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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

#251

Post by fl7305 »

kypro wrote: post #106
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…

As a principal I tend to lower my conviction of any opinion I hold the more that people I intellectually respect disagree with me. I think to say with confidence that we're doomed or that there is no risk to the AI system currently in development would be intellectually arrogant. I'm not even convinced you necessarily need AGI before AI becomes a risk to humanity. An advanced enough auto-GPT bot given a bad goal migh…

> Cripple enough infrastructure and humanity is going to be starving to death within weeks.

Just the threat of a malicious AGI that people take seriously enough would cause ourselves to pull the plug on the Internet and all computers until they can be disinfected and new filters put in place.

It doesn't matter if the AGI is capable of actually inflicting damage or not.

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

#252

Post by mr_toad »

chpatrick wrote: post #206
consumer451 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess what I am getting at is: When I ask ChatGPT 4 Turbo to "search for the article by Eric Berger from Sep 10th 2023, and summarize it," it does, and responds including that new information because it is now in the context. The next step would seem to be to integrate those search results into its training data - while somehow filtering bunk data which is the tough part - and when the next user asks that question…

What I mean is if context length wasn't a limit, you could have your own AI agent that remembers that article forever, along with everything else you've ever discussed with it. If it generated text on its own, without human interaction, and developed its "personality", then you could say it's more like what we consider an intelligent being.

Context length is limited by the length of articles in the training data. You couldn’t use infinite context lengths unless the LLM had been trained on infinity long articles.

Context lengths aren’t arbitrary limits - they reflect the ability (and limits) of the model to actually reason about lengthy topics. If you want longer context lengths you’ll need more training data, larger models, and a lot more money.

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

#253

Post by kragen »

jacquesm wrote: post #198
kragen wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that is certainly a very plausible and worrisome risk, and i agree that facial recognition doesn't require strong ai but i think there are other, possibly larger risks that result from strong ai in weapons, and plausible incentives to put it there

Can you give some examples of those risks?

like biological weapons, its collateral damage might be a lot less predictable, because it's hard to predict what someone who's smarter than you will do

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

#254

Post by josephg »

RandomLensman wrote: post #207
josephg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It would also be easy for a benevolent actor to counter-flood etc.

Sure; but multiple AI generated "mass movements" don't cancel each other out.

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

#255

Post by mr_toad »

DalasNoin wrote: post #75
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?

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,...

> It will prevent you

It will have no motivation to prevent you from pulling the plug. Human level intelligence is not the same as animal instinct.

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

#256

Post by Teever »

RandomLensman wrote: post #242
Teever wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nuclear war is still an overhanging threat that we should be concerned about, especially in the day and age of automation and AI.

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

#257

Post by tim333 »

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…

A non foom scenario is a monopolistic and aggressive company maybe something like the 1990s Microsoft develops AGI and decides to monopolise the market the way they tried with Windows. Then later when they've got 90% market share and the AI has superhuman IQ, it turns. Thankfully the current Microsoft seems a bit less aggressive than the Gates version.

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

#258

Post by gumballindie »

okdood64 wrote: post #25

Something I see lacking in many discussions about AI Safety and Alignment is: What does the role of China mean for AI Safety? Is there any reason to believe that they will a) adopt any standards SV, the US or some international government body will create, or b) care enough to slow down development of AI? If AI Safety is really a concern, you can expect in the long run (not that much further behind than the US) China…

The China argument is mainly used for consolidating the fud around ai. I doubt the chinese lose any sleep over this.

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

#259

Post by mr_toad »

youarelabor wrote: post #197
invig wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We already have procedures for getting the 'right' people, as far as it can be determined, into positions of power/decision-making authority. Unelected greedy fuckers like Sam Altman should be laughed at and thrown out of power immediately . I would rather have sclerotic legislators, preferably drawn from the Millennial and Zoomer generations, than the greedy fuckers like Paul Graham and Sam Altman pretending they ar…

Who would invest in a business where the executives were elected by non-owners and had conflicting interests?

What you’re arguing for is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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

#260

Post by calamari4065 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #221
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…

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.

That's what machine learning is. We build these systems we don't fully understand, and set them on solving problems we don't understand. It's revolutionary because it lets us solve problems we don't understand. We don't really fully understand what they do or how, but it does still work.

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