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OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

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Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#21

Post by mapmeld »

zer00eyz wrote: post #2

What is the actual threat of AI? Job loss? Tech already did that, the little old ladies that opened your envelope at sears and roebuck got replace by computers a long time ago... Deepfakes? Are we talking the moon landing? Avengers movies? AGI taking over the world? Does no one realize that without people going out every day and doing work the world ends in a week... Does no one remember when we had the spate of tran…

Job loss for knowledge workers, especially affecting intro jobs (I'm thinking of frontend dev or paralegal work, which is how a lot of people get a foothold in these fields). What are reasonable degrees to take out a college loan for in 2024?

Militaries using AI checkpoints, guards, patrols, and loitering munitions (from a Humanitarian / rules of war perspective, not necessarily existential risk). Possibly to continue regimes where human soldiers would defect or differentiate civilians from armed opponents.

AI-reinforced media bubbles promoting alternative realities (most people blame this on social media, but from QAnonCasualties it seems like YouTube and Facebook recommendations hooked a lot of people before mainstream companies assessed whether they could be harmful). I think this is more core than "deepfakes" because people believe even fake Tweet screenshots if it backs the narrative.

Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#22

Post by 39896880 »

moralestapia wrote: post #14
radicaldreamer wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The threat basically boils down to runaway destructive swarms which destroy infrastructure or poison the atmosphere etc. Imagine an AI agent which manipulates exposed SCADA systems. That could be incredibly destructive!

/s? GP's point (and I agree) is that an evil actor could, in principle, do those things already (and a much more intelligent one, while we're at it). And yet, it doesn't happen. Why? Because reality is not a "winner takes all" game. Actions carry consequences and other factors limit the extent of damage any actor could do. It is way more threatening to human life that there exists, today, a huge stockpile of nuclear…

An evil actor could do those things, but they don’t because smart people work really hard to build systems that make doing those things more difficult and/or with dire consequences to the potential actors. Shrugging at the AI threat reminds me of “I felt better so I stopped taking the medication.”

Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#23

Post by rgbrenner »

The term "AI" hypes the capabilities and dangers of LLMs by invoking lay people's thoughts about AGI and sentience. I think firms like OpenAI play up this idea to get people interested in the tech; and some firms seem to be working toward legislation to cement their position and limit competition (since just creating an LLM is not a sufficient moat).. and this AGI angle appears to play well in lobbying.

OpenAI--one of the most vocal about the danger--is particularly vulnerable to open competition since they lack the device control that Microsoft, Google, and Apple have. And while Microsoft has funded a lot of OpenAI, they actually have a parallel AI team. The moment they no longer need OpenAI, Microsoft can pull out of their deal. OpenAIs position is particularly precarious (similar to Anthropics position--another vocal AI-danger proponent).

Ilya says he thinks LLMs are capable of achieving AGI all by themselves, but there's no evidence of that and it's open for debate. LLMs simply generate the next token based on the scoring of previous tokens.. and then does that repeatedly. I'm very skeptical of the idea that the human mind is equivalent to an LLM.

Don't get me wrong.. this tech is all very impressive. But the idea that there's no limit to this tech is unfounded. And if people understood the way LLMs generate tokens, I doubt there would be as much discussion about the dangers of LLMs.

Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#24

Post by reducesuffering »

fwn wrote: post #18
OmarShehata wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might enjoy this article ( https://aisafety.dance/ ) the section: "No, AI Safety isn't a fringe concern by sci-fi weebs" > AI Safety / AI Risk used to be less mainstream, but now in 2024, the US & UK governments now have AI Safety-specific departments![10]10 This resulted from many of the top AI researchers raising alarm bells about it. These folks include: > Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio > Stuart Russell and…

I think it is pretty telling that in response to a direct question about what we have to fear from AI, you link to an article that itself remains so obviously vague that they felt the need to address that they are just appealing to other authorities. An actual plausible threat should be easy to describe. In terms of arguments, vagueness indicates weakness.

No, it’s pretty telling of the state of the intellectual discourse when we’re still getting “we could just turn it off” level responses, so appeals to knowledgeable scientific authorities is the most convincing for people who have strong opinions but haven’t done even 30 minutes of grappling with the case made by those they already dismissed. For the more well-read, there are plausible threads:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a...

Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#25

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

zer00eyz wrote: post #2

What is the actual threat of AI? Job loss? Tech already did that, the little old ladies that opened your envelope at sears and roebuck got replace by computers a long time ago... Deepfakes? Are we talking the moon landing? Avengers movies? AGI taking over the world? Does no one realize that without people going out every day and doing work the world ends in a week... Does no one remember when we had the spate of tran…

> Where is the threat from ML that doesn't already exist

On this site, of all sites, it's remarkable how many people overlook that scale and automation lead to important qualitative shifts.

Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#26

Post by moralestapia »

39896880 wrote: post #22
moralestapia wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/s? GP's point (and I agree) is that an evil actor could, in principle, do those things already (and a much more intelligent one, while we're at it). And yet, it doesn't happen. Why? Because reality is not a "winner takes all" game. Actions carry consequences and other factors limit the extent of damage any actor could do. It is way more threatening to human life that there exists, today, a huge stockpile of nuclear…

An evil actor could do those things, but they don’t because smart people work really hard to build systems that make doing those things more difficult and/or with dire consequences to the potential actors . Shrugging at the AI threat reminds me of “I felt better so I stopped taking the medication.”

>smart people work really hard ...

Nah, you'll be surprised at how dumb things in the real world could be; like, the nuclear briefcase password is probably 0000-0000.

Punishment and retaliation is what deters most people from going rogue. Note that by retaliation I do not mean "fear of retaliation", I mean the actual consequences that come to you from FAFO in the real world.

Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#29

Post by benlivengood »

rgbrenner wrote: post #23

The term "AI" hypes the capabilities and dangers of LLMs by invoking lay people's thoughts about AGI and sentience. I think firms like OpenAI play up this idea to get people interested in the tech; and some firms seem to be working toward legislation to cement their position and limit competition (since just creating an LLM is not a sufficient moat).. and this AGI angle appears to play well in lobbying. OpenAI--one o…

Gato and RoboCat[0] are examples of what transformer architectures with environment/action tokens can accomplish. These are pretrained with visual and experiential data, but ultimately are "simply generating the next token". This is why it's likely that transformers are capable of AGI, and the top models are no longer strictly LLMs since they are multimodal.

[0] https://deepmind.google/research/publications/35829/

Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#30

Post by kelseyfrog »

zer00eyz wrote: post #2

What is the actual threat of AI? Job loss? Tech already did that, the little old ladies that opened your envelope at sears and roebuck got replace by computers a long time ago... Deepfakes? Are we talking the moon landing? Avengers movies? AGI taking over the world? Does no one realize that without people going out every day and doing work the world ends in a week... Does no one remember when we had the spate of tran…

> What is the actual threat of AI?

This is like asking a dodo in 1598 to be able to explain what the threat of humans are. Their inability to do so isn't related to the probability that the threat is real.

Likewise, our inability to articulate the threat posed by AI isn't evidence that a threat does not exist. We simply don't know that threat is and even if we knew there was a threat, there's no guarantee that we would be able to comprehend it enough to describe it. Rather, our inability to comprehend super-intellegent threats make us more susceptible to identifying and stopping them.

Why don't we apply the same logic to the status quo? Because we are, for the most part, exposed to shocks and change within the regime of normal variance and have continued to exist which is evidence for continued existence. Planetary co-habitation with super-intelligence represents a many-times-beyond the standard variance of shocks to our natural order.

If any of the lifeforms we've extincted already were as intelligent as humans, would that have increased their chances of survival? Personally, I see that as an easy yes which implies that differences in intelligence are at least somewhat correlated with extinction outcomes. But perhaps others see it otherwise.

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