"AI escaping and taking over the world" is a phrasing which inverts the situation to make it sound much safer; a special effects explosion has to get everything
right to be safe. If anything isn't right, people could get hurt by shrapnel, by pressure, by heat, by smoke, by nearby structures being weakened and collapsing, by that causing breakage of steam pipes or other secondary effects, by it triggering a chain of other fires or explosions, by nearby people reacting e.g. swerving the car they are driving, etc. There are few safe outcomes and many dangerous ones. If a baby elephant has to jump over you while you are lying on the ground without crushing you, it has to be graceful and precise in a way that baby elephants aren't. Maybe it will see you as a wobbly unsafe landing place and try to avoid you for that reason if you're lucky. If there was such a thing as a 'baby monster truck' well it would behave more like a monster truck with a brick on the accelerator. And your defense is to pooh pooh the idea that a vehicle "would escape and try to kill you" handwaving away all the times runaway vehicles kill people without any intent to do so.
CUDA (2007), capable GPGPUs (circa 2012), Attention Is All You Need paper (2017), GPT 2 (2019), ChatGPT (2022), OpenAI valued at ~$28Bn (April 2023), OpenAI valued at $80Bn (Feb 2024).
Computers use fewer bits to store a list of countries than humans use braincells to do the same, and they have an easier time of it. Computers do arithmetic much faster than humans. Computers use fewer logic gates to do arithmetic than humans use braincells to do arithmetic. I don't think we can take it for granted that we need enough computing power to simulate 86 billion neurons in realtime before computers can show any glimmer of intelligence.
> "It is similar to the risk of aliens attacking earth after detecting its TV and radio transmissions."
We have high confidence that there's no quicker way to get here than the speed of light. We know that space travel is vastly complex and expensive, so the kind of reasons humans went to war in the past (land, resources) do not apply to aliens - any species capable of making interplanetary warships can synthesise water, mine asteroids, build Dyson swarms, cheaper and quicker than coming here to take them from Earth. Even if they did want to destroy us, it wouldn't be Independence Day and Will Smith dogfighting, the aliens could piledrive Earth with one spaceship moving at interstellar speeds and bam, extinction level event we'd never see coming or have a chance to react to. When the meteorite crash extinguished the dinosaurs, the impact was like a megaton nuke every six kilometers and lead to hours of sustained inferno as all the displaced rock rained back to Earth, being on the other side of the Earth didn't protect dinosaurs from being cooked.[1]
A thing with power which is also untrained, untamed, clumsy, unaware, fundamentally alien without even the shared mammal / living creature history, doesn't have to choose to attack us it can potentially end our rather fragile lives with its initial thrashing about.
> "given how remote the associated risks are. The concerns about AI risks are like a drunk driver going 90 mph on a country road and suddenly deciding to stop saying "goddamn" just in case Jesus returns and punishes those who invoked God's name in vain in violation of the Third Commandment."
GPT1 (2018), GPT2 (2019), GPT3 (2020), GPT4 (2023), LLaMA (Feb 2023), TogetherAI released LLaMA training set (April 2023), LLaMA-2 (July 2023), llama.cpp (July 2023) now with >1500 releases since then, Mistral AI (April 2023), Anthropic Claude 3 (March 2024), Bard, LaMDA, Bing chat, BloombergAI, Bart, Gemma, Gemini, Grok, Sora, Falcon, https://llmmodels.org/
I don't think a present-day LLM is going to be the superintelligent AI, but in the last ~5-10 years we've poured billions of dollars, tens of thousands of the world's smartest information processing people, the resources of the world's biggest companies, the greed and investment resources of the world's VCs, the open collaborative spread of the internet, and added the heat and chaos of hype and FOMO and nationalist competition and dangled results (like SoRA) that machines have never been able to do before. If this doesn't ignite it, maybe it cannot be ignited. But if it can be ignited, we're trying hard. Could it be as far away as 2200? 2100? 2050? Could it be as near as 2040? 2035? 2030? 2026?
To just handwave this away as "the risks are remote" isn't convincing. The risk is on our doorstep, Aladdin's cave is open, the lamp is found and people are shoving pipecleaners down the spout, cupping their hands over it and calling "halloooooo, is anyone in theeeereeee? Genieeeeee?". The lockpickers are at Pandora's box, and Pandora is stepping away and looking nervous. Louis Slotin is showing off holding the two halves of the AI Demon Core apart with a screwdriver we're the bystanders saying to each other "this can't be dangerous there are no aliens in the room, lol". The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet - well if the AI wakes up[2] we'll have a sixteenth of a second to understand and respond before light has distributed its influence both ways around the Earth and met on the other side. Our main hope is that there is no Genie and that Pandora's box is past its use-by date and the contents are dust. Because we sure aren't building a suitable containment chamber, cautiously scanning it, and standing well back.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-happened-...
[2] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/28116 - Dial F for Frankenstein by Arthur C. Clarke ~1965