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Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

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Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#71

Post by te_chris »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #48
kolektiv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced the onus should be on one side to prove why something isn't an existential risk. We don't start with an assumption that something is world-ending about anything else; we generally need to see a plausibly worked-through example of how the world ends, using technology we can all broadly agree exists/will shortly exist. If we're talking about nuclear weapons, for example, the tech is clear, the pattern…

AI safety / x-risk folks have in fact made extensive and detailed arguments. Occasionally, folks arguing against them rise to the same standard. But most of the arguments against AI safety look a lot more like name-calling and derision: "nuh-uh, that's sci-fi and unrealistic (mic drop)". That's not a counterargument. > If we're talking about nuclear weapons, for example, the tech is clear, the pattern of human behavi…

An extensive HYPOTHETICAL argument, stuffed with assumptions far beyond the capabilities of the technologies they're talking about for their own private ends.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#72

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

suslik wrote: post #53
JoshTriplett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned They are calling for all AI (above a certain capability level) to be banned. Not just open, not just closed, all . There are risks that apply only to open. There are risks that apply only to closed. But nobody should be developing AGI without incredibly robustly proven alignment, open or closed, any more…

What is the reason to believe that LLMs are an evolutionary step towards AGI at all? In my mind there is a rather large leap from estimating a conditional probability of a next token over some space to a conscious entity with its own goals and purpose. Should we ban a linear regression while we're at it? It would be great to see some evidence that this risk is real. All I've witnessed so far was scaremongering posts…

> What is the reason to believe that LLMs are an evolutionary step towards AGI at all? In my mind there is a rather large leap from estimating a conditional probability of a next token over some space to a conscious entity with its own goals and purpose.

In my highly-summarized opinion? When you have a challenging problem with tight constraints, like flight, independent solutions tend to converge toward the same analogous structures that effectively solve that problem, like wings (insects, bats, birds). LLMs are getting so good at mimicing human behavior that it's hard to believe their mathematical structure isn't a close analogue to similar structures in our own brain.* That clearly isn't all you need to make an AGI, but we know little enough about the human brain that I, at least, cannot be sure that there isn't one clever trick that advances an LLM into a general-reasoning agent with its own goals and purpose.

I also wouldn't underestimate the power of token prediction. Predicting the future output of a black-box signal generator is a very general problem, whose most accurate solution is attained by running a copy of that black box internally. When that signal generator is human speech, there are some implications to that. (Although I certainly don't believe that LLMs emulate humans, it's now clear by experimental proof that our own thought process is much more compactly modellable than philosophers of previous decades believed).

* That's a guess, and unrelated to the deliberately-designed analogy between neural nets and neurons. In LLMs we have built an airplane with wings whose physics we understand in detail; we also ourselves can fly somehow, but we cannot yet see any angel-wings on our back. The more similarities we observe in our flight characteristics, the more this signals that we might be flying the same way ourselves.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#73

Post by ben_w »

visarga wrote: post #58
jagrsw wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seems to be a lot of hand-waving between where we are now and "AGI". Modeling an entity that surpasses our intelligence, especially one that interacts with us, is an extraordinarily challenging, if not impossible, task. Concerning the potential for harm, consider the example of Vladimir Putin, who could theoretically cause widespread destruction using nuclear weapons. Although safeguards exist, these could be circu…

How would an AGI launch nuclear missiles from their silicon GPUs? Social engineering?

Sure.

Or by writing buggy early warning radar systems which forget to account for the fact that the moon doesn't have an IFF transponder.

Which is a mistake humans made already, and which almost got the US to launch their weapons at Russia.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#74

Post by hanselot »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #48
kolektiv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced the onus should be on one side to prove why something isn't an existential risk. We don't start with an assumption that something is world-ending about anything else; we generally need to see a plausibly worked-through example of how the world ends, using technology we can all broadly agree exists/will shortly exist. If we're talking about nuclear weapons, for example, the tech is clear, the pattern…

AI safety / x-risk folks have in fact made extensive and detailed arguments. Occasionally, folks arguing against them rise to the same standard. But most of the arguments against AI safety look a lot more like name-calling and derision: "nuh-uh, that's sci-fi and unrealistic (mic drop)". That's not a counterargument. > If we're talking about nuclear weapons, for example, the tech is clear, the pattern of human behavi…

Is it not a bit disingenuous to assume all open source AI proponents would readily back nuclear proliferation?

It's going to be hard to convince anyone if the best argument is terminator or infinite paperclips.

The first actual existential threat is destruction of opportunity specifically in the job market.

The same argument though can be made for the opposing side, where making use of ai can increase productivity and open up avenues of exploration that previously required way higher opportunity cost to get into.

I don't think Miss Davis is more likely an outcome than corps creating a legislative moat (as they have already proven they will do at every opprtunity).

The democratisation of ai is a philanthropic attempt to reduce the disparity between the 99 and 1 percent. At least it could be easily perceived that way.

