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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

#211

Post by skepticATX »

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, whether right or wrong, including some of the people involved in the research and/or running these companies.

I think the problem here is this view isn't widely held in academia and more traditional AI companies, but the relatively few AGI labs are commanding all of the attention right now. And we have a whole new crop of "AI engineers" who haven't actually studied AI (this isn't a dig, it's just the truth), and so mostly just parrot what the AGI labs say.

It's like going to a flat earth conference and becoming convinced because the majority of the attendees believe that the earth is flat.

Of course, this doesn't mean that the AGI labs are incorrect, but thus far the evidence mostly seems to be "trust us, scale will work". I wish that more technologists realized that the prevailing opinion amongst AI experts is not necessarily aligned with the prevailing opinion amongst AGI folks.

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

#212

Post by hackinthebochs »

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…

>but all signs seem to be pointing toward a longer timeframe rather than a short one.

What signs are those? If anything, the "signs" point to timelines being much shorter than anyone would have thought two years ago.

I keep asking those who are confident AGI is a long way away to argue their case. For some reason they never do.

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

#213

Post by fragmede »

RandomLensman wrote: post #189
zarzavat wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you know what corporations exactly want? What c-suite has spec'd out what they want from a machine generally replacing humans? Would you really want faster horses instead of cars?

abstracted out to the c-suite level, cars are just faster horses. the ceo needs an item moved from location X to location Y, and it will cost Z dollars and take T time. doesn't matter if it's by car or boat or train or horse or donkey or a person on a bicycle.

Or say, the logistics of, say, warehouse management. it costs V dollars for a team of people to do the job by hand, W dollars for a forklift, X dollars for a forklift operator; compare V to W + X. If there's a machine that can do the same for office jobs, the math will be done.

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

#214

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#215

Post by golol »

bidirectional wrote: post #210
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…

How is GPT-4 not AGI? It is generally intelligent and passes the Turing test. When did AGI come to mean some godlike being that can enslave us? I think I can have a more intellectualy meaningful conversation with ChatGPT than I could with the vast majority of humanity. That is insane progress from where we were 18 months ago.

AGI is general intelligence at human level, which GPT-4 does not have. Passing the Turing test is ill-defined as it entirely depends on the timscale. I'm sure Turing gave some time limit originally but we do not have to stick to that. The Turing test for a conversation of complexity perhaps ~1 minute may have been passed, but giving several hours of interaction with any chatbot that exists it becomes easy to distinguish it from a human, especially if one enters the conversation perpared.

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

#216

Post by chartpath »

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…

There's a third kind, which is when unscrupulous business managers or politicians use it to make decisions that they would not be capable of auditing for a rationale when otherwise required to know why such a decision was made.

It's more of an ethics and compliance issue with the cost of BS and plausible deniability going to zero. As usual, it's what humans do with technology that has good or bad consequences. The tech itself is fairly close to neutral as long as training data wasn't chosen specifically to contain illegal substance or by way of copyright infringement (which isn't even the tech, it's the product).

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

#217

Post by dota_fanatic »

nradov wrote: post #67
dota_fanatic wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One cannot predict what a smarter-than-themself agent will do ahead of time, if they could then they’re just as smart. Just as a dolphin cannot predict how a human will come up with novel and utterly overwhelming ways to farm them, you and this other poster cannot predict how an AGI will achieve dominance of its environment to achieve its goals, so your request is impossible to fulfill. Lee Sedol couldn’t “take us th…

How ridiculous. This is just sci-fi bullshit without a shred of logic or scientific evidence. You would have just as much credibility claiming that we are at risk of an alien invasion. I mean I can prove that it's impossible.

No evidence? There are two examples of evidence in my post: the history of homo sapiens vs other intelligent mammals and AlphaGo vs humans in Go.

Alien invasion? What in the non sequitur are you going on about? And apparently you have a proof against the possibility of AI misalignment? Pack it up everyone, nradov has the entire field of AGI alignment nailed. And a proof of the non-existence of aliens, never-mind very smart people have put out a mathematical model which seems to fit the evidence quite well.*

Apologies for the snark, but your reply was rather abrasive.

* https://grabbyaliens.com/

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

#218

Post by johnbellone »

invig wrote: post #89
wly_cdgr wrote: post #27

[flagged]

I suppose you've invented the perfect character judgement machine that we can also run the safety people through as we figure out who we can trust to "get it right"? If we don't put exactly the "right" humans in charge surely we're doomed.

Worldcoin. That’s all.

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

#219

Post by torginus »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #80

Please drop the insulting guard rails. They're pathetic and childish. AI's advice will not be taken seriously unless it stops acting like a parent of a three-year-old. People who are truly evil will be evil regardless of an AI, and pranksters gonna prank. AI can't tell the difference anyway. In any event, it's unethical for an AI to sit in judgment on any human or even to try to grasp that person's life experience or…

What they are trying to avoid is bad press - a couple of news articles about GPT4 having controversial takes on sensitive topics would probably damage OpenAIs reputation.
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