21–30 of 99 posts
Yes. Yes it is. Yes they are giving up on safety. They are openly saying so. It is easy to see if you take just a second to look for yourself instead of looking at press releases and algorithmic promotion.
https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-...
Not an insider but someone who uses the tools. It's a branding update, nothing more. The models haven't gotten any less sanctimonious, but the companies behind them have stopped harping on their restrictions in order to appeal to a broader customer base (gov contracts, etc.) So the guardrails (for you and me) are still there. They just stopped committing the unforced error of excluding themselves from federal procure…
I don't think it's sanctimonious to say, hey, I don't want the technology I work on to be used for targeting decisions when executing people from the sky. Especially as the tech starts to play more active roles. You know governments will be quick to shift blame to the model developers when things go wrong.
What do you do when the government come to you and tell you that they do want that, and can back it up with threats such as nationalizing your technology? (see Anthropic)
We're back to "you might not care about politics, but that won't stop politics caring about you".
More on the periphery than an insider, but I personally know researchers in all three major labs who were there long before GPT-3. They all care about existential safety, a lot. In the sense that they believe there's a meaningful chance all humans are dead a decade from now (and that that's a bad thing; unfortunately, there are also people deeply involved who don't think human extinction is a bad thing). The issue is…
Existential in what sense?
There's this one sense in which people are almost moral about it: "yup, AI is just superior to humans, nothing we can do about it."
And then there's ones where the elite class implements mass surveillance and warfare and obsoletes billions of humans of their own volition. These AI are already capable enough right now to execute on said plan (of course, with proper evil engineering)
There's two ways to "win". One is in an absolute or platonic sense - one that cares about things like values, even in the presence of extreme pushback. The other is in a darwinian sense. No, not in the meme way that again, feeds back into the narrative of "the things that survive are smarter". The things that survive, survive. It doesn't matter how it gets there.
I can agree with the second way. But it gets smuggled in as the first way, almost as an attempt to crush any and all resistance preemptively.
AI doesn't need to say, be capable of pushing the frontier of quantum mechanics to be lethal.
/endrant
Sorry, not really related to your comment, just had to get it out there.
Some of them are pandering. Some aren't. Some care. Some don't.
Businesses with ferocious funding needs are vulnerable to pressure (internal and external) to do whatever aligns with money and power. Money and power will flow into the ones so-aligned. That is the nature of the parasitic extraction models that typically drive decision making at those kinds of companies.
"safe" is such a subjective concept to begin with, have any of the model providers ever defined what they mean by "safe"? It doesn't mean much to me if a safe model is one that does not output the recipe for mustard gas, that information is trivially available elsewhere. Or, is a safe model one that doesn't come off as racist? Ok but i would classify that as unoffensive instead of safe but I admit definitions of word…
The only answer is there’s no money on it being safe. It is not an epistemic problem
Anyone pursuing safety will be outcompeted by someone who isnt. Given the amount of investments there is no patience for any calls to slow down. I tend to believe this won’t actually end in disaster as I don’t think it’s actually economical to put AI everywhere with enough real control that we can’t manage the risks as they evolve, but it’s a low confidence prediction.
The problem is that safety is written in blood. Airlines implemented flight recorders / black boxes and various processes after major incidents. A major mistake occurs that causes death or destruction to property, or both, an investigation occurs, we learn from it, and introduce new laws and regulations to prevent a reoccurence.
You can align to the user wants and so you are a hammer. This is alignment>safety.
Or you take a safety first approach where the AI decides what safe is and does its own bidding instead of yours. This is safety>alignment.
I prefer hammers to be honest. Mostly because humans can be prosecuted, AIs can't. So if the human wants to commit crime with the AI it should be able to, because the opposite turns to dystopia fast.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's sanctimonious to say, hey, I don't want the technology I work on to be used for targeting decisions when executing people from the sky. Especially as the tech starts to play more active roles. You know governments will be quick to shift blame to the model developers when things go wrong.
> I don't want the technology I work on to be used for targeting decisions when executing people from the sky What do you do when the government come to you and tell you that they do want that, and can back it up with threats such as nationalizing your technology? (see Anthropic) We're back to "you might not care about politics, but that won't stop politics caring about you".
Challenge it in court. Move the company to a different jurisdiction. Burn everything down and refuse to comply.
"safe" is such a subjective concept to begin with, have any of the model providers ever defined what they mean by "safe"? It doesn't mean much to me if a safe model is one that does not output the recipe for mustard gas, that information is trivially available elsewhere. Or, is a safe model one that doesn't come off as racist? Ok but i would classify that as unoffensive instead of safe but I admit definitions of word…
Just because safety is a hard and messy problem doesn't mean we should just wash our hands of it.