31–40 of 52 posts
I hate to be “that guy,” but every time I go to a website that is not mobile friendly, I immediately discount it and close the tab. There’s something in my head that thinks, “This writer is out of touch” (even if they are not). I admit my logic may be faulty.
Disaster capitalism! Seriously though, if you are interested in addressing the real, presently-timed harms of large language models (and the capitalists who deploy them), this letter is just the thing: Statement from the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots on the “AI pause” letter Timnit Gebru (DAIR), Emily M. Bender (University of Washington), Angelina McMillan-Major (University of Washington), Margaret Mitchell (H…
They are stopping only just short of saying that myopism is The One True Faith. (They literally call out "Longtermism" as being elitist and the root of all evil.) I mean, sure, one should look at one's feet from time to time to make sure one doesn't trip. However, these people come across as exclusively myopic and uncompromising in their position at that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are stopping only just short of saying that myopism is The One True Faith. (They literally call out "Longtermism" as being elitist and the root of all evil.) I mean, sure, one should look at one's feet from time to time to make sure one doesn't trip. However, these people come across as exclusively myopic and uncompromising in their position at that.
It seems to really get to you.
I get the concern expressed, but the fear-mongering is getting a little much these days. Innovation can be scary, and at this time, people are making assumptions based purely on things that we do not know. How this will impact the future of business and technology has yet to be determined. Only time will tell. We must be careful as we chart this new scary world of large language models and Artificial Intelligence and…
There are similarities, sure. But there are also stark differences. Due to the existence of ChatGPT, the GPT-3 API, and the general viability of natural language prompting, LLMs are now essentially commoditised. They are now in the hands of orders of magnitude more people. Barring sector-specific regulations, people are free to iterate (with varying degrees of care, ethical consideration, and success) at a much faste…
National Academy of Sciences must not only take a leading role here in creating the platform for discussions tasked with advising the government and public, it also must spearhead creating a national MI infrastructure for public use. Department of Energy already runs many high-tech national labratories and we need a Sandia or Los Alamos for AI , for national, public use.
There's potential for manipulation here by the government. I would qualify your post with open source usage of the model, training algorithms and training data as well.
Instead of us hoping for Facebook or whoever to grace us with weights for example, or having debates over copyrights, fine, let's have the US government (just like the efforts that gave us the internet ..) put together a program for national academies & labratories, research universities (such as Stanford), and private sector work together.
For example such a program can then insure that the most up to date gigantic model X has a public variant with public weights with regulations for usage by public and private interests.
And the issue of hoovering of content to create private models becomes moot, or at least far less problematic.
> This year with the introduction of ChatGPT-4 we may have seen the invention of something with the equivalent impact on society of explosives, mass communication, computers, recombinant DNA/CRISPR and nuclear weapons – all rolled into one application. I just can't stand this kind of language. ChatGPT is quite useful but have you tried to ask it something serious that is not twitter worthy? We are not there yet. And…
Building nukes and bioweapons aren't as good of a business model as AGI though. The government was incentivised to at least take some precautions with nukes. Nukes can't be developed and launched by individual bad actors. AGI isn't that comparable to nukes for numerous reasons. Bioweapons maybe, but I wouldn't be in support of companies researching bioweapons without regulation.
It's not a choice between living in fear and going full steam ahead. Both are idiotic positions to take. The reasonable approach here would be to publicly fund alignment research while slowing and regulating AI capability research to ensure the best possible outcomes and minimise risk.
You're basically arguing in favour of a free market approach to developing what has the potential to be a dangerous technology. If you wouldn't allow the free market to regulate something as mundane as automobile safety, then why would you trust the free market to regulate AI safety?
Companies who wish to develop state-of-the-art AI models should be required to demonstrate they are taking reasonable steps to ensure safety. They should be required to disclose state-of-the-art research projects to the government. They they should be required to publish alignment research so we can learn...
> This year with the introduction of ChatGPT-4 we may have seen the invention of something with the equivalent impact on society of explosives, mass communication, computers, recombinant DNA/CRISPR and nuclear weapons – all rolled into one application. I just can't stand this kind of language. ChatGPT is quite useful but have you tried to ask it something serious that is not twitter worthy? We are not there yet. And…
> Nukes have existed for 70 years and probably become much more accessible. Biotech could create thousands of humanity-ending viruses, today. These are fears that we live with and will forever live with, but we can't live lives only in fear. Building nukes and bioweapons aren't as good of a business model as AGI though. The government was incentivised to at least take some precautions with nukes. Nukes can't be devel…
I agree. It's quite possible that humanity-ending AI is also not a good business, don't you agree?
I think the whole Apocalypse discussion is premature distraction for the moment. A more improtant discussion is what kinds of AI will end up making money. We have already seen how the internet turned from an infinite frontier to a more modern version of TV dominated by a few networks with addictive buttons. Unfortunately we will see the same with AI becuase such is the nature of money today, and capitalism is one thing that AI will not change. The applications of AI that make the most money will dominate, to the detriment of applications that are only benefiting small groups of people (such as the disabled).
> to publicly fund alignment research while
We don't really know if alignment research is what we need. Governments should fund AI research in general, otherwise it would be like the early attempts of the EU to regulate AI. In fact any kind of funding of AI ethics at the moment is dubious because it is changing so fast . Stopping it for six months will not solve those ethical issues either, it will just delay their obsolescence by six months. This is stupid on the face of it
> This year with the introduction of ChatGPT-4 we may have seen the invention of something with the equivalent impact on society of explosives, mass communication, computers, recombinant DNA/CRISPR and nuclear weapons – all rolled into one application. I just can't stand this kind of language. ChatGPT is quite useful but have you tried to ask it something serious that is not twitter worthy? We are not there yet. And…
>These are fears that we live with and will forever live with, but we can't live lives only in fear. But we can't lie to ourselves about reality in order to prevent fear either. The opinions from Elon musk, to Sam Altman to even the person who started it all Geoffrey Hinton are actually inline with the blog post. Hinton even says things like these chatGPT models literally can understand things you tell it. Should we…
But they have evidence, measurements and a quantitative model etc.
Where is the AGI FUD people's evidence? It's largely very opinionated arguments of rectal origin. But modern AI is a quantitative model that is completely known and can be readily analyzed. If there is some proof or even substantial quantitative or empirical evidence that those numbers are imminently dangerous, then we are talking.