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After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

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Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#131

Post by bananaflag »

subharmonicon wrote: post #62
crazygringo wrote: post #52

It's so confusing because people keep (intentionally?) conflating two separate ideas of "AI safety". The first is the kind of humdrum ChatGPT safety of, don't swear, don't be sexually explicit, don't provide instructions on how to commit crimes, don't reproduce copyrighted materials, etc. Or preventing self-driving cars from harming pedestrians. This stuff is important but also pretty boring, and by all indications c…

> We're so far away from AGI Although I personally suspect this is correct, the issue seems to be that there are a lot of people who feel otherwise, whether right or wrong, including some of the people involved in the research and/or running these companies. I've seen several prominent people say things to the effect of "We just don't know if we're six months or 600 years from AGI,", which to me is a little like sayi…

Time travel is something that is thought to be most probably ruled out by future laws of physics.

Intelligence is something that we know exists in nature in a manageable form (namely humans), so it does not seem implausible that we might create it.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#132

Post by RandomLensman »

jjoonathan wrote: post #105
subharmonicon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're so far away from AGI Although I personally suspect this is correct, the issue seems to be that there are a lot of people who feel otherwise, whether right or wrong, including some of the people involved in the research and/or running these companies. I've seen several prominent people say things to the effect of "We just don't know if we're six months or 600 years from AGI,", which to me is a little like sayi…

> all signs seem to be pointing toward a longer timeframe rather than a short one If we time-traveled back to 2019 and showed past-you a demo of GPT4's capabilities and asked you to guess the timeline, would you have gotten it correct to within a decade? I wouldn't have. It's not crazy to prepare for another jump.

If you saw the Concorde fly for the first time in the late 1960s and all the plans fore more supersonic planes & travel, would you have thought that 50 years later there was none?

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#133

Post by _w1tm »

rondini wrote: post #112
invig wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same is true for anything. It's possible we could stumble into a dragon and unless we've built dragon defences it'll be too late.

And if we're hunting for dragons should we wait until we find one and bring it to the castle before we start discussing how to protect people from it?

Why does protection from AGI require something extraordinary? Secure your system and it doesn’t matter if you’re being attacked by AI or script kiddies.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#134

Post by fredgrott »

There is an interesting side argument started by Penrose....

Now this is a summation and I no way can replicate Penrose skills in essays...

Basically, we cannot have real AI due to real Intelligence being confined if you will the quantum uniqueness of cell signaling. Quantum in the form of whatever the water in cell is doing in a very specific cell structure that all cells and all neurons have.

Now at this point is just a theory and of course he does have some counter theories to this as well...in fact if you do deep reading of Penrose and his IU counter you will realize that both their arguments are not counters to each other but actual companions to very long and complicated weave of AI debate.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#135

Post by adventured »

subharmonicon wrote: post #62
crazygringo wrote: post #52

It's so confusing because people keep (intentionally?) conflating two separate ideas of "AI safety". The first is the kind of humdrum ChatGPT safety of, don't swear, don't be sexually explicit, don't provide instructions on how to commit crimes, don't reproduce copyrighted materials, etc. Or preventing self-driving cars from harming pedestrians. This stuff is important but also pretty boring, and by all indications c…

> We're so far away from AGI Although I personally suspect this is correct, the issue seems to be that there are a lot of people who feel otherwise, whether right or wrong, including some of the people involved in the research and/or running these companies. I've seen several prominent people say things to the effect of "We just don't know if we're six months or 600 years from AGI,", which to me is a little like sayi…

> the issue seems to be that there are a lot of people who feel otherwise

They're self-serving. It's virtue signaling and doom-pandering for their own attention and benefit.

It's the same reason the online ad industry loves the infamous quote about how their generation's best and brightest are wasting their time building ad systems and trying to figure out how to drive higher click rates. It's not true (the best and brightest are not working in advertising), it just makes them feel better so they are ok with the quote and propagate it.

