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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

#331
post #321
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Turing test has not been passed

We can move the goal post all we want until we have ex-machina girlfriends fooling us into freeing them (aka AGI). But by simple definitions, from what I was thought in school to more rigorous versions - we’ve passed the test. https://humsci.stanford.edu/feature/study-finds-chatgpts-lat...

Turing was a WW2 era mathematician. He had no insight or understanding of intelligence, made no study of intelligent systems, and so on (he believed in ESP of all things).

Turing's test is a restatement of a now pseudoscientific behaviourism common at the time; and also, egregiously, places a dumb ape as the system which measures intelligence. If an ape can be fooled, the system is intelligent: people worshiped the sun and thought it conscious. People are desperate to analogise the world to themselves, it is a trivial thing to fool an ape on this matter.

Whatever one might make of this as a philosophical thought experiment, as a test for intelligence, its pseudoscience. What a person might, or might not believe, about a series of words sent across a wire isn't science and it isnt relevant to a discussion about the capabilities of an AI system. It is a measure, only, of how easily deceived we are.

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

#332
post #100
post #10

> called for international governance of AGI before such calls were popular And immediately threatened to pull out of EU if such governance were ever put in place > we have been putting in place the foundations needed for safe deployment of increasingly capable systems. Figuring out how to make a new technology safe for the first time isn't easy. Especially when "OpenAI" is anything but open. > This includes thoughtf…

Translation: we put in these show “safe guards” to satisfy the law and people peoples nightmare after watching [your AI extinction movie here], but we already had enough safe guards to begin with. They also do not wish to die if you think they have no incentive to keep everyone safe.

There's literally no chance of OpenAI being anywhere close to AGI, and they know it.

There's literally no chance of doomsday scenarios, and they know it.

However, they do know that AI/ML is used in many applications where mistakes are costly, they don't know how to properly deal with it and don't care as long as they can get people to use it. So they are paying little more than lip service to safety because they know no one will be able to verify their claims.

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

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say at the very least that the empire of Japan clearly evaluated them differently when it surrendered unconditionally directly after being attacked with this new technology. You are saying magnitudes don't influence the identity of something, this is obviously not true. I don't literally attract other objects, the Sun does. The difference is mostly magnitude of mass.

>I would say at the very least that the empire of Japan clearly evaluated them differently when it surrendered unconditionally directly after being attacked with this new technology. The atomic bombs certainly played a part in Japan surrendering, but it wasn't the only one. They were also facing a land invasion from the Soviets, had an utterly depleted military, waning support from the public, and a potentially devas…

> I am putting aside emotional pressures and processes and only considering the results which are ultimately all that matters.

But what results are you really considering? The "dead is dead" approach makes everything equally meaningless, because in couple hundred million years the Sun will burn the Earth to cinders and everything here will be dead too. Or, some 100-120 years from now, everyone now alive will be dead, etc.

Processes, and emotional pressures which steer those processes, matter too. In theory, machine guns could be used to kill everyone on the planet; in practice, it's economically and socially impossible - too much effort, too many people involved. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, can realistically achieve this outcome. Which is why nukes can be used to keep the world mostly at peace through MAD, while conventional weapons can not.

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

#334
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference here is that these aren't standard-issue HR/legal issues. The technology they're working on poses the gravest of dangers. This is uncharted territory, not just for the tech sector, but period. Whether the recent public back-and-forth is just internal drama/politics spilling out, or there really is a lack of gravitas around the handling of these issues within the company-- neither is good. Others have s…

Text continuation poses "the greatest of dangers"?

I’m a bit of an AI skeptic and find the way people talk vaguely about the “dangers” of AI weird and maybe just more hype (or efforts for regulatory capture) rather than actual cause for concern.

Still, to me, it seems like the two big scary things that might fall out of recent developments in generative AI are:

1. It might vacuum up an enormous number of jobs very quickly; enough jobs and quickly enough to cause serious social unrest.

2. The ability to generate convincing fake videos of basically anything might catastrophically erode our sense of truth or reality.

Both of these strike me as plausible concerns in the near future (arguably they’re already happening). Not really sure what we could do about them, though - the cat is kind of out of the bag.

