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Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

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Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#211

Post by sublimefire »

Sparkyte wrote: post #102

Ehhh, doomsday is any sizable economic force of nature wielding against the betterment of mankind and forcing socio-political agendas for profit over everyone. From corporations to countries that you might as well just call corporations. We need international rights and regulations on AI to ensure it isn't used to harm people.

We do have laws that punish the ones doing harm already. Not to mention data protection and privacy related regulation. Why would you need to control me, a one man company, who is trying to sell the use of the small-tuned models?

> to ensure it isn't used to harm people

You can harm people with many things like bottles, forks, plastic bags, pillows, but it does not mean the manufacturer needs to be controlled. The harm is done by the company or a person, and the usual way is to prove it in the courts first and take it from there.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#212

Post by tome »

Palmik wrote: post #79
chrismarlow9 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need cutting edge models if you can solve your problems with less?

The gap between the value added by GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 to my every day tasks is immense. Most people, outside of these circles, don't realize that such a large gap exists.

Could I ask what exactly you get from 4 that you don't get from 3.5?

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#213

Post by concordDance »

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #35

The way incumbents are attempting to seize power via regulatory capture, using "X-Risk" and fantastical claims of sudden human extinction is maybe one of the most cynical ploys in the history of tech so far. Open source is one of our greatest gifts, and the push to close off AI with farcical licensing and reporting requirements (which will undoubtedly become more strict) is absurd. The laws we have already cover male…

> The way incumbents are attempting to seize power via regulatory capture, using "X-Risk" and fantastical claims of sudden human extinction is maybe one of the most cynical ploys in the history of tech so far.

How sure are you that they don't think the risk is real? I have only third hand accounts, but at least some of the low level people working for OpenAI seemed to think the risk is worth taking seriously, its not just a cynical CEO ploy.

Sam Altman knows and has talked to Yudkowsky plenty of times. To me the simplest explanation is that he thinks figuring out alignment via low powered models is the best way of solving the problem, so pushed to get those working and then trying to reduce the rate of progress for a bit while they figure it out.

(I think it's a plan that doesn't have good odds, but nothing seems to give amazing odds atm)

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#214

Post by visarga »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #206
upupupandaway wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If good cocaine was only produced in one country with extremely costly machines, a good-enough alternative would appear almost immediately. This has happened millions of times in the history of humanity, I refuse to believe that people haven't learned this lesson.

And yet, it doesn't seem to be that easy with chips.

Yet China and Russia are still getting their chips, by smuggling if need be. So much for the power of blocking access.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#216

Post by YetAnotherNick »

maeil wrote: post #156
topspin wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Stop" is not regulatory capture. "Stop" is a fiction that exists exclusively inside your head. Unless your solution anticipates a planet wide GULAG system run by a global government your "stop" is infeasible.

If tomorrow TSMC, NVIDIA and ASML get destroyed in the next 9/11, it's "stopped". It's completely possible.

I think current hardware already produced till now is either enough to get us to AGI, or it is very far away. I don't believe AGI is 30 years away. It is either very near or more than 1000s of years away.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#217

Post by visarga »

concordDance wrote: post #203
3rd3 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when are military spooks and political opportunists better at deciding on our technological future than startups and corporations? The degree of global policing and surveillance necessary to fully prevent secret labs from working on AI would be mind-boggling . How would you ensure all government actors are sticking to the same safety standards rather than seizing power by implementing AI hastily? This problem h…

> The degree of global policing and surveillance necessary to fully prevent secret labs from working on AI would be mind-boggling. It's not that bad given the compute requirements for training even the basic LLMs we have today. But yes, it's a long shot.

Training a SOTA model is expensive, but you only need to do it once, and fine-tune a thousand times for various purposes.

And it's not even that expensive when compared to the cost of building other large scale projects. How much is a dam, or a subway station? There are also corporations who would profit from making models widely available, such as chip makers, they would commoditise the complement.

Once you have your very capable, open sourced model, that runs on phones and laptops locally, then fine-tuning is almost free.

This is not make belief. A few recent fine-tunes of Mistral-7B for example are excellent quality, and run surprisingly fast on a 5 year old GPU - 40T/s. I foresee a new era of grassroots empowerment and privacy.

In a few years we will have more powerful phones and laptops, with specialised LLM chips, better pre-trained models and better fine-tuning datasets distilled from SOTA models of the day. We might have good enough AI on our terms.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#218

Post by calgoo »

jstanley wrote: post #202
scarmig wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, it seems the only way to stop someone from building an omnipotent AI that could destroy the world is to build an omnipotent AI under your control faster than any of the people you need to destroy. If you believe in that sort of thing.

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with AI is a good guy with AI.

AI's for everyone!!!! It's actually a scare but possible future. Everyone has to carry personal security AI that you rent from some Corpo, and if you don't you will be endlessly hacked and harassed in IRL just like we are online these days.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#219

Post by aa1234556 »

duckmysick wrote: post #201
timmytokyo wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His solution -- assuming it's the same as the one proposed by Yudkowsky, who he quotes -- is launching air strikes against data centers hosting AI computation. So yeah, imaginary.

I wonder what would happen if the AI computation is co-hosted in data centers with civilian data.

[dead]

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#220

Post by GaggiX »

peterth3 wrote: post #119

Can we stop labeling prominent AI researchers as “AI Godfather”? It’s so silly and barely truthful. The concept of AI has been around since Turing and if anyone deserves a title like “Father of AI” it’s him. LeCun is Chief AI Scientist at Meta. They can just leave it at that.

LeCun is the main author of the paper "Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten Zip Code Recognition" 1989, the earliest real-world application of a neural net trained end-to-end with backpropagation. "AI godfather" is fair enough.
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