31–40 of 99 posts
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…
These token predictors will never be smart enough to be dangerous.
Every misalignment/AI safety paper is basically a metaphor for how corporate values can misalign with actual human values under capitalism.
The first thing that happened when "AI Safety" became useful to corporate interests, is that the "goal" of it instantly became "profitability" not safety. "AI Safety" became about liability minimization, not actual safety for humanity. (Look! the system is now misaligned with the goal, wonder how that happened!?)
AI Safety concerns were instantly proven true, it happened, and now we live in the world where it is too late to prevent the superintelligences that we call "corporations" from paper-clipping us to death in pursuit of profit.
"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…
But give that same recipe to a wannabe terrorist and suddenly it is dangerous. Context matters, not just the information.
If some company says security or safety, don't expect much more than words.
"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…
What if I tell the model to go commit fraud or crimes and it complies? What if users are having psychotic episodes driven by their interactions with the model? Just because safety is a hard and messy problem doesn't mean we should just wash our hands of it.
Maybe this is an outdated definition, but I've always thought of safety as being about preventing injury. Things like safety glasses and hardhats on the work site, warning about slippery floors and so on. I think people are trying to expand the word to mean a great many more things in the context of AI, which doesn't help when it comes to focusing on it.
I think we need a different, clearer word for "The AI output shouldn't contain certain unauthorized things."
The AI proponents who originally spoke of safety did so because they are aware of the dangers. However they, like all of us, are not able to change human nature or society. Molloch will drag them into the most dangerous game or eliminate them from the competition. Only with time, death, and damage (and many lawsuits) will any measure of safety be gained. The righteous will say "see we said AI was dangerous!" but that will be the only satisfaction they can have, many years after the damage is done.
If we want to speedrun safety, the only real mechanism is to make legal recourse more viable (e.g. $1M penalty per copyright infringement, $100M per AI-related death, etc.). If this was the case, lawyers self-interest and greed will compete with the self-interest and greed of the AI corps, balancing the risk (but there is no altruistic route to solving this).
Maybe the text prediction programs are too familiar to people for the Skynet marketing to bite like it used to.
Or maybe it was not just a marketing thing and the AI bros really did believe we were a few GPUs and some training data away from AGI, but now they no longer believe this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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".
I know this is a foreign concept to some, but you can have a backbone. 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…
What if I tell the model to go commit fraud or crimes and it complies? What if users are having psychotic episodes driven by their interactions with the model? Just because safety is a hard and messy problem doesn't mean we should just wash our hands of it.
Instead of making actual improvement on the subject (you name it, safety, security, etc), it becomes a checkbox exercise and metrics and bureaucracies become increasingly decoupled from truth.