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Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

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Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#101

Post by Eisenstein »

arsome wrote: post #97
ayakang31415 wrote: post #79

I still don't have any sense of urgency to create and to regulate AI safety protocols. AI that we call is just software with tuned parameters. You input data into it, and it does some computation on chips, and it spits out data. That is all it needs. My sense is that no harm can come from it, but some harm can be inflicted by people who use it.

Yeah - this stupidity with regulating AI goes hand in hand with regulating cryptography - illegal math is simply not feasible.

Illegal chemistry is also not feasible, but we can restrict availability to certain chemicals to try and prevent people from doing things likes like making bombs or turning their neighborhood radioactive while messing around. Of course some people will find a way but that doesn't mean the door has to be left completely open for anyone with a credit card to be able to order large amounts of high purity H2O2 for example.

I am not advocating for this particular issue, I am pointing out the flaw in your metaphor -- you can't restrict the math but unless people figure out how to make their own wafer fab then you can at least try to restrict the ability to do it.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#102

Post by mark_l_watson »

The recent Executive Order is a good example of regulatory capture. This probably locks in a large advantage for the few tech giants who are so-far winning the LLM race (or AGI race).

I do wish my government would get tougher on user privacy issues, but that is a very different subject.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#103

Post by JW_00000 »

chasd00 wrote: post #73
mrangle wrote: post #57

Statements to the effect that AI will be controlled for safety are pretentious. As well as being a characteristic of only this early time. The premise of AI danger, in the real sense of the word, has always been rooted in the seemingly accurate logic that it won't be controllable. If anything, restrictions on any scale only allow for compeitition to catch up to an surpass it on that scale. Restrict an AI to be polite…

>Statements to the effect that AI will be controlled for safety are pretentious. and "safety" is such a loaded term these days. What exactly do they mean by safety? Prevention of launching ICBMs or prevention of not using the gender neutral pronoun "they"?

The Executive Order [1] is clearly more focused on the former. Some of the things they mention (I haven't read it all):

* creating chemical/biological/nuclear weapons

* biohazards

* outputs that could threaten to critical infrastructure (e.g. energy infrastructure)

* threats to national security

* cyberattacks, e.g. automatic discovery of vulnerabilities/exploits

* software that would "influence real or virtual events" (I'm guessing they mean elections?)

* social engineering

* generating fake news / propaganda

* generating child porn or deep fakes

Note that it's not banning these, but asking US government departments as well as private companies, AI experts, academia, for their inputs on what regulations could/should be. In that sense, this Mozilla letter is a response to the EO.

Also, there's no mention of the use of certain pronouns, nor of an AI-caused apocalypse (not even a mention of paperclips!).

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#104

Post by Eisenstein »

Mistletoe wrote: post #27
CamperBob2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is no different than proliferating nuclear weapons I mean, once the discussion goes THIS far off the rails of reality, where do we go from here?

Can someone outline how AI could actually harm us directly? I don’t believe for a second sci-fi novel nonsense about self-replicating robots that we can’t unplug. My Roomba can’t even do its very simple task without getting caught on the rug. I don’t know of any complicated computing cluster or machine that exists that wouldn’t implode without human intervention on an almost daily level. If we are talking about AI st…

Consider an AI as a personal assistant. The AI is in charge of filtering and sorting your email. It has as a priority to make your life more efficient. It decides that your life is more efficient if you don't see emails that upset you, so it deletes them. Now consider that you are in charge of something very important.

It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to come up with scenarios like these.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#105

Post by chasd00 »

chakalakasp wrote: post #14
silenced_trope wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, this is existing players (OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, FB, etc) protecting their moat. AI can't be "paused". Sometimes I see the question "should we put a pause on AI development?" It doesn't mean anything. Some countries like China may say they're on board with pausing it but would they actually do so? Or just sign on and allow their companies to get an edge by not enforcing a pause. Same thing with the existin…

Yes and no. AI is no different than proliferating nuclear weapons or deciding to burn all the fossil fuels -- on an individual competitive level, it makes sense to do this more and more to remain competitive. On a systems-whole level it leads to catastrophe. The whole tragedy of the commons thing, or, more recently described, the Moloch problem. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation... Yann LeC…