That being said, keeping up with SOTA is currently still insanely hard. The number of papers dropping in the space is exponential year on year. So perhaps it would be worth to figure out how to use existing AI to fix some problems, like unreproducable results in academia that somehow pass peer review.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#75

Post by jagrsw »

kolektiv wrote: post #62
jagrsw wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seems to be a lot of hand-waving between where we are now and "AGI". Modeling an entity that surpasses our intelligence, especially one that interacts with us, is an extraordinarily challenging, if not impossible, task. Concerning the potential for harm, consider the example of Vladimir Putin, who could theoretically cause widespread destruction using nuclear weapons. Although safeguards exist, these could be circu…

Oh, absolutely - such an entity obviously could! Modelling the behaviour of such an entity is very difficult indeed, as you'd need to make all kinds of assumptions without basis. However, you only need to model this behaviour once you've posited the likely existence of such an entity - and that's where (purely subjectively) it feels like there's a gap. Nothing has yet convinced me (and I am absolutely honest about th…

> those have stalled at local maxima every single time.

It's challenging to encapsulate AI/ML progress in a single sentence, but even assuming LLMs aren't a direct step towards AGI, the human mind exists. Due to its evolutionary limitations, it operates relatively slowly. In theory, its functions could be replicated in silicon, enhanced for speed, parallel processing, internetworked, and with near-instant access to information. Therefore, AGI could emerge, if not from current AI research, then perhaps from another scientific branch.

> We've built some incredibly impressive tools, but so far, nothing that looks or feels like a concept of will (note, not consciousness) yet, to the best of my knowledge.

Objectives of AGIs can be tweaked by human actors (it's complex, but still, data manipulation). It's not necessary to delve into the philosophical aspects of sentience as long as the AGI surpasses human capability in goal achievement. What matters is whether these goals align with or contradict what the majority of humans consider beneficial, irrespective of whether these goals originate internally or externally.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#76

Post by jagrsw »

ben_w wrote: post #73
visarga wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would an AGI launch nuclear missiles from their silicon GPUs? Social engineering?

Sure. Or by writing buggy early warning radar systems which forget to account for the fact that the moon doesn't have an IFF transponder. Which is a mistake humans made already, and which almost got the US to launch their weapons at Russia.

I don't think discussing this on technical grounds is necessary. AGI means resources (eg monetary) and means of communication (connection to the Internet). This is enough to perform most of physical tasks in the world, by human proxies if needed.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#77

Post by __loam »

visarga wrote: post #50
kmeisthax wrote: post #7

AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…

> I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative use of AI, and none of the AI safety people are talking about stopping it. This should be an explicitly allowed practice, it is following the spirit of copyright to the letter - use the ideas, facts, methods or styles while avoiding to…

We really need to talk about preserving the spirit of copyright, which is about protecting the labor conditions of people who make things. I'm not saying the current copyright system accomplishes that at all but I do think a system where humans do a shit load of work that AI companies can just steal and profit from without acknowledging the source of that work is another extreme that is a bad outcome. AI systems need human content to work, and discouraging people from making that data source is at the very least a tragedy of the commons. And no, I don't think synthetic data fixes that problem.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#78

Post by _cjse »

nerdponx wrote: post #42
kmeisthax wrote: post #7

AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…

It's way too late to ban any of this. How do you propose to make that work? That would be like banning all "malicious software", it's a preposterous idea when you even begin to think about the practical side of it. And where do you draw the line? Is my XGBoost model "AI", or are we only banning generative AI? Is a Markov chain "generative AI"?

If you lower the problem to "stop people from future developments on AI", then it seems pretty easy to get most people to stop fairly quickly by implementing a fine-based bounty system, similar to what many countries use for things like littering. [url-redacted]

I guess you could always move to a desert island and build your own semiconductor fab from scratch if you were really committed to the goal, but short of that you're going to leave a loooooong paper trail that someone who wants to make a quick buck off of you could use very profitably. It's hard to advance the state of the art on your own, and even harder to keep that work hidden.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#79

Post by visarga »

suslik wrote: post #53
JoshTriplett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned They are calling for all AI (above a certain capability level) to be banned. Not just open, not just closed, all . There are risks that apply only to open. There are risks that apply only to closed. But nobody should be developing AGI without incredibly robustly proven alignment, open or closed, any more…

What is the reason to believe that LLMs are an evolutionary step towards AGI at all? In my mind there is a rather large leap from estimating a conditional probability of a next token over some space to a conscious entity with its own goals and purpose. Should we ban a linear regression while we're at it? It would be great to see some evidence that this risk is real. All I've witnessed so far was scaremongering posts…

LLMs learned from text to do language operations. Humans learned from culture to do the same. Neither humans or AIs can reinvent culture easily, it would take a huge amount of time and resources. The main difference is that humans are embodied, so we get the freedom to explore and collect feedback. LLMs can only do this in chat rooms, and their environment is the human they are chatting with instead of the real world.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#80

Post by lannisterstark »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #21
kmeisthax wrote: post #7

AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…

> AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned They are calling for all AI (above a certain capability level) to be banned. Not just open, not just closed, all . There are risks that apply only to open. There are risks that apply only to closed. But nobody should be developing AGI without incredibly robustly proven alignment, open or closed, any more…

>But nobody should be developing AGI

Pass. People should be developing whatever the hell they want unless given a good, concrete reason to not do so. So far everything I've seen is vague handwaving. "Oh no it's gonna kill us all like in ze movies" isn't good enough.

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