Sam Altman is as much the answer to regulating AI as SBF was the answer to regulating crypto.

Yeah. Walking into Congress and agreeing with every barb thrown his way is a red flag to me. OpenAI has made AI fear mongering a central plank in their marketing platform. I think their goal is to convince the government to build a regulatory moat around their business. Why? Because they see the writing on the wall. There’s no network effect here. Anyone can build AI. There are thousands of students going into grad s…

They didn’t practically, they did. There was a specific exchange between Sam and members of the hearing in which a sitting US Senator asked him if he wanted the job. Sam replied no, he likes his job, but suggested they could recommend people. The Senator appeared happy with this.

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#69

Post by mrguyorama »

JohnFen wrote: post #62
kyledrake wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> plausible dangers Name three. There are 50,000 gun related deaths in the United States per year, are any of them a bigger threat than gun violence? I struggle to find a single thing AI can do, sans being hooked up to nuclear weapons and time travelling robots with german accents, that's even imaginatively more dangerous than what this country already allows and decides doesn't require useful regulations. I'm sorry…

So, because we haven't been able to resolve a highly political and divisive issue (gun deaths), that means we shouldn't try to resolve other dangerous issues? > I struggle to find a single thing AI can do How about job loss? If AI can do what proponents say, then it's easy to see that a large amount of job loss will result. If even 20% of people can no longer earn a living, people will die.

It's also important to note here that even if you believe that all these ML models are not even close to "AI", that doesn't stop your naive boss from buying their hype and replacing you with it. There's good reason to talk about how society should handle that even if ChatGPT is all hot air.

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#70

Post by NumberWangMan »

kyledrake wrote: post #59
joe_the_user wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "it hasn't killed people yet" is a very good criteria. There are a lot of plausible dangers that existing and imaginable large-machine-learning could involve. I can't see how one could do the regulating of AI but I don't think one can limit the worry-area to "clear and obvious" situations.

> plausible dangers Name three. There are 50,000 gun related deaths in the United States per year, are any of them a bigger threat than gun violence? I struggle to find a single thing AI can do, sans being hooked up to nuclear weapons and time travelling robots with german accents, that's even imaginatively more dangerous than what this country already allows and decides doesn't require useful regulations. I'm sorry…

Existential threat is a really hard thing to grapple with. You can't wait for real-world evidence of danger to deal with it.

If there's a possibility of an asteroid coming that will wipe out life on earth, waiting until our telescopes can see it to start taking action may not give us enough time to react. We have to plan for the theoretical possibility.

Maybe we'll never be able to create artificial superintelligence. Maybe artificial superintelligence will be much easier to align than we thing. Maybe it'll be hard, but manageable, possibly because we have more time to work on the problem than we think.

All of those are possibilities, but the fact that if you ask 100 people about it, you'll get 100 different opinions, means that we have very little idea how things will go. Given that, I don't like the approach of wing it / hope for the best. If we end up stifling AI innovation unnecessarily, that may mean that our techno-utopia is delayed for a few years, but we get there in the end. On the other hand, if we under-react and things turn out really bad, we may not get another try. Scenarios where AGI kills a billion people are really bad, but scenarios where we create it and end up permanently disempowered or dead are worse.

I wonder sometimes if people are just really dissatisfied with their lives, that they react with such vitriol to the idea of AI progress being delayed. I know we have a lot of problems, but how many of them are technological vs. having poor human institutions and incentive structures? AI probably won't help much with that.

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