651–660 of 964 posts
Also: they focus on extinction events (how are you gonna predict that?) but remain silent on all the ways that AI already sucks by connecting it to systems that can cause human suffering, e.g. sentencing[1].
My opinion: this accomplishes nothing, like most open letter petitions. It's virtue signaling writ large.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithm...
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I'm eternally skeptical of the tech business, but I think you're jumping to conclusions, here. I'm on a first-name basis with several people near the top of this list. They are some of the smartest, savviest, most thoughtful, and most principled tech policy experts I've met. These folks default to skepticism of the tech business, champion open data, are deeply familiar with the risks of regulatory capture, and don't…
It’s worth noting also that many academics who signed the statement may face adverse issues like reputational risk as well as funding cut to their research programs if AI safety becomes an official policy. For a large number of them, these risks are worth far more than any possible gain from signing it. When a large number of smart, reputable people, including many with expert knowledge and little or negative incenti…
This reeks of marketing and a push for early regulatory capture. We already know how Sam Altman thinks AI risk should be mitigated - namely by giving OpenAI more market power. If the risk were real, these folks would be asking the US government to nationalize their companies or bring them under the same kind of control as nukes and related technologies. Instead we get some nonsense about licensing.
The question it answers is "does the replicator allow for Star Trek's utopia, or does Star Trek's utopia allow for the replicator?"
https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/13tpq18/hear...
It is very thought provoking, and very relevant.
This reeks of marketing and a push for early regulatory capture. We already know how Sam Altman thinks AI risk should be mitigated - namely by giving OpenAI more market power. If the risk were real, these folks would be asking the US government to nationalize their companies or bring them under the same kind of control as nukes and related technologies. Instead we get some nonsense about licensing.
I'm eternally skeptical of the tech business, but I think you're jumping to conclusions, here. I'm on a first-name basis with several people near the top of this list. They are some of the smartest, savviest, most thoughtful, and most principled tech policy experts I've met. These folks default to skepticism of the tech business, champion open data, are deeply familiar with the risks of regulatory capture, and don't…
Language can represent thoughts and some world models. There is strong evidence that LLMs contain some representation of world models it learned from text. Moreover, LLM is already a misnomer; latest versions are multimodal. Current versions can be used to build agents with limited autonomy. Future versions of LLMs are most likely capable of more independence.
Even dumb viruses have caused catastrophic harm. Why? It’s capable of rapid self replication in a massive number of existing vessels. You add in some intelligence, vast store of knowledge, huge bandwidth, and some aid by malicious human actors, what could such a group of future autonomous agents do?
More on risks of “doom” by a top researcher on AI risk here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xWMqsvHapP3nwdSW8/my-views-o...
This reeks of marketing and a push for early regulatory capture. We already know how Sam Altman thinks AI risk should be mitigated - namely by giving OpenAI more market power. If the risk were real, these folks would be asking the US government to nationalize their companies or bring them under the same kind of control as nukes and related technologies. Instead we get some nonsense about licensing.
I'm eternally skeptical of the tech business, but I think you're jumping to conclusions, here. I'm on a first-name basis with several people near the top of this list. They are some of the smartest, savviest, most thoughtful, and most principled tech policy experts I've met. These folks default to skepticism of the tech business, champion open data, are deeply familiar with the risks of regulatory capture, and don't…
First, there are actual worries by a good chunk of the researchers. From runaway-paperclip AGIs to simply unbounded disinformation, I think there are a lot of scenarios that disinterested researchers and engineers worry about.
Second, the captains of industry are taking note of those worries and making sure they get some regulatory moat. I think the Google memo about moat hits it right on the nail. The techniques and methods to build these systems are all out on the open, the challenges are really the data, compute, and the infrastructure to put it all together. But post training, the models are suddenly very easy to finetune and deploy.
AI Risk worry comes as an opportunity for the leaders of these companies. They can use this sentiment and the general distrust for tech to build themselves a regulatory moat.
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Having their names on something so public is definitely an incentive for prestige and academic promotion. Shilling for OpenAI & co is also not a bad way to get funding support. I’m not accusing any non-affiliated academic listed of doing this but let’s not pretend there aren’t potentially perverse incentives influencing the decisions of academics, with respects to this specific letter and in general. To help dissuade…
Could you be more specific about the conflicts you've uncovered?
I’m not uncovering anything, several of the academic signatories list affiliations with OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Stability, MILA and Vector resulting in a financial conflict.
Note that conflict does not mean shill, but in academia it should be disclosed. To allay some concerns a standard disclosure form would be helpful (i.e. do you receive funding support or have financial interest in a corporation pursuing AI commercialization).
>The succinct statement below... How does AI morph from an existential crisis in software development into a doomsday mechanism? It feels like all this noise stems from ChatGPT. And the end result is going to be a "DANGER! ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENT SOFTWARE IN USE" sticker on my next iPhone.
Please make that sticker, I will buy it.
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The risks are real, but I don't think regulations will mitigate them. It's almost impossible to regulate something you can develop in a basement anywhere in the world. The real risks are being used to try to built a regulatory moat, for a young industry who famously has no moat.
State of the art AI models are definitely not something you can develop in a basement. You need a huge amount of GPUs running continuously for months, huge amounts of electrical power, and expensive-to-create proprietary datasets. Not to mention large team of highly-in-demand experts with very expensive salaries. Many ways to regulate that. For instance, require tracking of GPUs and that they must connect to centrali…
This is changing very rapidly. You don’t need that anymore
https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1661417003951718430?s=46
There’s an inverse Moore’s law going on with compute power requirements for AI models
The required compute power is decreasing exponentially
Soon (months, maybe a year), people will be training models on their gamer-level GPUs at home, maybe even on their computer CPUs
Plus all the open and publicly available models both on HuggingFace and on GitHub
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>except ourselves. Good argument, lets ignore the (human) elephant in the room! >worrying about deadly quantum laser weapons If humans were shooting smaller less deadly quantum lasers out of their eyes I'd be very fucking worried that we'd make a much more powerful artificial version. Tell me why do you think humans are the pinnacle of intelligence? What was the evolutionary requirement that somehow pushed us to this…
AI also has a power budget. It has to fit in a datacenter. Inconveniently for AI, that power budget is controlled by us.
If that is somehow the only barrier between humanity and annihilation, then things don't bode well for us.
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The risks are definitely real. Just look at the number of smart individuals speaking out about this. The argument that anybody can build this in their basement is not accurate at the moment - you need a large cluster of GPUs to be able to come close to state of the art LLMs (e.g. GPT4). Sam Altman's suggestion of having an IAEA [ https://www.iaea.org/ ] like global regulatory authority seems like the best course of a…
"There should be a world government that decides what software you're allowed to run"