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Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

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Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#111

Post by shrimpx »

flockonus wrote: post #86
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,…

While i don't disagree, that's missing the forest for the trees - the point is having the freedom to share models and continue to open-source. I'll argue that between stable diffusion and llama 2, there is nothing highly specific that prevents [very] large amount of people from adopting these models and specializing for them own needs. The tragedy would be if those went away.

Yeah but llama2-level AI may be insignificant in power compared to future models, which may be inaccessible to the public. Even assuming the algorithms/code are open, people at large won't be able to create working models.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#112

Post by drdaeman »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #2

I still don't get what the plan is to stop bad actors from developing bad AI. A bunch of good actors agreeing not to do bad things won't help it.

It will make it harder for "bad" actors to develop "bad AI" if all those "good" actors will never let anyone access their research, keep it entirely private, and only lease access to the final products. "Bad" actors will have to do everything on their own, and "good" actors will try to hire every good scientist for themselves, and possibly threaten anyone who considers working with "bad" actors or try to make this cooperation harder.

I'm not supporting this, of course. That's just what "good" actors seem to do.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#113

Post by dragonwriter »

jmfldn wrote: post #21
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.

True but there is a really difficult trade off here between a big tech monopoly and decentralised open source anarchy. I say this as a Linux-using FOSS lover, but we need to open this up as much as possible without allowing superpowers to escape into the wrong hands. I guess strong regulation is the key but I'm just handwaving here really. I don't know how the tradeoff should be made. I see great dangers in hyper-pow…

> but we need to open this up as much as possible without allowing superpowers to escape into the wrong hands

There are no superpowers, and the wrong hands are the ones least effected by any effort at restricting distribution by “strong regulation”.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#114

Post by dragonwriter »

ta1243 wrote: post #44
pdonis wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without allowing superpowers to escape into the wrong hands The wrong hands will have the same access to whatever "superpowers" AI gives regardless of what regulations are or are not put in place. Regulations can't and won't stop potential bad actors with state-level resources, like China, from using any technology they decide they want to use. So trying to regulate on that basis is a fool's errand. The real questi…

China, Iran, North Korea, Iran, US, Israel, Europe aren't bad actors. The bad actors don't have state level resources.

> China, Iran, North Korea, Iran, US, Israel, Europe aren't bad actors

On a very good day, as many as three of those might simultaneously not be bad actors.

They aren't bad actors whose access to AI technology is likely to be meaningfully impacted by regulation (but, for certain of the non-US ones, that hasn't stopped the US from trying before), but that's a different issue.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#115

Post by autoexec »

shrimpx wrote: post #108
autoexec wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Companies will always have an advantage with scale. It's not like you need a super computer though. You can have a single desktop media server in your home that does what netflix does without any problem. A single media server can even serve multiple homes.

Netflix cheats. They send non-supercomputer boxes out to ISPs to install locally. If I could convince every ISP to install a bunch of my media servers people could watch my shows from anywhere in the US too.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#116

Post by drdaeman »

imiric wrote: post #107
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 developme…

This is some weird nonsense that folks who read too much sci-fi (not realizing how unrealistic it is, with the state of modern society and technology) seem to fantasize about, and politician talking heads happily repeat because populism is on the rise again and it's easier to fight imaginary windmills than real world issues.

I believe a more realistic concern is that some workers will lose their jobs to automation as it becomes capable of running more and more complicated tasks, because it's cheaper to run or, more likely, contract to run some fancy software that can be taught its job in a natural language. And if this scales up it may require significant socioeconomic changes to work around the associated issues.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#117

Post by blacksmith_tb »

trentnix wrote: post #33
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.

> Leaving AI to a handful of companies is in my opinion the fastest route for inequality and power concentration/centralisation Well yes, that’s precisely why they are lobbying for it.

That does seem awfully convenient, yes. But I am also skeptical that Meta is railing against regulation out of their commitment to protect scrappy little startups doing AI...

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#118

Post by coryfklein »

If you think there is even a 5% chance that super-human level artificial general intelligence could be catastrophic for humanity, then the recipe for how to make AGI is of itself an infohazard far worse than the recipe for methamphetamines/nuclear weapons/etc, and precedent shows that we do in fact lock down access to the latter as a matter of public safety.

No, GPT-4 is not AGI and is not going to spell the end of the human race, but neither is pseudoephedrine itself a methamphetemine and yet we regulate its access. Not as a matter of protecting corporate profits, but for public safety.

You'll need to convince me first that there is in fact no public safety hazard from forcing unrestricted access to the ingredients in this recipe. Do I trust OpenAI to make all the morally right choices here? No, but I think their incentives are in fact more aligned with the public good than are the lowest common denominator of the general public.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#119

Post by drdaeman »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #102

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.

I thought the EO is "go research about it and give President advice by a certain date", without any concrete steps yet? The only steps there is to not use this modern tech for critical infrastructure, military and social and some other government-ran stuff while the details are being figured out.

More like "we heard some ruckus, so we need to investigate". Of course, this is concerning because who knows what the advice will be with all the corporate lobbying - but I think there is no capture, not yet. Or have I missed something?

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#120

Post by Vetch »

jmfldn wrote: post #21
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.

True but there is a really difficult trade off here between a big tech monopoly and decentralised open source anarchy. I say this as a Linux-using FOSS lover, but we need to open this up as much as possible without allowing superpowers to escape into the wrong hands. I guess strong regulation is the key but I'm just handwaving here really. I don't know how the tradeoff should be made. I see great dangers in hyper-pow…

Let's assume that these LLMs are very useful and provide boosts to their users. It follows that anyone not leveraging them where applicable would be at an economic disadvantage. Without opensource models, everyone would have to pay a Google or Microsoft tax for the pleasure of using a service which could not exist without our work. All code, writing, art, data would have to be continually sent to their servers for anyone wanting to leverage their tools. You might use a FOSS editor or shell but you are still sending all your data to Microsoft servers.

The ones in control of the models also control what sentences are sanctioned, this is a problem the more widely LLMs are used. To add insult to injury, while we are not allowed private use of the models, governments and ad-tech surveillance capabilities will skyrocket.

Do you see the problem here? The capabilities of opensource models are not anywhere near high enough to justify such a cost, now or anytime soon.

And it won't end there. As the march of progress continues, we will see the AI doom crowd agitate for tighter surveillance of money flows, limits on private compute, bandwidth limits to homes, tracking what programs we run on our computers, on who is allowed to read the latest in semiconductor research and on and on.

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