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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

#271

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…

We really have replaced “oh no, you put too much knowledge into a LISP program and it’s sentient!” with “oh no, you’ve stacked too many transformers and now it’s sentient!”

I put a few neurons together and got a nematode, then I put 100 trillion together and got a human.

While there are other structures involved here, expanding some systems does allow the expansion of capability

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

#272
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.

Uh this is like saying "Y2K didn't happen so we wasted our time preventing it"

Like dude, it didn't happen because a lot of people prevented it, the same with nuclear war.

Because something could have tragic consequences is a reason to put great effort into ensuring it doesn't happen.

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

#273

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…

Well, one should consider that the deep learning system being developed today are developed through a process that's said to be "closer to alchemy than chemistry". The best deep learning developers aren't thinking about "what is intelligence, really?" but rather figuring ways to optimize systems on benchmarks. And at the same time, current system definitely have made advances in seeming intelligence. Moreover, the El…

One thing I keep seeing is 'human capabilities'...

Since humans are(?) the smartest things around we keep using ourselves as the benchmark. But what happens if we accidentally create 'alien intelligence'? That is something capable of solving problems but in a way we don't recognize therefore we discount and do not measure it.

Humans get quite surprised by other humans when they do things they didn't think of. I don't think it is beyond reason that machine intelligence could optimize in metrics we don't easily comprehend.

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we can make something that appears to be able to mimic human responses, isn't that AGI in practice even if it's not in principle? I'm confused by this. What's the difference? Is there a measure other than how well it "mimics" a human? If a robot is indistinguishable from a human, what other measure would make it different in practice vs principle?

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…

>But it’s easier to dream about a threat that doesn’t exist than one that does because you can still imagine a perfect scenario in which you prevent it

Science fiction invents scenarios that once created cannot be stopped quite often. The "don't create a black hole on earth unless you want to be in the black hole" effect.

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

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

not doubting your experience, what is important then, that you've seen?

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

#276
post #73

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Doesn't the second kind apply to AI in military drones? Companies like OpenAI talking about AI safety is a nice way of numbing us to AI used in actual killing machines. https://www.defensenews.com/unmanned/2023/08/03/artificial-i... https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2023/10/17/ukrain...

Killbots are trivial and probably don't even need AGI.

The term you are missing here is

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_chain

The thing that does the killing in a military is just a tiny part of the total functionality. As you say it doesn't need to be that smart. Picking the targets and figuring out what is going on without your enemies knowing they are being watched is the much larger part of the kill chain. There is ample room for AGI here.

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

#277

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

There is such a range of possible definitions for that, the statement is meaningless. It seems MSFT's contract with OpenAI picks one specific possible definition - and that probably doesn't prevent that threshold from being game-able.

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

#278
post #215

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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 distingu…

Even with that definition you would have to pick a "human level". That's a very broad range.

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

#279
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you so sure we are that far from AGI? Looking at current capabilities, and rate of improvement I would be surprised if it is more than a few years off.

People told me the same thing about self driving cars 10 years ago.

AGI is a needed part of self driving in unsupervised environments.

We put the cart before the horse. Now in semi controlled environments self driving cars do pretty well.

But in an unsupervised environment I know if a ball is rolling towards the road a child may be following it. What's interesting is you feed GPT a picture of a ball going toward a road it can make guesses that it presents risks because a person may be following it.

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

#280

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.

I think this is where the term "sparks of AGI" comes from.

What we are missing is loop functions and more reliable short term memory.

Of course I also believe the term AGI is far too course as it covers a wide range of behaviors that not all individuals posses. We need to have a set of measures for these functions to measure AGIs capabilities.

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