White House Secures Commitments from Leading AI Companies to Manage AI Risks

Looks like the companies all agreed to do what they were doing already. Nothing about training data transparency , nothing about a common definition of risk or standards for compliance.

The public have all heard “AI is going to destroy humanity” but those statements have been short on specifics.

I have been asked by many people to explain how AI could kill us all. How about some clarity for common people.

People always say "AGI" and they mean different things but I am guessing most now mean something like a digital living human/simulation of human when they say that. Mixed in with some blurry connotation of it automatically becoming godlike in power.

That stuff is very speculative. But we don't need AI to get to that level for it to be very dangerous. Just imagine that we have an open source GPT that is something like 33% smarter than GPT-4 and less brittle. Make the output 50 times faster than human thought and suppose that we can run it very inexpensively, in a "swarm" of agents cooperating.

Then you have a type of superintelligence that does not require any really speculative AI advance -- hyperspeed reasoning -- based on the current technology.

If that is widely deployed for military and industrial decision-making then something like a computer virus could create existential risk.

Also, realize that all these systems really need to emulate some of the core functional aspects of animals, like a self-preservation instinct or desire to control resources, is the right instruction and relaxation of guardrails. So when they can reason a bit better and at hyperspeed with collaboration between them, they don't need to be alive or anything to be dangerous.

Look at the history of increases in computing efficiency. It is easy to imagine 50 or whatever times output speed increase in less than 5 years. And even though they are not human level now, GPT-4 has proven that these types of systems can have strong problem solving ability.

One more thing to add is that as the AI performance increases and surpasses human decision-making ability, the hyperspeed will push competiting companies and countries to give them broader and broader goals and more autonomy. Because waiting overnight for human input means your competitor's AIs race ahead the equivalent of weeks.

I think we need to set a limit for the performance of new hardware at some point. Also we need people to understand the dangers of full autonomy and imitating animals in the context of hyperspeed or superintelligent AI. We will need criminal penalties and maybe some type of cooperative digital immune system.

I feel like this is one of those things that belongs in those news clips you see at the beginning of a dystopian or post-apocalyptic sci-fi film. It's just vague PR that won't actually do anything of substance.

I mean if you wire the output of GPT-x to a nuclear reactor it can cause all kinds of danger.

The thing that keeps us safe from computers is generally we don't let them have access to anything dangerous and when we do theres typically an evaluation of what can go wrong and how we'll prevent the computer from doing that (often in the other direction, we only program the computer to do X in Y situations). But sometimes that fails and you get the unexpected rapid acceleration of cars.

if you think about it, its actual insanity. The fears are all from science fiction with absolutely no grounding in reality. There are legitimate concerns about the unethical mass harvesting of data but if you think about "AI safety" vs something like vehicular safety or spacecraft safety its kind of nuts, because the latter are grounded in reality and have formal specifications which need to be met. But AI safety is so wishy-washy.

Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Motor_Vehicle_Safety_S...

You'd think if people are so scared about AI being apocalyptic it would have some strict regulation similar to vehicle standards but its not even close, nor is it in the conversation at all. Its just pure fear from science fiction and the govt putting out performative press releases. What the fuck even is "AI" anyway? it means different things to different people. It could mean a self checkout at a supermarket, or a bank's AML, or some super intelligence. there are basically no standard definitions of anything to do with "AI" anywhere and every single piece of regulation is equally as vague. Companies like having it be a vague term because its marketing so the actual experts don't care about changing it