Ask HN: Have top AI research institutions just given up on the idea of safety?

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 that they're embedded in capitalism, and that drives the labs to push further and faster than is responsible. They (and unfortunately us) end up in a race where no individual feels like they can back off or halt, because if they do, they will be destroyed.

Are you asking about top AI research institutions or leading AI businesses? There’s tons of work in research communities.

Surely safety does not exclusively mean guardrails, but the philosophy and ethics instilled during training?

The ethics are exactly what the DoD is complaining about. They want any legal action to not be obstructed by guardrails.

I was the author for the practitioners implementation section for the IEEE 7010 standard for assessing human impact from AI software

https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/7010/7718/

I also worked closely with Jack Clark at OpenAI before he disappeared on all these issues as CTO back in 2018

There are literally zero “AI labs” that have ever cared about “safety”

none of them have ever done anything tangible with any kind of independent auditable third-party way that has some defined reference baseline for what is safe and what is not, how to evaluate it, or a practitioners guidance for how to determine what it is and what is not safe as a designer.

They follow the same rules as every other technology platform: do as much as you can legally get away with no more no less

I say this as somebody who’s been actively involved in the AI “safety” debate for a long time now at least since 2013

The concept itself doesn’t even make sense if you fully understand the intersectional scope of technology and society

Societies demands are the things that are unsafe not the technologies themselves

Just like Bertrand Russell said “as long as war exists all technologies will be utilized for it” - you can replace “war” for anything that you think is unsafe