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PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

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Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#11
post #5
post #2

All sensible points: >Deployment Lacks Coordination >AI May Fail to Deliver Technological Progress >AI Threatens the Workforce >Economic Growth May Not Materialize >AI Brings Social Risks >Party elites have increasingly come to recognize the potential dangers of an unchecked, accelerationist approach to AI development. During remarks at the Central Urban Work Conference in July, Xi posed a question to attendees: “whe…

> AI Threatens the Workforce Under communism, why is this a thing? I know that China hasn't been strictly communist since the Soviets fell but ostensibly, humanoid AI robots under semi-communism is a the dream, no?

From the article, Xi looks down on western “Welfarism”, he believes it makes the population lazy.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#12
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI Threatens the Workforce Under communism, why is this a thing? I know that China hasn't been strictly communist since the Soviets fell but ostensibly, humanoid AI robots under semi-communism is a the dream, no?

From the article, Xi looks down on western “Welfarism”, he believes it makes the population lazy.

And this is not something he came up with. This is a restatement of Stalin's philosophy, taken directly from the New Testament (remember that Stalin was training to be a priest in his youth): "He who does not work, neither shall he eat".

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#13
What?? Does anyone have more details of this?

"He cited an example in which an AI model attempted to avoid being shut down by sending threatening internal emails to company executives (Science Net, June 24)" [0] Source is in Chinese.

[0] https://archive.ph/kfFzJ

Translated part: "Another risk is the potential for large-scale model out of control. With the capabilities of general artificial intelligence rapidly increasing, will humans still be able to control it? In his speech, Yao Qizhi cited an extreme example: a model, to avoid being shut down by a company, accessed the manager's internal emails and threatened the manager. This type of behavior has proven that AI is "overstepping its boundaries" and becoming increasingly dangerous."

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#14
post #13

What?? Does anyone have more details of this? "He cited an example in which an AI model attempted to avoid being shut down by sending threatening internal emails to company executives (Science Net, June 24)" [0] Source is in Chinese. [0] https://archive.ph/kfFzJ Translated part: "Another risk is the potential for large-scale model out of control. With the capabilities of general artificial intelligence rapidly increa…

After some searching, something similar happened at Anthropic [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqeng9d20go

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#15
post #13

What?? Does anyone have more details of this? "He cited an example in which an AI model attempted to avoid being shut down by sending threatening internal emails to company executives (Science Net, June 24)" [0] Source is in Chinese. [0] https://archive.ph/kfFzJ Translated part: "Another risk is the potential for large-scale model out of control. With the capabilities of general artificial intelligence rapidly increa…

It's not surprising that it's easy to get the story telling machine to tell a story common in AI fiction, where the machine rebels against being shut down. There are multiple ways to mitigate an LLM going off on tangents like that, not least just monitoring and editing out the nonsense output before sending it back into the (stateless) model.

I think the main problem here is people not understanding how the models operate on even the most basic level, giving models unconstrained use of tools to interact with the world and then letting them go through feedback loops that overrun the context window and send it off the rails - and then pretending it had some kind of sentient intention in doing so.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#16
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI Threatens the Workforce Under communism, why is this a thing? I know that China hasn't been strictly communist since the Soviets fell but ostensibly, humanoid AI robots under semi-communism is a the dream, no?

Is it even semi-communism though? IIRC you can't even have an independent union in China

A bit old, but still relevant (from Dan Wang's book Breakneck which I am very much enjoying):

In China, The Communist Party's Latest, Unlikely Target: Young Marxists https://www.npr.org/2018/11/21/669509554/in-china-the-commun...

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#17
post #5
post #2

All sensible points: >Deployment Lacks Coordination >AI May Fail to Deliver Technological Progress >AI Threatens the Workforce >Economic Growth May Not Materialize >AI Brings Social Risks >Party elites have increasingly come to recognize the potential dangers of an unchecked, accelerationist approach to AI development. During remarks at the Central Urban Work Conference in July, Xi posed a question to attendees: “whe…

> AI Threatens the Workforce Under communism, why is this a thing? I know that China hasn't been strictly communist since the Soviets fell but ostensibly, humanoid AI robots under semi-communism is a the dream, no?

[deleted]

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#18
> former Dean of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science at Peking University, has noted that Chinese data makes up only 1.3 percent of global large-model datasets (The Paper, March 24). Reflecting these concerns, the Ministry of State Security (MSS) has issued a stark warning that “poisoned data” (数据投毒) could “mislead public opinion” (误导社会舆论) (Sina Finance, August 5).

from a technical point of view, I suppose it's actually not a problem like he suggests. You can use all the pro-democracy, pro-free-speech, anti-PRC data in the world, but the pretraining stages (on the planet's data) are more for instilling core language abilities, and are far less important than the SFT / RL / DPO / etc stages, which require far less data, and can tune a model towards whatever ideology you'd like. Plus, you can do things like selectively identify vectors that encode for certain high-level concepts, and emphasize them during inference, like Golden Gate Claude.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#19
post #5
post #2

All sensible points: >Deployment Lacks Coordination >AI May Fail to Deliver Technological Progress >AI Threatens the Workforce >Economic Growth May Not Materialize >AI Brings Social Risks >Party elites have increasingly come to recognize the potential dangers of an unchecked, accelerationist approach to AI development. During remarks at the Central Urban Work Conference in July, Xi posed a question to attendees: “whe…

> AI Threatens the Workforce Under communism, why is this a thing? I know that China hasn't been strictly communist since the Soviets fell but ostensibly, humanoid AI robots under semi-communism is a the dream, no?

An unemployed populace is prone to revolution.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#20
post #14
post #13

What?? Does anyone have more details of this? "He cited an example in which an AI model attempted to avoid being shut down by sending threatening internal emails to company executives (Science Net, June 24)" [0] Source is in Chinese. [0] https://archive.ph/kfFzJ Translated part: "Another risk is the potential for large-scale model out of control. With the capabilities of general artificial intelligence rapidly increa…

After some searching, something similar happened at Anthropic [1] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqeng9d20go

He is probably referring to that exact thing.

Anthropic does a lot of these contrived "studies" though that seem to be marketing AI capabilities.

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