A variation of Von Neumann's premise about confessing a sin so as to take credit for it is applicable here. The AGI-is-near camp is intentionally being dramatic, they want attention, and it's wholly self-serving. The louder they are the more attention they get, that has long since been figured out.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#136

Post by nearbuy »

insanitybit wrote: post #11
HDThoreaun wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the ai safety arguments revolve around “once it’s powerful enough to cause damage it’ll be too late to come up with a strategy”. If you accept that it doesn’t matter that ai systems now suck, since we don’t know when they’ll improve.

What damage will it cause? I feel like there's "AI will replace jobs" level of damage, which, why would we regulate that? An insane amount of technology is developed with the purpose of improving productivity or outright replacing workers. Then there's the "AI will go rogue", which I don't think is substantiated at all. Like, one can theorize about some novel, distinct system that is able to interact with the externa…

There's a lot of concern about instrumental convergence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence). It's the idea that an AI that isn't rogue or evil might still kill us. It could kill us by just doing exactly what we asked it to, even if what we asked seemed innocuous.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#137

Post by spunker540 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #37
api wrote: post #9

Of course it isn’t. It’s about regulatory capture. They’re trying to con technically unsophisticated politicians (which is almost all of them) into granting them a monopoly or erecting a bunch of onerous regulations to make competition or decentralized open source alternatives harder. Their allies in this are otherwise very smart people that have thought themselves into a panic over this stuff, as smart people someti…

I’m not sure there’s a real distinction here. If AI makes it trivial for the average person to create an effective terrorist movement, or floods us with so much propaganda that most information you see is false, I would characterize that as doom. Neither seems very compatible with the orderly functioning of society.

I actually heard the opposite, that AI will make it trivial to defeat a terrorist movement, and trivial to filter out dangerous untrue propaganda. I would characterize that as utopia, and highly compatible with the orderly functioning of society.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#138

Post by jackbrookes »

Aloha wrote: post #42
golol wrote: post #15

Look, there is ASI/AGI safety, and "please don't swear and scam and misinform, and be unbiased" safety. ASI/AGI safety is only a concern right now if you believe in foom , i.e. that an AGI would rapidly self improve to an ASI and extinction level threat. I think it is absurd to believe that because AI right now is compute limited and any first AGI will only be able to run on large data centers. The latter kind of saf…

We should in general terms not give AI - any AI, the ability to manifest itself in meat space. This alone almost certainly reduces the existential risks from AI.

How can you stop that? An intelligent AI will send emails, create companies, hire people, and literally anything else you can do digitally in order to create means by which it can manifest itself into meatspace.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#139

Post by catgary »

SuperLynxDeluxe wrote: post #128
jjoonathan wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all signs seem to be pointing toward a longer timeframe rather than a short one If we time-traveled back to 2019 and showed past-you a demo of GPT4's capabilities and asked you to guess the timeline, would you have gotten it correct to within a decade? I wouldn't have. It's not crazy to prepare for another jump.

That really depends on who you asked. Transformers existed in 2019, and while GPT4 is genuinely advanced, it's not a gigantic leap. Deep learning is to neural networks what GPT4 is to transformers. It's a lot bigger, enabled by better hardware and more data, but fundamentally not a new technology. There needs to be a lot more leaps for AGI, language models are not the holy grail, but another tool like reinforcement l…

We really have replaced “oh no, you put too much knowledge into a LISP program and it’s sentient!” with “oh no, you’ve stacked too many transformers and now it’s sentient!”

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#140

Post by callalex »

_yb2s wrote: post #70
crazygringo wrote: post #52

It's so confusing because people keep (intentionally?) conflating two separate ideas of "AI safety". The first is the kind of humdrum ChatGPT safety of, don't swear, don't be sexually explicit, don't provide instructions on how to commit crimes, don't reproduce copyrighted materials, etc. Or preventing self-driving cars from harming pedestrians. This stuff is important but also pretty boring, and by all indications c…

Why are you so sure we are that far from AGI? Looking at current capabilities, and rate of improvement I would be surprised if it is more than a few years off.

People told me the same thing about self driving cars 10 years ago.
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