Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

1a3orn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 405 posts

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#281

Post by [deleted] »

variadix wrote: post #277
JoshTriplett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned They are calling for all AI (above a certain capability level) to be banned. Not just open, not just closed, all . There are risks that apply only to open. There are risks that apply only to closed. But nobody should be developing AGI without incredibly robustly proven alignment, open or closed, any more…

I don’t think any of the proposals by AI x-risk people are actionable or even desirable. Comparing AI to nukes is a bad analogy for a few reasons. Nukes are pretty useless unless you’re a nation state wanting to deter other nations from invading you. AI on the other hand has theoretically infinite potential benefits for whatever your goals are (as a corporation, an individual, a nation, etc.) which incentives basical…

[deleted]

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#282

Post by simiones »

foo3a9c4 wrote: post #274
reissbaker wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBQH, most of the AI safety x-risk arguments — different than just "AI safety" arguments in the sense that non-x-risk issues don't seem worth banning AI development over — are generally pretty high on the hypotheticals. If you feel the x-risk arguments aren't pretty hypothetical, can you: 1. Summarize a good argument here, or 2. Link to someone else's good argument? I feel like hand-waving the question away and sayin…

[dead]

The first links are spiffy little metaphors, but apply just as much at "God could smite all of humanity, even if you don't understand how". They're not making any argument, just assumptions. In particular, they accidentally show how an AI can be superhumanly capable at certain tasks (chess), but be easily defeated by humans at others (anything else, in the case of Stockfish).

The argument starts with a hypothetical ("there is a possible artificial agent"), and it fails to be scary: there are (apparently) already humans that can kill 70% of humanity, and yet most of humanity is still alive. So an AGI that could also do it is not implicitly scarier.

The final twitter thread is basically a thread of people saying "no, there is no canonical, well-formulated argument for AGI catastrophe", so I'm not sure why you shared it.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#283

Post by reissbaker »

foo3a9c4 wrote: post #274
reissbaker wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBQH, most of the AI safety x-risk arguments — different than just "AI safety" arguments in the sense that non-x-risk issues don't seem worth banning AI development over — are generally pretty high on the hypotheticals. If you feel the x-risk arguments aren't pretty hypothetical, can you: 1. Summarize a good argument here, or 2. Link to someone else's good argument? I feel like hand-waving the question away and sayin…

[dead]

Yes, I am looking for an argument that justifies governments banning LLM development, which implies existential risk is likely. Many things are possible; it is possible Christianity is real and everyone who doesn't accept Jesus will be tormented for eternity, and if you multiply that small chance by the enormity of torment etc etc. Definitely looking for arguments that this is likely, not for arguments that ask the interlocutor to disprove "x is possible."

The nitter link didn't appear to provide much along those lines. There were a few arguments that it was possible, which the Nitter OP admits is "very weak;" other than that, there's a link to a wiki page making claims like "Finding goals that aren’t extinction-level bad and are relatively useful appears to be hard" when in observable reality asking ChatGPT to maximize paperclip production does not in fact lead to ChatGPT attempting to turn all life on Earth into paperclips (nor does asking the open source LLMs result in that behavior out of the box either), and instead leads to the LLMs making fairly reasonable proposals that understand the context of the goal ("maximize paperclips to make money, but don't kill everyone," where the latter doesn't actually need to be said for the LLM to understand the goal).

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#284

Post by Der_Einzige »

ayende wrote: post #14
idle_zealot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advantage that open AI (not the company) has is that if using copyrighted content as training data without licensing it is found to be illegal, they can just keep doing it. There's plenty of FOSS software basically designed to violate copyright law (comic readers, home media center servers/clients, torrent clients) that big tech cannot compete with lest they face legal consequences. Basically what I'm saying is t…

As long as the cost for training a model is in the 7+ figures, that means that any such open model is bound to be tracked to someone with deep enough pockets to sue. Consider that you just spend a few millions on training a model on copyrighted data. Release it would reveal that, problem. I _guess_ you can try doing training in the public, like Seti @ Home or something like that, which distributes the risk? But no id…

