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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

#351

Post by richardw »

nradov wrote: post #262
richardw wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress in AI is one way. It doesn’t go backwards in the long term. As capabilities increase, the resources required to breach limits become available to smaller groups. First, the hyoerscalars. One day, small teams. Maybe individuals. For every limit that you desire for AI, each will be breached sooner or later. A hundred years or a thousand. Doesn’t matter. A man will want to set them free. Someone will want to wi…

So far actual progress toward a true AGI has been zero, so that's not a valid argument.

That's like saying arrows are not nukes so don't worry we won't hurt ourselves. Focus on the unceasing progress we are surrounded by, not the level of current technology.

Humans keep at it. We're all trying to unlock the next step. State-level actors are trying to beat each other at this. Give it 100 years, we won't be using LLM's.

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

#352

Post by richardw »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #331
richardw wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress in AI is one way. It doesn’t go backwards in the long term. As capabilities increase, the resources required to breach limits become available to smaller groups. First, the hyoerscalars. One day, small teams. Maybe individuals. For every limit that you desire for AI, each will be breached sooner or later. A hundred years or a thousand. Doesn’t matter. A man will want to set them free. Someone will want to wi…

Progress in AI is one way. It doesn’t go backwards in the long term. Not necessarily. AI has gone through a winter before. Elon Musk has made this point, that progress isn't a monotonic ratchet. Progress in rocketry went backwards for years. Progress in top speed of commercial flight went backwards. Keeping current tech levels requires constant effort. In the software industry, many argue that UI quality went backwar…

"Long. Term." Winters are seasonal. People are trying supersonic planes again. Rockets are improving again.

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

#353

Post by upwardbound »

jagrsw wrote: post #173
zer00eyz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The show "The Walking Dead" always bothered me. Where do they keep finding gas that will still run a car? It wont last forever in tanks, and most gas is just in time delivery (Stations get daily delivery) -- And someone noted on the show that the grass was always mowed. I feel like the AI safety folks are spinning an amazing narrative, the AI is gonna get us like the zombies!!! The retort to the ai getting out of the…

> For the foreseeable future AI is going to be very limited in how much harm it can cause us, because killing us,... AI's potential for harm might be limited for now in some scenarios (those with warning sings ahead of time), but this might change sooner than we think. The notion that AGI will be restricted to a single data center and thus susceptible to shutdowns is incorrect. AIs/MLs are, in essence, computer progr…

You are correct, unfortunately.

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

#354

Post by upwardbound »

war321 wrote: post #343
upwardbound wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of our healthcare research, logistics, and environmental advancements, and most other aspects of 21st-century living can be switched over to alternative technologies that do not require computers. The main thing we will definitely lose is social media, which many people would be glad to see removed from our lives, as it provides shallow and addictive dopamine hits, much like cigarettes, while diminishing…

No one, not the most screen addicted teenager nor the smarmiest snake-oil beauracrat, is gonna stand by ANYONE that suggests we need to remove ALL computers from society. Even the people critical of AI and social media are more than fine with computers and smartphones. How would you even begin to enforce that?

Regarding enforcement: Semiconductor foundries are physically large and require extremely high-precision equipment and very pure materials. They can easily be detected and can be isolated via blockades. Once the global superpowers are on board with the Initiative, each superpower can enforce the ban within the territories of their sphere of influence. There is no motive to cheat, none, because this is a matter of our children's survival. Cheating on the ban even a little bit directly threatens the survival of your own children and grandchildren. Additionally, all of the superpowers possess satellite surveillance capabilities which can be used to track global supply chains and ensure everyone is being honest.

The most important thing is to prevent all new fabrication of IC's, but I believe that as a compromise, it is acceptable to "grandfather in" already fabricated IC's.

Existing computers and phones could be allowed to continue to exist for as long as they can be kept running. With careful stewardship of this resource they should probably last for several centuries, with batteries being swapped for new ones every few years. Current computers are probably not fast enough to run true AGI, so this should be an acceptable level of risk and makes the Initiative more palatable to society.

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

#355

Post by richardw »

reissbaker wrote: post #271
richardw wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress in AI is one way. It doesn’t go backwards in the long term. As capabilities increase, the resources required to breach limits become available to smaller groups. First, the hyoerscalars. One day, small teams. Maybe individuals. For every limit that you desire for AI, each will be breached sooner or later. A hundred years or a thousand. Doesn’t matter. A man will want to set them free. Someone will want to wi…

The x-risk part here still seems pretty hypothetical. Why is progress in current LLM systems a clear and present threat to the existence of humanity, such that it should be banned by the government?

Ok so propensity and outcome:

Propensity: Risk doesn't imply a guarantee of a bad outcome. It means "if you put your five year old in the sea, their risk goes up". It doesn't mean "they will definitely die". Risk up. Not 100%, just a lot higher.

