Live data from Hacker News

Statement on AI Risk

safe.ai

341–350 of 964 posts

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the risk of belief in algorithmically derived information, and deployment of autonomous, unsupervised systems. And Sam Altman, head of one of the largest entities posing this exact risk, is one of the signatories. We can't take it too seriously, can we?

I don't get this argument at all. Why does the fact that you doubt the intentions one of the signatories mean we can disregard the statement? There are plenty of signatories (including 3 turing award winners) who have no such bias.

Every human has bias, no one is infallible, no matter how many awards they have to their name.

The reason why people doubt is cui bono. And it's a perfectly rational take.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#342

What I wonder is why all these folks didn’t come out so vocally before? Say 3 years ago when companies like Alphabet and Meta already saw glimpses of the potential.

Presumably they believe that capabilities research is progressing faster than they expected and alignment research is progressing slower than they expected. Also some of them have been saying this for years, it just wasn't getting as much attention before ChatGPT.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#343
calling it now, government controllers have trouble censoring people so they want to create AI censorship as a way of bypassing the person’s speech rights, censorship by proxy, talking about things that AI is banned from saying will be a natural side effect

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#344
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's the first author of the stochastic parrots paper, and she's fairly representative of the group of "AI safety" researchers who view the field from a statistical perspective linked to social justice issues. That's distinct from the group of "AI safety" researchers who focus on the "might destroy humanity" perspective. There are other groups too obviously -- the field seems to cluster into ideological perspectives…

Current topic aside, I feel like that stochastic parrots paper aged really poorly in its criticisms of LLMs, and reading it felt like political propaganda with its exaggerated rhetoric and its anemic amount of scientific substance e.g. > Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent, any model of the world, or any model of the reader’s state of mind. It can’t have been, because the training data nev…

It's extremely easy to publish in NLP right now. 20-30% acceptance rates at even the top end conferences and plenty of tricks to increase your chances. Just because someone is first author on a highly cited paper doesn't imply that they're "right"

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#345
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what argument is there to refute? It feels like Aquinas “proving” God’s existence by stating that it is self evident. They can’t point to an existing system that poses existential risk, because it doesn’t exist. They can’t point to a clear architecture for such a system, because we don’t know how to build it. So again, what can be refuted?

What? ChatGPT 4 can already pass the bar exam and is fluent in every language. It is super intelligent. Today. No human can do that, the system is here, and so is an architecture. As for the existential risk, assume nothing other than evil humans will use it to do evil human stuff. Most technology iteratively gets better, so there's no big leaps of imagination required to imagine that we're equipping bad humans with…

Right. And it would be a complete break from the history of computing if human-level GPT doesn't get 100+ times faster in the next few years. Certainly within five years.

All it takes is for someone to give an AI that thinks 100 times faster than humans an overly broad goal. Then the only way to counteract it is with another AI with overly broad goals.

And you can't tell it to stop and wait for humans to check it's decisions, because while it is waiting for you to come back from your lunch break to try to figure out what it is asking, the competitor's AI did the equivalent of a week of work.

So then even if at some level people are "in control" of the AIs, practically speaking they are spectators.

And there is no way you will be able to prevent all people from creating fully autonomous lifelike AI with its own goals and instincts. Combine that with hyperspeed and you are truly at it's mercy.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#346
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what argument is there to refute? It feels like Aquinas “proving” God’s existence by stating that it is self evident. They can’t point to an existing system that poses existential risk, because it doesn’t exist. They can’t point to a clear architecture for such a system, because we don’t know how to build it. So again, what can be refuted?

What? ChatGPT 4 can already pass the bar exam and is fluent in every language. It is super intelligent. Today. No human can do that, the system is here, and so is an architecture. As for the existential risk, assume nothing other than evil humans will use it to do evil human stuff. Most technology iteratively gets better, so there's no big leaps of imagination required to imagine that we're equipping bad humans with…

Neither ChatGPT nor GPT-4 pose an existential risk nor are they superintelligent in the sense that Eliezer or Bostrom mean.

I say this as a "doomer" who buys the whole argument about AI X-risk.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#347
People should be actively contacting their legislatures to ensure that we don't have these regulations take hold. They are absolutely preying on peoples fear to drive regulatory capture using modern moral panic.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#348
post #25

Well AI is here. We need to live with it. Change our economic systems to a socialist approach.

AI may be here (purely depends on definition so not worth debating) but the superintelligent AGI that they are scared of clearly isn't here yet.

I get what you're saying. Its day will come. Study human history. If we can build it - we will build it.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#350
post #77

Nonsense, the industry giants are just trying to scare the law makers to license the technology. Effectively, cutting out everyone else. Remember the Google note circulating saying "they have no moat", this is their moat. They have to protect their investment, we don't want people running this willy nilly for next to no cost on their own devices, God forbid!

That moat document was published by a single software engineer, not some exec or product leader. Humans dont really grasp exponential improvements. You wont have much time to regulate something that is improving exponentially.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN