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OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

lawfaremedia.org

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Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#31

Post by mysterydip »

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…

Having a customer service issue (locked account, fraud on credit card, lost package, etc) and literally never being able to reach a human:

"Your problem has been found statistically unlikely and the projected calculations of the loss of your future business does not justify the risk to fix it. This is our final determination. There is no manager to speak to, and no higher tier to escalate to. Have a nice day."

Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#32

Post by fwn »

reducesuffering wrote: post #24
fwn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

First, I want to address the precision of your response:

The content you link to is about AGI, which is a theoretical concept, and it is not at all clear that the path to AGI is incremental from our current approaches.

Regardless, it really feels like a pure marketing move to link concerns about AGI to our current tool chain of decision engines, content generators, and spell checkers.

Nothing that is publicly known about what OpenAI or its foes are currently working on suggests in any way that it should be linked to the emerging of AGI.

Now to the more general points made in the content you link to:

As the author states in the preamble, this is a "poorly organized list of individual rants".

And it seems that none of those make a good and plausible case for why even the theoretical idea(!) of AGI is particularly dangerous. Of course, with a good deal of good will, I can follow most of the ideas listed, but it feels forced and certainly requirement heavy.

Remember that the state they are thinking about is is in the future (probably far), and everything they write is hypothetical.

It's like if we learned to throw a stone for the first time, and suddenly the village is full of alarmist people discussing high-minded ideas about "what if everyone is suddenly thrown away, by which we mean displaced at high speed in a vaguely known direction - by a force we yet can not understand?

It's mostly not serious or related to the current technologies.

If someone is alarmist and wants to be taken serious they should be required to make an actual argument, themselves. .. without fleeing into references, vagueness or unnecessary complexity.

Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#33

Post by bunderbunder »

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…

> 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.

This debate is probably mostly just an argument over semantics. What exactly do we mean by "Large Language Model"? What exactly do we mean by "Artifical General Intelligence"?

On the strict end of things, if "LLM" the current state-of-the-art generative transformer architecture, and if we think that "general intelligence" requires something like sentience, or at least a certain capacity for flexible, iterative symbolic reasoning, then I think that most people would agree that LLMs clearly aren't any more capable of achieving artificial intelligence than a stock 1989 Buick LeSabre is of achieving sustained flight.

But the more flexible you're willing to be about how you define "large language model" and "artificial general intelligence", the more room there is for it to be possible. But also, the less practical value there is in making such a statement. Beyond some hand-waviness event horizon, you can probably just declare that any model capable of handling natural language inputs and outputs is a language model, take a nice slow toke, and begin pontificating about the Church-Turing thesis.

Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#34

Post by melkor73 »

greenavocado wrote: post #3
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…

The risk is in losing control of the narrative. That's all the top brass actually cares about. As you mentioned we already have deepfakes, spam, etc. and the world hasn't imploded.

Just wait.

Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#35

Post by fuzzfactor »

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…

Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we ourselves possess.

- Gandalf the Grey

Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#36

Post by ls612 »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #30
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 wou…

This sounds like an unfalsifiable claim of AI threats so I’m inclined to dismiss it out of hand.

Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#37

Post by radicaldreamer »

moralestapia wrote: post #26
39896880 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The codes to launch the nukes was literally just zeroes until 1977. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_action_link#:~:text....

Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#38

Post by kelseyfrog »

ls612 wrote: post #36
kelseyfrog wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wou…

This sounds like an unfalsifiable claim of AI threats so I’m inclined to dismiss it out of hand.

Anything that's never happened can't.

Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#39

Post by [deleted] »

quonn wrote: post #15
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…

Actually almost nobody got replaced by a computer. People retired and nobody new was hired. For others, roles shifted in a minor way. If AI ever replaces white collar jobs then that will be at an unprecedented scale and with essentially nowhere to shift to. But so far it doesn‘t seem to happen.

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI No Longer Takes Safety Seriously

#40

Post by zer00eyz »

mysterydip wrote: post #31
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…

Having a customer service issue (locked account, fraud on credit card, lost package, etc) and literally never being able to reach a human: "Your problem has been found statistically unlikely and the projected calculations of the loss of your future business does not justify the risk to fix it. This is our final determination. There is no manager to speak to, and no higher tier to escalate to. Have a nice day."

We did this years ago, and did not need ai.

This ship sailed.

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