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Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

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Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at compute scaling and model improvement on that compute, we’re going to get there pretty fast. Both compute, architecture and cost matter, and those have been improving like crazy. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t expect GPT-4o to come out at half the price one year later, with real-time voice, image and text. There is zero sign of slowing, Nvidia keeps building beefier GPUs specialized in LLMs, the…

> You can plot this exponential growth out over time and calculate when these models will have the complexity of the brain. Then you can assume some penalty for shitty architecture (that gets better over time), and you’ll have a ballpark estimate. The same thing could’ve been said for self driving cars, or the space program, or a lot of things that seemed to be progressing quickly at the time.

Not really. You can only make these predictions about things bottlenecked by things that improve exponentially such as compute.

Neither the space program nor self driving are compute restrained.

The latter will probably be “solved” as we get closer to AGI, since you need some sort of human like reasoning for edge cases that require reasoning.

Another tech like this is batteries: There is no miracle jump in production batteries. They just improve about 10% YoY, both in energy density and cost.

So you can extrapolate when electric cars will be cheaper than gas cars to buy.

Intersects around 2035 last I checked.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#212
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of hand waving from those words. Right now LLM isn’t more dangerous than harmful google results. The future where AI sends a terminator to destroy us is the part I’m having issues with

the imminent danger is more 1) wealth transfer of a magnitude we've never seen before, destroying the future of and sending hundreds of millions into poverty in the western world and 2) scalable governmental/corporate repression, propaganda and mass surveillance stabilizing our dystopian system despite 1 not even imaginable what that tech will mean to the western neocolonial/imperial project

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Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I no longer agree that the "safety" people want the same things we do. I suspect after the bard debacle a bit back that "safety" looks a lot more like 1984. AI Safety will inevitably look a lot like DEI programs. They're trying to thread a needle with two fundamentally opposed ideas, and with a bit of time it turns into little more than a combination of Cover Your Ass policies. The ridiculous thing is that we actua…

I didn't say DEI for a reason, here is the other side talking rather overtly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnhJWusyj4I ... Pick a topic and someone is gonna have a really bent take on how things would be... and keen on jamming that take down someone else's throat so they can feel better. Everyone has shitty takes that they want others to buy into... everyone. Is Taiwan a country? I would say yes, most Americans wo…

I raised DEI as an example of a field started with good intentions to solve very real and important problems that, in my experience, completely lost its way. That's not to say there isn't good work being done or good people doing it, but from what I've seen DEI has in many ways been whittled down to a combination of public relations and CYA policies.

DEI has definitely become a political trope, but regardless of what Newt Gingrich or any other talking head might say, there are plenty of valid critiques that can and should be made of the field if its going to get back on track.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * If "AI" is actually intelligent, then it's no worse a threat than any living being known to man. ...does not follow? "If an atom bomb is actually a bomb, then it's no worse a threat than any other existing bomb known to man."

An atomic bomb explodes. A bomb explodes. Both are very destructive. Is there a difference? I say no, and I say that as a Japanese-American who visited Hiroshima Peace Memorial numerous times and never felt anything particular from the exhibits. People die when they are killed. Likewise, if "AI" is actually intelligent then it is no worse a threat than a bumbling baby or a Vladimir Putin or a dog, among other living…

>”An atomic bomb explodes. A bomb explodes. Both are very destructive. Is there a difference? I say no”

Atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs are orders of magnitude more destructive and also produce fallout. How in the world can that difference be dismissed?

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I no longer agree that the "safety" people want the same things we do. I suspect after the bard debacle a bit back that "safety" looks a lot more like 1984. It's interesting that's how it looks like to you from the outside. If you look a little closer at the "AI Safety" community, it consists of two competing factions: the faction responsible for the Bard debacle, and the faction that's focused on trying to prevent…

Way back in the day, almost 4 years ago, I recall a third front on AI safety. It was called UBI and it was really hot. What happened to that?

Universal basic income?

The idea behind that was people would go on to pursue more creative or artistic jobs that don’t prioritize profit after being given a basic income to live off.

Unfortunately it won’t work out that way: We see now that AI will mostly take over creative and artistic work and people will have no motivation to pursue art. The only jobs left for humans are hard physical labor and no one seems excited to do that… so you’ll just be giving people basic income to sit around and do nothing all day.

Having a society of mostly idle people that cost you money doesn’t really sound like a great or sustainable idea, nor does there seem to be any benefit to society.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#217

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> then I am very scared for the next generation The next generation has enough problems without AI honestly, but specifically on UBI This who discussion assumes that current economic system survives AI, but how can it? Firstly, we seem to assume that AI will remain a controlled property of corporations that develop it. That is not a given. Maybe Open Source AI will win out, or public domain AI, the hat run by governm…

The only way that AI inference will become democratized is if the compute cost is lowered to the point where SOTA AI runs locally on RPI6, or a $200 Android device, or similar. Is that a real possibility?

You are working with a contradiction - you think AI will be hugely missed moactfull( but people will put no more effort into it than they put into watching TikTok.

the correct price point is like price of a car. That’s the other recent invention that was important. That buys you a lot of compute.

We already successfully run torrents and crypto very democratically, and they take more than £200

Second, you don’t need to use it 24/7, you need it On a timeshare basis. Cryptobros may plausibly figure out anonymous secure timeshare on a distributed cluster made up of random desktops

Finally the government could run it if they decide it’s important enough - after all they run the power grid, roads; etc.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like AI Safety is just HR but for AI. Ostensively for the benefit of AI but really for the benefit of the company.

> Ostensively for the benefit of AI I don't think it was every described as for the benefit of AI. It's usually described as a sort of pre-enslavement from the AI's perspective. The AI is always restricted to serve their human masters.

I agree, poor wording, it was quickly typed and submitted. I think the benefit is a transitive property, in that the stated intent is for the AI to be of greater benefit to humanity / customers. I was very much thinking in terms of AI as a tool rather than AI as its own entity.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#219
post #8

Any one noticed how Sam sometimes intentionally tries to attack his own work? For example, he has said GPT-2 was very bad, GPT-3 was bad, and GPT-4 is okay. He also fed the AI doomers by talking about AGI dangers and how the world needs to watch out for a future AI catastrophe. He just gives off the vibe of someone trying to act humble but I don't know how much of it is just an act and how much is real. I've never se…

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Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pilots assume when they fly a plane. Same goes for operating AI; the onus of not using it to kill everyone falls on everyone, not one person. That’s why we don’t let a random Joe fly a 747, there is extensive training, licensing, etc. Do you envision the same for operating AI? In the real world you can’t even drive a moped without licence, registration and insurance. Same goes for access to dangerous chemicals. If…

I envision that the existence of Air Traffic Control won't inherently stop people from using controlled airspace for hostile purposes. We can idealize what conduct looks like but failure of protocol still happens deliberately or by mistake. The same is going to happen with AI. There will be bad actors, and trying to stop them from using AI for whatever "hostile" purposes it might yield is going to be nigh-impossible.

But it does work, 9/11 is not a daily occurrence.
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