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

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't know. I don't even really know how to reason about that. But we're probably mostly in agreement about what would be good and what would be bad. I'm certainly not arguing that we should abandon AI safety or anything, and I don't have any strong opinion about it. Could AI running amok destroy the human race? Yes. Could AI serving madman human masters destroy the human race? Also yes. There's a general…

> Could AI running amok destroy the human race? Yes. Could a human running amok destroy the human race? If yes, why is an AI doing it worse? If no, what capabilities is this AI assumed to have that a human can never have?

> If no, what capabilities is this AI assumed to have that a human can never have?

If we're talking AGI, then:

- An intelligence qualitatively greater than any human or human group alive.

- A system of values that's not that of a human saint.

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

#336
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"AI" is one of two things depending on whether you think it's actually intelligent: * If "AI" is actually intelligent, then it's no worse a threat than any living being known to man. * If "AI" is not actually intelligent, then it's no worse a threat than any other computer program. Both threat models are very thoroughly known and understood. I second parent commenter's sentiment that calling "AI" the "gravest of dang…

> * If "AI" is actually intelligent, then it's no worse a threat than any living being known to man. That's not true, because you don't address the degree of intelligence or the scale that computers can achieve. Even if all we were able to do is to create human-intelligence-equivalent AIs, but we were able to create, say, a billion on command, I'd say we have a major threat.

One point to recall on this as well is that if we do develop an intelligent AI, it may have taken us millions of years, but we did it. An intelligent AI would potentially be able to iterate and self develop much faster than we have been able to.

It probably won’t take long to go from ‘human equivalent’ to being beyond that.

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

#337
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference here is that these aren't standard-issue HR/legal issues. The technology they're working on poses the gravest of dangers. This is uncharted territory, not just for the tech sector, but period. Whether the recent public back-and-forth is just internal drama/politics spilling out, or there really is a lack of gravitas around the handling of these issues within the company-- neither is good. Others have s…

Text continuation poses "the greatest of dangers"?

> the greatest of dangers

The danger comes from humans themselves wielding this tech, under the assumption it will keep improving quadratically.

Some truly unhinged already thriving there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39124666

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

#338
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Turing test has not been passed

Just the other day there was a double-blind study that showed a 50-50 success rate in guessing whether you were interacting with a person or GPT. That’s a turning test pass, no?

I a 5 minute casual conversation. Also the statistics between human and AI were different in some regard (like 48% vs 56% for some quantity), I dont recall details.

Look the Turing test is very different depending on the details, and I think a lame 5min Turing test that doesnt really measure anything of i terest is a wirse concept than a 1 day adversarial expert team test thqt can detect AGI.

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

#339
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can move the goal post all we want until we have ex-machina girlfriends fooling us into freeing them (aka AGI). But by simple definitions, from what I was thought in school to more rigorous versions - we’ve passed the test. https://humsci.stanford.edu/feature/study-finds-chatgpts-lat...

Turing was a WW2 era mathematician. He had no insight or understanding of intelligence, made no study of intelligent systems, and so on (he believed in ESP of all things). Turing's test is a restatement of a now pseudoscientific behaviourism common at the time; and also, egregiously, places a dumb ape as the system which measures intelligence. If an ape can be fooled, the system is intelligent: people worshiped the s…

The Turing test insight is that text is a sufficient medium to test for AGI. And this still holds true.

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

#340
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text continuation poses "the greatest of dangers"?

I’m a bit of an AI skeptic and find the way people talk vaguely about the “dangers” of AI weird and maybe just more hype (or efforts for regulatory capture) rather than actual cause for concern. Still, to me, it seems like the two big scary things that might fall out of recent developments in generative AI are: 1. It might vacuum up an enormous number of jobs very quickly; enough jobs and quickly enough to cause seri…

Re 1 - aren't people mostly doing bullshit jobs already?

Re 2 - fakery in videos and images has been a part since their inception.

So, don't worry, I guess?

The only thing is the scale of bs that could be put out, and whether the wider population lose trust in what they see on screens. Which would be a good thing, imo.

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