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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

#221

Post by joe_the_user »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #101
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…

> "We don't know if we'll have time travel and ray guns in six months or 600 years." That's not the (only) problem, it's that no one can describe what AGI will really look like outside of vague and circular definitions. People have an idea of what they would like it to be, but there's no evidence any of it can be built, particularly human like intelligence, which may be only possible in the human host. > "If we can m…

That's not the (only) problem, it's that no one can describe what AGI will really look like outside of vague and circular definitions

The basic description is "a computer system that can do all relevant things a human being can do". And sure, we don't have a very codified definition of what those things are but we, human beings, exist and so even if we can't define our own capacities, we have an strong idea they exist.

The implicit argument is that one can't engineer something one doesn't understand. I tend to agree in the case of full capacities but LLMs seem to have some capacities that their creator don't understand, so the claim doesn't seem a "slam dunk" anymore.

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

#222

Post by RandomLensman »

fragmede wrote: post #213
RandomLensman wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Based on my experience with large corporate transformations, I'd be amazed if it were done that way. Usually, (simple) math isn't really that important.

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

#223

Post by RandomLensman »

chpatrick wrote: post #203
RandomLensman wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they same way there is no certainty that it is close by. History suggests that predictions about technological and socia-economic futures are tough.

I agree but I wouldn't bet on it being far either based on how far we've come on the last few years.

Only one way to find out: letting time pass.

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

#224

Post by haldujai »

jjoonathan wrote: post #146
SuperLynxDeluxe wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Transformers existed in 2019, and while GPT4 is genuinely advanced, it's not a gigantic leap I'm referring to the emergent capabilities that show up with scale, which are a gigantic leap. The usual citation suggests that this came into the public consciousness in 2020 [1]. Do you take issue with the timeline or the idea that these were a gigantic leap? [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165

> Do you take issue with ... the idea that these were a gigantic leap?

Yes, the gigantic leap was transformers. No one thought we peaked with 340M or 1.5B parameters, in fact expectations from early work was that massively scaling was going to achieve zero-shot capabilities rather the emergent capabilities you're alluding to which are essentially variations of in-context learning, a relative disappointment.

Subsequent improvements in GPT-4, which seem to be mostly just more RLHF and MoE, are similarly not surprising and are temporizing measures while hardware and datasets are limited. Jury is still out whether the billions spent are worth it in terms of actually getting us closer to AGI.

It seems to be worth it for OpenAI/MS who are trying to be first to market and establish vendor lock-in.

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

#225

Post by mountainriver »

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…

How would all signs possibly be pointing to a longer timeline?

3-4 years ago everyone thought it was 50-100 years away. Now with GPT-4 that timeline has radically shifted.

The rate of improvement in this space right now is like nothing we’ve ever seen. All signs are quite literally pointing to us getting there by the end of the decade if not much sooner

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

#226

Post by harpiaharpyja »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #101
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…

> "We don't know if we'll have time travel and ray guns in six months or 600 years." That's not the (only) problem, it's that no one can describe what AGI will really look like outside of vague and circular definitions. People have an idea of what they would like it to be, but there's no evidence any of it can be built, particularly human like intelligence, which may be only possible in the human host. > "If we can m…

> "That's not the (only) problem, it's that no one can describe what AGI will really look like outside of vague and circular definitions."

Not so much unlike the time travel and rayguns, isn't it?

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

#227

Post by blablabla123 »

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…

It seems both kinds are just the same with different magnitude. Even if ChatGPT is that far away from AGI it passes yesterday's Turing tests with ease.

While some Skynet-like dystopia indeed seems very far away and might never happen for practical reasons even with a full-blown AGI - people can agree on things offline, the A(G)I can't. So it seems narrow-scoped issues are the real worst-case and apply to non-general AI. And that's safety, employment topics and related economic issues...

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

#228

Post by theptip »

needadvicebadly wrote: post #66
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…

I don't mean to be facetious in any way, but how does AGI/ASI protect itself from humans simply pulling the plug?

How do you “pull the plug” on a datacenter, or on all of the cloud providers if the ASI has processes running everywhere? Given that anyone with a credit card can already achieve robust multi-region deployments, it doesn’t seem hard for an ASI to make itself very hard to “turn off”.

Alternatively an ASI can ally with a group of humans to whom it can credibly promise wealth and power. If you think there is a baby machine god in your basement that is on your side, you’ll fight to protect it.

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

#229

Post by skepticATX »

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 someone showed you the progression of GPT-2 -> GPT-3, and then informed you that they were going to train a new model with 100x the compute and tons more high quality data, what would you expect this model to be able to do? And how would it compare to the GPT-4 that we actually got?

I think that while GPT-4 is very impressive and a useful tool, seeing the jump, or lack thereof in the places that I expected, between GPT-3 and GPT-4 resulted in me lengthening my timeline.

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

#230

Post by ncruces »

zarzavat wrote: post #145
RandomLensman wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

And yet GPT optimizes for anything but efficiency, but it's great because it's so conversational.
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