Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

Because it reads as relatively naive and a pretty old horse in the debate of sentience

I'm all for villainizing the figureheads of the current generation of this movement. The politics of this sea-change are fascinating and worthy of discussion.

But out-of-hand dismissal of what has been accomplished smacks more to me of lack of awareness of the history of the study of the brain, cognition, language, and computers, than it does of a sound debate position.

> You can do bad things with it but people who believe we're on the brink of singularity, that we're all going to lose our jobs to chatgpt and that world destruction is coming are on hard drugs.

Geoff Hinton, Stuart Russell, Jürgen Schmidhuber and Demis Hassabis all talk about something singularity-like as fairly near term, and all have concerns with ruin, though not all think it is the most likely outcome.

That's the backprop guy, top AI textbook guy, co-inventor of LSTMs (only thing that worked well for sequences before transformers)/highwaynets-resnets/arguably GANs, and the founder of DeepMind.

Schmidhuber (for context, he was talking near term, next few decades):

> All attempts at making sure there will be only provably friendly AIs seem doomed. Once somebody posts the recipe for practically feasible self-improving Goedel machines or AIs in form of code into which one can plug arbitrary utility functions, many users will equip such AIs with many different goals, often at least partially conflicting with those of humans. The laws of physics and the availability of physical resources will eventually determine which utility functions will help their AIs more than others to multiply and become dominant in competition with AIs driven by different utility functions. Which values are "good"? The survivors will define this in hindsight, since only survivors promote their values.

Hassasbis:

> We are approaching an absolutely critical moment in human history. That might sound a bit grand, but I really don't think that is overstating where we are. I think it could be an incredible moment, but it's also a risky moment in human history. My advice would be I think we should not "move fast and break things." [...] Depending on how powerful the technology is, you know it may not be possible to fix that afterwards.

Hinton:

> Well, here’s a subgoal that almost always helps in biology: get more energy. So the first thing that could happen is these robots are going to say, ‘Let’s get more power. Let’s reroute all the electricity to my chips.’ Another great subgoal would be to make more copies of yourself. Does that sound good?

Russell:

“Intelligence really means the power to shape the world in your interests, and if you create systems that are more intelligent than humans either individually or collectively then you’re creating entities that are more powerful than us,” said Russell at the lecture organized by the CITRIS Research Exchange and Berkeley AI Research Lab. “How do we retain power over entities more powerful than us, forever?”

“If we pursue [our current approach], then we will eventually lose control over the machines. But, we can take a different route that actually leads to AI systems that are beneficial to humans,” said Russell. “We could, in fact, have a better civilization.”

It's very sad that people lack the imagination for the possible horrors that lie beyond. You don't even need the imagination; Hinton, Bengio, Tegmark, Yudkowsky, Musk, etc. are spelling it out for you.

This moment, 80% of comments are derisive, and you actually have zero idea how much is computer generated bot content meant to sway opinion by post-GPT AI industry who see themselves as becoming the next iPhone-era billionaires. We are fast approaching a reality where our information space breaks down. Where almost all text you get from HN, Twitter, News, Substack; almost all video you get from Youtube, Instagram, TikTok; is just computer generated output meant to sway opinion and/or make $.

I can't know Altman's true motives. But this is also what it looks like when a frontrunner is terrified at what happens when GPT6 is released and if they don't, the rest of the people who see billionaire $ coming their way are close at your heels trying to leapfrog you if you stop. Consequences? What consequences? We all know social media has been a net good, right? Many of you sound exactly like the few remaining social media cheerleaders (of which there were plenty 5 years ago) who still think Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, isn't causing depression and manipulation. If you appreciated what The Social Dilemma illuminated, then watch the same people on AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ

Give me a break. Very interesting theoretical work and all, but show me where it's actually being used to do anything of value, beyond publication fodder. You could also say MLPs are proved to be universal approximators, and can therefore model any function, including the one that maps sensory inputs to cognition. But the disconnect between this theory and reality is so great that it's a moot point. No one uses MLPs this way for a reason. No one uses GATs in systems that people are discussing right now either. GATs rarely even beat GCNs by any significant margin in graph benchmarks.

This is the message I shared with my senator (edited to remove information which could identify me). I hope others will send similar messages.

Dear Senator [X],

I am an engineer working for [major employer in the state]. I am extremely concerned about the message that Sam Altman is sharing with the Judiciary committee today.

Altman wants to create regulatory roadblocks to developing AI. My company produces AI-enabled products. If these roadblocks had been in place two years ago, my company would not have been able to invest into AI. Now, because we had the freedom to innovate, AI will be bringing new, high paying jobs to our factories in our state.

While AI regulation is important, it is crucial that there are no roadblocks stopping companies and individuals from even trying to build AIs. Rather, regulation should focus on ensuring the safety of AIs once they are ready to be put into widespread use - this would allow companies and individuals to research new AIs freely while still ensuring that AI products are properly reviewed.

Altman and his ilk try to claim that aggressive regulation (which will only serve to give them a monopoly over AI) is necessary because an AI could hack it's way out of a laboratory. Yet, they cannot explain how an AI would accomplish this in practice. I hope you will push back against anyone who fear-mongers about sci-fi inspired AI scenarios.

Congress should focus on the real impacts that AI will have on employment. Congress should also consider the realistic risks AI which poses to the public, such as risks from the use of AI to control national infrastructure (e.g., the electric grid) or to make healthcare decisions.

Thank you, [My name]