AI isn't anything like nuclear weapons. One possible analogy i can draw is how scientists generally agreed to hold off on attempting to clone a human. Then that one guy in China did and everyone got on his case so bad he hasn't done it again (that we know of). In the best case, I could see AI regulation taking that form, as in, release a breakthrough get derided so much you leave the field. God, what a sad world to live in.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#106

Post by chasd00 »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #94
Mistletoe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone outline how AI could actually harm us directly? I don’t believe for a second sci-fi novel nonsense about self-replicating robots that we can’t unplug. My Roomba can’t even do its very simple task without getting caught on the rug. I don’t know of any complicated computing cluster or machine that exists that wouldn’t implode without human intervention on an almost daily level. If we are talking about AI st…

I don't need to know how a chess computer will beat me to know that it will beat me. If the only way you will entertain x-risk is to have a specific scenario described to you that you personally find plausible, you will never see any risk coming that isn't just a variation of what you are already familiar with. Do not constrain yourself to considering only that which can be thought up by your limited imagination.

> Do not constrain yourself to considering only that which can be thought up by your limited imagination.

Don't let your limited imagination constrain you're ability to live in fear of what could be. Is that what you mean? So it's no longer sufficient to live in fear of everything, now you need to live in fear even when you can't think of anything to be afraid of. No thanks.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#107

Post by imiric »

ayakang31415 wrote: post #79

I still don't have any sense of urgency to create and to regulate AI safety protocols. AI that we call is just software with tuned parameters. You input data into it, and it does some computation on chips, and it spits out data. That is all it needs. My sense is that no harm can come from it, but some harm can be inflicted by people who use it.

> My sense is that no harm can come from it, but some harm can be inflicted by people who use it.

The concern is not that AI is harmful on its own, and that it will unleash a Skynet scenario. It's precisely that it will be abused by humans in ways we can't even predict yet. The same can be said about any technology, but AI is particularly concerning because of its unlimited potential, extremely fast pace of development, and humanity's lack of preparation on a political, legal and social level to deal with the consequences. So I think you're severely underestimating "some harm" there.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#108

Post by shrimpx »

autoexec wrote: post #89
shrimpx wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power is already concentrated in the sense that only the wealthy can train. We should make kickstarter-type models to fund open source AI training, because it'll likely continue to cost millions to tens of millions for cutting edge models. With Llama2 we're at Meta's mercy, as it cost 20M to train. No guarantee Meta will continue to give us next-gen models. And even if it does, we're stuck with their training biases,…

> Power is already concentrated in the sense that only the wealthy can train. That situation will change as technology evolves. We'll eventually reach a point where a normal desktop PC can train AI. The wealthy will always be able to do it faster, but the gap will shrink with time. The trick is making sure that laws aren't put in place now that would restrict our ability to do that freely once the technology is there…

That didn't happen with cloud though. I know it's not entirely apples to apples, but you still need a computer the size of a large building to serve Netflix, etc.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#109

Post by drdaeman »

Eisenstein wrote: post #101
arsome wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - this stupidity with regulating AI goes hand in hand with regulating cryptography - illegal math is simply not feasible.

Illegal chemistry is also not feasible, but we can restrict availability to certain chemicals to try and prevent people from doing things likes like making bombs or turning their neighborhood radioactive while messing around. Of course some people will find a way but that doesn't mean the door has to be left completely open for anyone with a credit card to be able to order large amounts of high purity H2O2 for exampl…

But is chemistry illegal? I think anyone can have all the equations they want to have (like, idk, U238 -> Th234 + alpha particle) - just can't possess some actual substances (Uranium). So I don't think the comparison is valid.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#110

Post by najork »

jeanloolz wrote: post #12

Leaving AI to a handful of companies is in my opinion the fastest route for inequality and power concentration/centralisation, and this is in a way an AI disaster we should be worrisome. Power corrupts, great power greatly corrupts, this is not entirely new. From where I stand, it looks like the pandora box has already been opened anyway. The era of hugginface and/or Llama2 models is only going to grow from there.

I completely agree. AI naturally lends itself to monopoly formation, and stifled competition in the space is something that we as consumers (and stakeholders of human progress) should be wary of. I wrote down my thoughts in a brief blog post and I'd love your take on it.

https://radiantai.com/blog/building-resilience-into-ai

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