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Statement on AI Risk

safe.ai

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Re: Statement on AI Risk

#701

Post by arisAlexis »

revelio wrote: post #585
arisAlexis wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All academics and researchers from different parts of the world reek marketing? Conspiracy theorists are strong

Academic research involves large components of marketing. That's why they grumble so much about the time required in the grant applications process and other fund seeking effort. It's why they so frequently write books, appear in newspaper articles and on TV. It's why universities have press relations teams.

Again since these are almost the top cream of all ai researchers there is a global conspiracy to scare the public right?

Has it occurred to you what happens if you are wrong, like 10% chance you are wrong? Well it's written in the declaration.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#702

Post by shrimpx »

kypro wrote: post #380
shafyy wrote: post #32

The issue I take with these kind of "AI safety" organizations is that they focus on the wrong aspects of AI safety. Specifically, they run this narrative that AI will make us humans go extinct. This is not a real risk today. Real risks are more in the category of systemic racism and sexism, deep fakes, over reliance on AI etc. But of course, "AI will humans extinct" is much sexier and collects clicks. Therefore, the…

You hear similar arguments from those who believe climate change is happening but disagree with current efforts to counter-act it. The logic being that right now climate change is not causing any major harm and that we can't really predict the future so there's no point in worrying about what might happen in a decade or two. I don't think anyone is arguing that right now climate change or AI is threat to human civili…

> slightly more advanced LLM

I don't think there is a path, that we know if, from GPT4 to a LLM that could take it upon itself to execute complex plans, etc. Current LLM tech 'fizzles out' exponentially in the size of the prompt, and I don't think we have a way out of that. We could speculate though...

Basically AI risk proponents make a bunch of assumptions about how powerful next-level AI could be, but in reality we have no clue what this next-level AI is.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#703

Post by Darkphibre »

NumberWangMan wrote: post #503
valine wrote: post #17

I have yet to see a solution for “AI safety” that doesn’t involve ceding control of our most powerful models to a small handful of corporations. It’s hard to take these safety concerns seriously when the organizations blowing the whistle are simultaneously positioning themselves to capture the majority of the value.

Ok, so if we take AI safety / AI existential risk as real and important, there are two possibilities: 1) The only way to be safe is to cede control to the most powerful models to a small group (highly regulated corporations or governments) that can be careful. 2) There is a way to make AI safe without doing this. If 1 is true, then... sorry, I know it's not a very palatable solution, and may suck, but if that's all w…

I just don't see how the genie is put back in the bottle. Optimizations and new techniques are coming in at a breakneck pace, allowing for models that can run on consumer hardware.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#704

Post by haldujai »

chefandy wrote: post #698
haldujai wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s unequivocal that academics may have conflicts (in general), that’s why disclosures are required for publications. 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…

I'm not really interested in doing a research project on the signatories to investigate your claim, and talking about things like this without specifics seems dubiously useful, so I don't really think there's anything more to discuss.

Huh, you don’t have to do any research.

Go to: https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk#signatories and uncheck notable figures.

Several of the names at the top list a corporate affiliation.

If you want me to pick specific ones with obvious conflicts (chosen at a glance): Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, Ian Goodfellow, Shane Legg, Samuel Bowman and Roger Grosse are representative examples based on self-disclosed affiliations (no research required).

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#705

Post by ericb »

jumelles wrote: post #691
ericb wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If super means "surpassing normal human intelligence" then, YES. Take a look at the table in this article. If a human did that, was fluent in every language and coded in every language, we'd say they were superhuman, no? https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf

No. It’s not reasoning in any way. It’s an impressive parrot.

What is it parroting here? I made the puzzle up myself.

https://chat.openai.com/share/a2557743-80bd-4206-b779-6b06f7...

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#706

Post by toth »

nico wrote: post #658
toth wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 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 (m…

Roll to disbelief. That tweet is precisely about what I mentioned in my previous post that doesn't count: finetuning LAMA derived models. You are not going to contribute to the cutting edge of ML research doing something like that.

For training LAMA itself, Meta I believe said it cost them $5 million. That is actually not that much, but I believe that is just the cost of running the cluster for the the duration of the training run. I.e, doesn't include cost of cluster itself, salaries, data, etc.

Almost by definition, the research frontier work will always require big clusters. Even if in a few years you can train a GPT4 analogue in your basement, by that time OpenAI will be using their latest cluster to train 100 trillion model parameters.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#707

Post by adamsmith143 »

AlanYx wrote: post #256
ChatGTP wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were to take a look at the list of signatories on safe.ai, that's basically everyone who is everyone that works on building AI, what could Emily B Bender a professor of computer linguistics possibly add to the conversation and how would she be able to talk more about the "real AI safety" than any of those people? Edit: Sorry if it sounds arrogant, I don't mean Emily wouldn't have anything to add, but not sure…

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…

>She's the first author of the stochastic parrots paper,

That alone is enough to disqualify any of her opinions on AI.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#708

Post by adamsmith143 »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #289
shafyy wrote: post #32

The issue I take with these kind of "AI safety" organizations is that they focus on the wrong aspects of AI safety. Specifically, they run this narrative that AI will make us humans go extinct. This is not a real risk today. Real risks are more in the category of systemic racism and sexism, deep fakes, over reliance on AI etc. But of course, "AI will humans extinct" is much sexier and collects clicks. Therefore, the…

> This is not a real risk today. Yes, clearly. But it is a risk for tomorrow. We do still care about the future, right?

No man, the future of trillions of humans is obviously much less important than 1 person getting insulted on the internet.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#709

Post by [deleted] »

yadaeno wrote: post #674
hayst4ck wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seth McFarland wrote a pretty great piece on Star Trek replicators and their relationship to the structure of society. 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.

Ive never seen Star Trek, but lets say you had an infinite food machine. The machine would have limited throughput, and it would require resources to distribute the food. These are both problems that capitalism solves in a fair and efficient way. I really don’t see how the “capitalism bad” is a satisfying conclusion to draw. The fact that we would use capitalism to distribute the resources is not an indictment of our…

[deleted]

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#710

Post by toth »

shrimpx wrote: post #680
toth wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are wrong. The risks are real and, while I am sure OpenAI and others will position themselves to take advantage of regulations that emerge, I believe that the CEOs are doing this at least in part because they believe this. If this was all about regulatory capture and marketing, why would Hinton, Bengio and all the other academics have signed the letter as well? Their only motivation is concern about the r…

> academics Academics get paid (and compete hardcore) for creating status and prominence for themselves and their affiliations. Suddenly 'signatory on XYZ open letter' is an attention source and status symbol. Not saying this is absolutely the case, but academics putting their name on something surrounded by hype isn't the ethical check you make it out to be.

This a letter anyone can sign. As someone pointed out Grimes is one of the signatories. You can sign it yourself.

Hinton, Bengio, Norvig and Russell are most definitely not getting prestige from signing it. The letter itself is getting prestige from them having signed it.

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