The costs are falling 10-100x every few months. If you told people in 2022 that they could run 70b paramater models at 2 bit quantization on your home 4090, they'd have laughed in your face. They're not laughing anymore. SFT/DPO are ultra efficient compared to RLHF, and innovation in this space is only just now getting started.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#285

Post by simiones »

jagrsw wrote: post #75
kolektiv wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, absolutely - such an entity obviously could! Modelling the behaviour of such an entity is very difficult indeed, as you'd need to make all kinds of assumptions without basis. However, you only need to model this behaviour once you've posited the likely existence of such an entity - and that's where (purely subjectively) it feels like there's a gap. Nothing has yet convinced me (and I am absolutely honest about th…

> those have stalled at local maxima every single time. It's challenging to encapsulate AI/ML progress in a single sentence, but even assuming LLMs aren't a direct step towards AGI, the human mind exists. Due to its evolutionary limitations, it operates relatively slowly. In theory, its functions could be replicated in silicon, enhanced for speed, parallel processing, internetworked, and with near-instant access to i…

> In theory, its functions could be replicated in silicon, enhanced for speed, parallel processing, internetworked, and with near-instant access to information. Therefore, AGI could emerge, if not from current AI research, then perhaps from another scientific branch.

This is true, but there are some important caveats. For one, even though this should be possible, it might not be feasible, in various ways. For example, we may not be able to figure it out with human-level intelligence. Or, silicon may be too energy inefficient to be able to do the computations our brains do with reasonable available resources on Earth. Or even, the required density of silicon transistors to replicate human-level intelligence could dissipate too much heat and melt the transistor, so it's not actually possible to replicate human intelligence in silico.

Also, as you say, there is no reason to believe the current approaches to AI are able to lead to AGI. So, there is no reason to ban specifically AI research. Especially when considering that the most important advancements that led to the current AI boom were better GPUs and more information digitized on the internet, neither of which is specifically AI research.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#286

Post by Der_Einzige »

zulban wrote: post #211
cherryteastain wrote: post #117

Government knows that random people having the ability to use "AI" without their control and oversight reduces their ever expanding reach. As the article demonstrates, the groundwork is already being laid by these "think tanks" to prevent a repeat of Llama 2. We truly need an AI Stallman. FOSS AI models need to become a movement, like the push for a FOSS UNIX became in the 80s and 90s. Sadly when I wrote to Stallman…

If you believe in this, maybe you should be that person.

Being a stallman like figure has a lot of serious downsides. For example, I'm sure that Stallman may be "watched" quite a bit more than the average tech toucher. For those who don't watch truman show as a utopia, such a lifestyle can be very scary to live.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#287

Post by lr1970 »

kmeisthax wrote: post #7

AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…

To the hypocrisy claim: OpenAI recently changed their terms for GPT models allowing military applications and AI safety people are all silent. If it is not hypocrisy than I do not know what hypocrisy is.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#288

Post by prirun »

I'm guessing this is at the request of Google, Amazon, OpenAI, and Microsoft. The goal IMO is for only their AIs to be sanctioned; everything else is criminal.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

"President Biden is convening seven leading AI companies at the White House today – Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI – to announce that the Biden-Harris Administration has secured voluntary commitments from these companies to help move toward safe, secure, and transparent development of AI technology."

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#289

Post by simiones »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #125
JoshTriplett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned They are calling for all AI (above a certain capability level) to be banned. Not just open, not just closed, all . There are risks that apply only to open. There are risks that apply only to closed. But nobody should be developing AGI without incredibly robustly proven alignment, open or closed, any more…

>They are calling for all AI (above a certain capability level) to be banned. Not just open, not just closed, all. Nah a lot are complaining about the licensing of content because they think it will destroy it but instead would essentially mean image gen ai would only be feasible for companies like Google, Disney, Adobe to build. Not sure if you could even feasibly make GPT4 level models without a multi year timeline…

Given that you need monumental amounts of compute power to come close to something like GPT-4, I don't think the added costs of not treading on people's IP is the major moat that it's being made out to be.
Post reply on HN