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

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

#231

Post by dragontamer » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 10:04 PM UTC

jdmoreira wrote: post #190

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

Sounds like something really simple to define and grasp. What's wrong with, for example: "A software that beats most humans on most cognitive tasks". People make it harder than it needs to he IMO

We've had computers that beat humans in differential equations, automated theorems, arithmetic, aiming a gun and more in the 1970s.

Even search was considered an AI before Google, but today is just a thing computers are and always have been faster than humans at. Even before ChatGPT, lawyers relied upon computers to double-check citations.

Even in programming, I expect that compilers and IDEs check for the most common errors.

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

#232

Post by Teever » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 10:05 PM UTC

RandomLensman wrote: post #132

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.

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?

In the 1960s many people were gravely concerned about the end of human civilization due to nuclear war, so yes, many people would have considered that a reasonable possibility.

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

#233

Post by a_wild_dandan » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 10:06 PM UTC

dr_dshiv wrote: post #94

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…

It is a relatively mainstream opinion (e.g. Peter Norvig [1]) that AGI is already here but in the early stages. He specifically compares it to the beginning of general purpose computers. In any case, I think it’s a mistake to consider it a 0/1 situation. This means there will be an ecology of competitive intelligences in the market. It won’t be monolithic. [1] https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-…

Well said. AGI is already here, because intelligence & generality exist on a spectrum, not a checkbox. Evaluating AGI's presence isn't "yes/no?", but "how much?"

LLMs have an astonishingly general set of emergent skills, which they can combine to solve novel problems (intelligence). LLMs smoke humans in many broad intellectual domains, are competitive in others, and fail abysmally in some. Folks try skirting this messy reality, squaring the circle, by conflating AGI with ASI or some techno-godhood outcome. We should evaluate AGI the same way we evaluate human general intelligence, which also manifests with dizzying variety.

This is what the "statistical parrot" (i.e: 'No True Scotsman') critics miss. Their handwavy statements about LLMs not "really" understanding the world, "only" doing simple token prediction, having no autonomy/drive, etc. miss the point: it doesn't matter. The damn thing communicating with you (on HN or elsewhere!) may display broad intelligence. I think that's why Turing's test requires a text interface -- people can't help themselves from judging agents by silly anthropomorphic heuristics (appearance, similarity to me, spacial behaviors, etc). So you must literally wall off those biases.

AGI is here. It just looks inhuman and our GI is "better", for now.

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

#234

Post by theptip » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 10:07 PM UTC

spunker540 wrote: post #119

DalasNoin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like it was pretty hard to pull the plug on sam? It will prevent you from pulling the plug by being smarter than you, spreading to more systems, making you dependent on it, persuasion,...

Neat idea, so it will conform like most humans in society and try to create more value than it destroys to avoid persecution and jail time? Sounds like our shared societal values will keep it in check then the same way they kept the openai board in check.

GP was describing acquiring power, which is completely orthogonal to being aligned with our values. (Indeed, power-seeking is usually deemed to be a bad thing.)

There are certainly ecological and mimetic niches where pro-social behaviors will improve fitness. But it’s also certain that anti-social (defect/dominate/parasite) behaviors will improve fitness in many niches.

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

#235

Post by FireBeyond » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 10:09 PM UTC

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.

Ask it to solve a moderately complex mathematical equation that you describe to it.

Ask it to solve a logical riddle that is only a minor variation with respect to items or words to existing issues (i.e. it's not something that is in its model).

It is unable to do either.

That's why it's not AGI.

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

#236

Post by hoten » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 10:14 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #228

needadvicebadly wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mach…

Airgap it. Give it no connections to the outside world, just a single controlled interface with a human operator. It's reduced to an advisor at this point, not an agent, but it removes most potential harm short of tricking its operators to plug it into the Internet.

In this scenario, pulling the plug is a matter of turning off power to the data centers it runs in - or simply disabling the one mode of external communication it has.

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

#237

Post by lacrimacida » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 10:15 PM UTC

ncruces wrote: post #230

zarzavat wrote: post #145

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.

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

GPT is optimized for moving fast and breaking things. Efficiency will certainly follow when/if the time comes.

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

#238

Post by hackerlight » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 10:29 PM UTC

insanitybit wrote: post #36

shwaj wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 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 external world and becomes "evil", but that seems way, way beyond the helpful word-spitter-outers of today. * It seems far away until it doesn’t. A year before AlphaGo, most researchers in the field thought it would be 20 years before computer…

But any AI that can go rogue would require agency and the ability to interact with external systems. Both of these things seem trivial to control for - like, stopping a program from running is not hard, nor is isolating a program (airgap). LLMs have nothing close to agency, to my knowledge - in no way are they self directed, they only respond to their inputs (as in, if I walk away from an LLM it doesn't compute in th…

We will give AI physical access to controls because of incentives. The profit incentives of corporations will ensure AI access to control in order to improve production efficiency and increase profits. The security incentives of nation states will similarly ensure giving AI a level of control, only within self-interested bounds. Stopping this requires a significant re-engineering of incentives the likes of which we've failed at multiple times in the past.

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

#239

Post by theptip » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 10:30 PM UTC

hoten wrote: post #236

theptip wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mach…

Airgap it. Give it no connections to the outside world, just a single controlled interface with a human operator. It's reduced to an advisor at this point, not an agent, but it removes most potential harm short of tricking its operators to plug it into the Internet. In this scenario, pulling the plug is a matter of turning off power to the data centers it runs in - or simply disabling the one mode of external communi…

A sufficiently intelligent system that is un-aligned can likely subvert a human operator if it wants to.

But even if we ignore that, note that nobody is building their systems this way, and nor will they without extremely draconian laws requiring it. An airgapped system is substantially less valuable than one that is connected to the outside world.

I take the question “why can’t we turn it off” to refer to the actual real systems that we have built and will continue to build, not hypothetical systems we might build if we took safety risks very seriously.

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

#240

Post by FireBeyond » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 10:40 PM UTC

shrimpx wrote: post #35

xt00 wrote: post #29

AI safety allows AI companies to tell governments and worried people to not worry too much while they plow ahead doing what they want. That’s not to say there is nobody at these companies actually being responsible but having to open up your company to the equivalent of nuclear watchdogs is not something companies would be excited about. Just like nuclear weapons and nuclear energy we benefit from the tech as well as…

The crazy thing is people at large didn’t know anything about “AI safety” until these very companies started peddling the concept in the political sphere and media. The very companies who were doing the opposite of this concept they advertised so much and whose importance they stressed much.

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."

Or talk of the laws of robotics.

I think that people know plenty.