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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

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 commo…

I could beat the differential equations AI at aiming a gun so badly

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

#242
post #232

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?

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.

Good point, forgot about wrong visions of the future that excluded each other. People really get the future wrong in every way possible. Will be the same with AI.

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

#243

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 find it confusing why the first type of AI "safety" is being focused on so much. A reasonable person will know that a tool like AI can spit out none-politically-correct things, and that reasonable person should shrug it off. But we're making a giant deal out of it and dedicating an unreasonable amount of work onto this aspect, at least in my opinion. It's akin to spending 1/4 of a Dewalt drill's development budget…

It’s not just about politics. I don’t want to build a product that tells a mentally unwell kid how to blow up the school. It’s important to me that my work doesn’t do things I don’t want it to do. Is that really so weird?

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

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if that’s the definition of AGI we’re going by, we’re in no danger of it murdering us all. Imagine thinkjng GPT4 was somehow capable of really any harm at all. It’s also just incredible failure of risk assessment. Global warming is the real and pressing threat, and it’s here right now. Not sentient murderous AI. But it’s easier to dream about a threat that doesn’t exist than one that does because you can still im…

> Imagine thinkjng GPT4 was somehow capable of really any harm at all. There’s plenty of new ways you could use chatgpt to mess with society. For example, apparently you only need 8% of people to be talking about something for it to seem like a mass movement. It would be pretty easy for a malicious actor to use LLMs to flood the internet with some new - but fake - story or motivated point of view and kickstart a “mas…

And no amount of well intended AI ethics or prompt denial would stop this sort of malevolent activity.

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

#245

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…

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 exis…

I feel all these discussion about AGI vs not-AGI are nice and fascinating but useless. MBAs will take whatever EY tells them is smart enough in a fancy powerpoint, kick all human employees out to increase shareholders value and let that expensive computer handle all the red buttons. It doesn't take an AGI to f'up humanity, it only takes a dumb computer trusted with the wrong buttons.

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What % of people alive can do either? We have a system which beats the vast majority of humanity.

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

#247

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…

While I think we're probably at least years away, I do think there's a certain level of inevitability, and that certain individuals/companies/governments can and will put a lot of funding and effort towards making this happen.

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

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What % of people alive can do either? We have a system which beats the vast majority of humanity.

Moderately complex might be inflating things. Last I read we're talking grade and middle school math.

And we're talking questions like "if all x are y, and all a are b, and some people are both a and x, ..., correct, incorrect, unable to determine based on information?"

And this is why it's not AGI. It's regurgitating synthesized examples it has seen before. It's not processing and calculating from first principles.

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

#249

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…

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 exis…

> The implicit argument is that one can't engineer something one doesn't understand.

Isn't that easy to debunk?

I'd be hard pressed to implement an algorithm that can control a double-jointed inverted pendulum without reading up on control theory again.

But I can instead read up on neural networks and implement one that can be trained to control the pendulum.

For a more advanced example, I would never be able implement speech recognition explicitly by writing a regular program. But I could probably implement a passable one using neural networks and lots of training material.

How is this not "engineer something one doesn't understand"?

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

#250
After all the ink spilt over ways to guarantee that the ai doesn’t “get free” or break out of its black box, turns out the whole question is moot because we’re just gonna give it total access to internet and free copies to everyone. I don’t know why I expected anything else to happen.
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