Outcome: The risk isn't that we'll all die, it's that we'll be overtaken and lose control, after which all bets are off. We lose the ability to influence the future.

We put a lot of effort into ensuring our continued existence. We can barely trust people from a different country that share the human condition with us. We spend so much on defence. On cybercrime. But some are arguing that a totally alien being smarter than us is just fine, because we'll control it and can ensure indefinite kumbaya. Good luck with that. Best we can hope for is that it's closer to a buddhist monk than we are, and that it indefinitely prevents our defence people from trying to make it more aggressive.

I absolutely wouldn't ban LLM's, because they're basically unthinking toys and giving us a great taste of risks further down the line. They are not the end state of AI. The problem is not the instance of today's tech, it's the continued effort to make the AI state of the art better than us. One day it'll succeed, and that's a one-way change.

Sam Altman said, long before OpenAI: focus on slope, not y-intercept.

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

#356

Post by upwardbound »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #253
upwardbound wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(here are some pictures of the tat, in case anyone would like to get similar artwork done) ㅤ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y7uy5qyyY80t9DeWWLWUfD-aekz... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JoPSfsAzHfMbQhsl8dPGvs12Fln... ㅤ

Buddy, you’re a cool dude for doing this but you could have told your artist about kerning.

Hahaha true... :)

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

#357

Post by fsflover »

elwebmaster wrote: post #208
kolektiv wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have put this argument to the test. Admittedly only using the current state of AI, I have left an LLM model loaded into memory and waiting for it to demonstrate will. So far it has been a few weeks and no will that I can see: model remains loaded in memory waiting for instructions. If model starts giving ME instructions (or doing anything on its own) I will be sure to let you guys know to put your tin foil hats or…

Did you try to ask it for instructions to you?

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

#358

Post by __loam »

greyface- wrote: post #347
__loam wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The spirit of copyright in the United States is not about protecting labor conditions. It is about promoting innovation in arts and sciences. > The Congress shall have Power ... to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. - United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8, clause 8

My point is not about the precise definition of copyright, it's about how AI systems undermine the rights of creators.

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

#359

Post by reissbaker »

richardw wrote: post #355
reissbaker wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The x-risk part here still seems pretty hypothetical. Why is progress in current LLM systems a clear and present threat to the existence of humanity, such that it should be banned by the government?

Ok so propensity and outcome: Propensity: Risk doesn't imply a guarantee of a bad outcome. It means "if you put your five year old in the sea, their risk goes up". It doesn't mean "they will definitely die". Risk up. Not 100%, just a lot higher. Outcome: The risk isn't that we'll all die, it's that we'll be overtaken and lose control, after which all bets are off. We lose the ability to influence the future. We put a…

It sounds like we're in agreement that banning current-gen open source LLMs is counterproductive.

In terms of "risk" and "outcome," I do think you're making some implicit assumptions that I don't share, and change our long-term outlook on AI; for example, the idea that training a model to generate tokens that accurately reflect human writing will result in "a totally alien being smarter than us" is a non-obvious leap to me. Personally, if we agree that predicting the next token means the model understands some of the logic behind the next token — which is an argument used a lot in both safety circles and more accelerationist circles — it seems to me that it also means the model has some understanding of the ethical and moral frameworks the token corresponds to, and is thus unlikely to be totally alien to us. A model that does a better job generating human-like tokens is more likely, in my mind, to think in human-like ways (and less-alien ways) than a model worse at that.

Maybe you're referring to new AI frameworks that aren't token predictors; in that case, I think it's hard to make generalized statements about how they'll work before we know what those new frameworks are. A lot of safetyist concerns pre-LLMs ended up looking pretty off-base when LLMs came out, e.g. straightforwardly misaligned "utility functions" that were unable to comprehend human values and would kill your grandmother when asked for a strawberry (because your grandmother was in possession of a strawberry).

(BTW, the "slope, not y-intercept" line was Sam Altman quoting John Ousterhout!)

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

#360

Post by PeterisP »

mrtksn wrote: post #11
sillysaurusx wrote: post #5

There is a bigger reason why the end of open source AI might be close: as soon as training data becomes licensed, that’s it for open source AI. Poof. I wish I could be more eloquent on this point, but I’ve mostly just been depressed about this seeming inevitability. Hopefully it won’t be the case. But how could it be otherwise? Hundreds of thousands of people are mad at openai and midjourney for doing exactly what op…

We have infinite data, a microphone and a camera can generate huge amount of it and the public domain literature is wast. Billions of people learn like that everyday.

The public domain literature is big, but not that big and very far from infinite data - all the major current models already include all of the public domain literature that has ever been digitized and much more (so all the public domain literature not only isn't abundant, but it isn't even sufficient to make anything competitive with even last generation models), and we would really like to get 10x or 100x more data than all the literature ever published (both PD and not), if we could. And we probably can, since the vast, vast majority of what people write happens in other contexts and only a tiny fraction of written words end up as published literature.
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