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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

#171
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just view the current gpt llm as a better search engine. It’s not self learning. It’s stateless when queried - so really the concern is we can create content on demand and create responses that intuitively make the llm very useful tool. Until it’s self learning I’m only concerned with how humans would use it just like any other tool in the hands of humans it can be both super useful and super destructive.

If they figure out how to give an LLM infinite/really long context length, it will basically become self-learning.

Which is more likely to happen first, "an LLM (with) infinite/really long context length," or an LLM-like system which can integrate new training data in real-time?

Am I even asking this question correctly?

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

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago we thought we were so far away from AI creating art or having a reasonable conversation.

Not really true: when people first engaged with ELIZA some thought they had a meaningful interaction then.

Except we quickly learnt it wasn't really anywhere near beating the Turing test, and for 60 years we thought it that was almost impossible to do so. Then just under a year ago ChatGPT changed everything.

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

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concorde was a case of optimizing for the wrong thing. Concorde optimized for speed but what people actually care about is cost, i.e. fuel efficiency and range. Both of those have come on leaps and bounds. The longest commercial flight has been consistently increasing.

The US poured a lot of money into the SST, too, it wasn't just the French and the British. A lot of people thought that the future is supersonic as people did want the speed increase when moving to jet planes. Conversely, maybe AGI is not what is wanted in the end anyway.

> Conversely, maybe AGI is not what is wanted in the end anyway.

I dont think it is, if it is trully intelligent, it will probably have rights, so you cant treat it as a slave. And it will likely not be controllable.

Both of these mean it will not be commercially progotable, any more than having children is profitable.

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

#174

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

Are… are we? I think a valuable metric for the development of radical technology is the rate at which the complexity of discourse increases.

In the ‘00s, it was just called AI. Now it’s the ‘20s, and it’s the discussion between AI/AGK/AGI/ASI. Furthermore, there is far more investment in AI research these days.

The conclusion? Things that are far away look like step functions: they exist or they don’t. As you approach them, the detailed specifics & complexity come into view, and you realize that, in truth, the transitions are gradients. AGI is just whenever people are astounded enough.

In conclusion AGI is not so far away. AGI is arriving on the order of decades.

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

#175

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…

> The second kind is preventing AGI from enslaving/killing humanity or whatever.

Y'all are crazy for thinking this. A computer program without arms or legs cannot extinct or enslave the human race.

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

#176
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Killbots are trivial and probably don't even need AGI.

sure, a landmine is a killbot. a control system with any kind of weapon can kill people but intelligence is much more important than weapons. you can make sure they don't get away or turn the weapons against you if you can outsmart them. also you can kill the people you intend to kill, instead of somebody else, which is fundamental if you have objectives other than racking up a high body count. finally, intelligence…

No, a killbot is a way to kill parties while trying to reduce the number of 'false positives', aka collateral damage. But because a killbot does that the result then is that you get far more deployment and eventually the collateral damage in total rises because the weapon is seen as effective. That's why killbots are bad.

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really true: when people first engaged with ELIZA some thought they had a meaningful interaction then.

Except we quickly learnt it wasn't really anywhere near beating the Turing test, and for 60 years we thought it that was almost impossible to do so. Then just under a year ago ChatGPT changed everything.

So what? Humans again being bamboozled by some machine? That has happened in various forms for hundreds of years. (Setting aside that often the adversarial nature of the test as proposed by Turing got ignored.)

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concorde was a case of optimizing for the wrong thing. Concorde optimized for speed but what people actually care about is cost, i.e. fuel efficiency and range. Both of those have come on leaps and bounds. The longest commercial flight has been consistently increasing.

The US poured a lot of money into the SST, too, it wasn't just the French and the British. A lot of people thought that the future is supersonic as people did want the speed increase when moving to jet planes. Conversely, maybe AGI is not what is wanted in the end anyway.

Whether or not people want AGI, corporations definitely want it, as long as the cost of an AGI worker is less than the cost of a human worker. So perhaps we should prepend a C for “cheap” to the term AGI.

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

#179

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…

I'm pretty sure we're far away from real AGI too, but the issue that worries me most is if these models advance along current trends suggest, in a few years we could be facing a situation where large swathes of the population are suddenly redundant, and labor loses all ability to stand up to capital. That's a kind of political situation that could easily escalate into a total collapse of society into a totalitarian nightmare.

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

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they figure out how to give an LLM infinite/really long context length, it will basically become self-learning.

Which is more likely to happen first, "an LLM (with) infinite/really long context length," or an LLM-like system which can integrate new training data in real-time? Am I even asking this question correctly?

LLMs can integrate new information but they only remember what you told them up to the context length. If they could remember longer then you would have agents with a lot of new knowledge.
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