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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

#311

Post by bart_spoon »

keep_reading wrote: post #175
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…

> The second kind is preventing AGI from enslaving/killing humanity or whatever. Y'all are crazy for thinking this. A computer program without arms or legs cannot extinct or enslave the human race.

One doesn’t need arms and legs or any physical presence at all to do immense damage to society. Ransomware attacks cripple companies, hospitals, utilities, and governments on a regular basis. The US and Israel have demonstrated, in at least one instance, the ability to create computer viruses that can cause industrial hardware to physically destroy itself.

Our world has been so completely integrated with digital technology that if it were disrupted in a large scale fashion it could easily result in millions of deaths. No power, no internet, and people lose access to heating/cooling, clean water, hospitals can’t run, food production is disrupted, money can’t be accessed, medicine can’t be produced, communication is cut, shipping and transportation of what goods do exist grinds to a halt.

And that’s just in the world of malware, that doesn’t consider all the ways it could just inject enough discord into society that it doesn’t need to physically attack us, we will do it ourselves.

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

#313

Post by Apocryphon »

bart_spoon wrote: post #305
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 came about in 2017, so extend the time horizon by a whopping 2 years and OP’s point remains. AlexNet was 2012, which is what essentially kicked off the deep learning neural network revolution. The original implementation of AlphaGo utilized DNN in 2016 to beat Lee Sedol at Go, which people had been predicting was at least 5-10 years away. So the timeline, spanning just under the last 12 years at this poi…

This is more of a social/cultural perception issue. In 2012 we had Siri, Google Now, and S Voice. (Alexa and Cortana both came in 2014.) So the average layman would just be like, “oh, so that’s a fancier Siri.”

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

#314

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#315

Post by dr_dshiv »

a_wild_dandan wrote: post #233
dr_dshiv wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mes…

> We should evaluate AGI the same way we evaluate human general intelligence, which also manifests with dizzying variety.

This is key. All humans don’t understand everything—and the way we assess human conceptual understanding is through tests. This implies that we need a lot more tests for AI.

I’d like to see a big investment in “Machine Psychology.”

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

#316

Post by reverius42 »

fl7305 wrote: post #251
kypro wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We couldn’t even do coordinated lockdowns for a few weeks to prevent millions of Covid deaths, and you think we’ll have a coordinated cessation of computer and internet use?

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

#317

Post by golol »

creer wrote: post #278
golol wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, my point is that the Turing test has not been invalidated as a tool to detect AGI.

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

#318

Post by junofan »

mountainriver wrote: post #225
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…

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

We’re actually maybe a little behind schedule if you look at the “with funding” case from the AGI-09 conference survey: https://sethbaum.com/ac/2011_AI-Experts.pdf

Matches my recollection. The field is prone to hype cycles.

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

#319

Post by RandomLensman »

fragmede wrote: post #275
RandomLensman wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Very roughly: where the future business is coming from, what the future capabilities should be, how a new organisation should look like, what change can actually be accomplished, how to manage that change, required skills & infrastructure, how to get them. Then there is a whole legal ans compliance arc somewhere.

Only when the change is small and local is it getting close to a math thing, but a large rollout of technology is a big thing already today.

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

#320

Post by alex_young »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #292
alex_young wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don’t understand how a transformer approach to human language can be expected to result in reasoning machines that are a threat to humanity. Feeding more information in has absolutely resulted in phenomenal progress in predicting the next token in a given document, but how then do we expect even a perfect token predictor machine to start exhibiting independent emotions, desires, secret plots, and long term str…

Here's one possibility: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpPnReyBC54KESiSn/optimality...

That’s a lot of words to say something like “if an LLM asks you to execute some code it could be dangerous”.

Seems somewhat obvious. Would you execute random code from a ‘friend’ who emailed you? Does the LLM have any nefarious intentions?

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