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Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

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Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#151

Post by skybrian »

pdonis wrote: post #135
skybrian wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State-level actors are one problem. People defrauding the elderly are a different problem. Ransomware is a third problem. They are all problems. The idea that there's only one important problem is a fallacy.

> The idea that there's only one important problem is a fallacy. I have made no such claim. The people advocating for regulating AI are claiming it will solve all the relevant problems--i.e., that it will prevent AI from doing great harm. So pointing out a problem that the regulations will not solve is refuting the claims the advocates of regulation are making. That was my point.

That's surprising and seems like an overreach. Whatever those advocates claimed, it doesn't seem very relevant to deciding with or not a particular regulation is a good idea.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#152

Post by drdaeman »

coryfklein wrote: post #142
drdaeman wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but neither is pseudoephedrine itself a methamphetemine and yet we regulate its access I don't think it's a correct argument. I believe it's not a secret how metamphetamine is made (though I don't know it myself, but I'm too lazy to research for a sake of argument), and it's known pseudoephedrine is a precursor chemical. Thus, the regulation. No one - I believe - knows how to build an AGI. There is no recipe. It is…

First of all, pseudoephedrine is an analogy. But with AGI there is literally no historical event to compare it to as a perfect analogy, including the ones I gave above. > it's not a secret how metamphetamine is made I didn't say it was a secret. But try sharing the recipe to methamphetamine virtually anywhere online and see how long it stays up; we do in fact try to at least make it moderately difficult to find this…

How about we just ban all new research, just in case it turns into something bad? Because - I’m sorry - but what you’re saying sounds to me exactly like this, just less generalized.

I’m pretty sure that if someone figures out AGI they’ll think of the potential dangers before publishing. And even after - AGI, once developed, won’t magically hack the world and spread everywhere, or somehow build itself an army of robots to eradicate humanity, or steal the elections, or cause whatever harm it’s supposed to cause. It’ll be just another human (probably a slow one), except for being not a human. It’ll be a long story before it’ll have any chances to do something impactful, and we’ll have plenty of time to figure out the details. Just like with drug precursors.

Also, meth is a bad analogy. And turns out the recipes can be found just about anywhere, I’ve just checked: https://kagi.com/search?q=how+to+make+methamphetamine so I don’t think “see how long it stays online” is valid either.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#153

Post by Taek »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #117
trentnix wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

The gap between Meta and other proprietary ai ecosystems (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) is pretty large. Meta necessarily is only as far behind as open source as a whole is behind.

If open source catches up, Meta can ride the tailwind and also catch up. I'm sure Meta will flip its position once it doesn't feel outclassed by the competition.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#154

Post by Eisenstein »

drdaeman wrote: post #109
Eisenstein wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's exactly the point I was making. It seems I did a poor job -- it is impossible to make chemistry illegal but it is possible to regulate possession of some chemicals.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#155

Post by torginus »

chakalakasp wrote: post #150
torginus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does everybody come up with the 'nuclear weapons' comparison, when there is a much more appropriate one - encryption, specifically public key cryptography? Way back in the 90s, when Phil Zimmerman released PGP, the US government raised hell to keep it from proliferating. Would you rather live in a world where strong encryption for ordinary citizens was illegal?

Because encryption is not an inherently dangerous thing. A superintelligent AI is. It’s no different than inviting an advanced alien species to visit. Will it go well? Sure hope so, because if they don’t want it to go well it won’t be our planet any more

Current AI (the one that's getting regulated, e.g. LLMs and diffusion models) lacks any sort of individual drive or initiative, so all the danger it represents is that of a powerful tool wielded by someone.

People who are saying AI is dangerous are saying people are dangerous when empowered with AI, and that's why only the right people should have access to it (who presumably are the ones lobbying for legislation right now).

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#156

Post by PeterStuer »

shrimpx wrote: post #133
autoexec wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coul…

I guess we're speculating that training llama2 will drop by 1000x or something, so anyone can train their own llama2 from scratch for about $2k. I don't think compute cost has dropped by 1000x since 20 years ago. Maybe by 10 to 50x. And if you add in the demand for higher quality, the cost has probably increased. Like encoding a video for streaming 20 years ago, at that standard, may have cost roughly the same as it…

What compute was available 20 years ago that would be the equivalent of an H100?

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#157

Post by ta1243 »

pdonis wrote: post #138
ta1243 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Seriously? You don't think China, Iran, and North Korea are bad actors? What planet are you on?

Well depends on your point of view

But I don't see China or North Korea firing nukes or even blowing up western buildings. They are limited by the threat of response.

A rogue wacko in his basement can make Kim Jong Un look like Theodore Roosevelt.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#158

Post by chasd00 »

JW_00000 wrote: post #103
chasd00 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 event…

i was being a bit extreme so thanks for the clarifications. Something about this topic brings out a lot of emotion from me.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#159

Post by pdonis »

skybrian wrote: post #151
pdonis wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that there's only one important problem is a fallacy. I have made no such claim. The people advocating for regulating AI are claiming it will solve all the relevant problems--i.e., that it will prevent AI from doing great harm. So pointing out a problem that the regulations will not solve is refuting the claims the advocates of regulation are making. That was my point.

That's surprising and seems like an overreach. Whatever those advocates claimed, it doesn't seem very relevant to deciding with or not a particular regulation is a good idea.

> Whatever those advocates claimed, it doesn't seem very relevant to deciding with or not a particular regulation is a good idea.

I don't see why not. The whole point of regulations is to regulate, i.e., to keep the regulated activity within some particular bounds. If the regulation won't accomplish that, then it is pointless. Unless, of course, the actual purpose of the regulation is not the same as the purpose that is publicly stated--which is exactly what happens with regulatory capture.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#160

Post by pbronez »

ta1243 wrote: post #157
pdonis wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China, Iran, North Korea, Iran, US, Israel, Europe aren't bad actors. Seriously? You don't think China, Iran, and North Korea are bad actors? What planet are you on?

Well depends on your point of view But I don't see China or North Korea firing nukes or even blowing up western buildings. They are limited by the threat of response. A rogue wacko in his basement can make Kim Jong Un look like Theodore Roosevelt.

The term you’re looking for is “constrained” and “unconstrained” actors. The Chinese and North Korean governments are state level actors, constrained by their internal institutions and power dynamics. A rogue wacko is unconstrained - they do whatever they want with no limitations beyond their own mind and individual capabilities.

Examples:

In the Iran Hostage Crisis you had a constrained actor (Iranian government) making somewhat rational choices to use hostage taking as a negotiation tactic.

In the Oklahoma City Bombing, you had unconstrained actors (Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols) blowing up a building with a vehicle borne improvised explosive device for personal reasons.

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