Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

>You keep throwing examples of weapons of mass destruction, meant to evoke emotions.

I actually think global catastrophes evoke much less emotion than they should. "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic"

>For better or worse, nuclear weapons have been democratized.

Not to the point where you could order one on Amazon.

>The announcement from OpenAI should give you pause because it's being run by board members that are completely unfit to lead OpenAI. You rarely see this level of incompetence.

That depends on whether the board members are telling the truth about Sam. And on whether the objective of OpenAI is profit or responsible AI development.

I see how some of his tweets could come across as crank-ish if you don't have a background in AI alignment. AI alignment is sort of like computer security in the sense that you're trying to guard against the unknown. If there was a way to push a button which told you the biggest security flaw in the software you're writing, then the task of writing secure software would be far easier. But instead we have to assume the existence of bugs, and apply principles like defense-in-depth and least privilege to mitigate whatever exploits may exist.

In the same way, much of AI alignment consists of thinking about hypothetical failure modes of advanced AI systems and how to mitigate them. I think this specific paper is especially useful for understanding the technical background that motivates Eliezer's tweeting: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.01820.pdf

> You mean a complete hypothetical outside of scifi?

18 months ago, so was having an AI make even so much as a toy website by drawing a sketch on a sheet of paper, taking a photo, captioning it "make me a website that looks like this", and pressing the "go" button.

> Our planet is actually, not hypothetically, becoming uninhabitable due to pollutiom. I am so tired of ML people thinking they are god and have created something of infinite power. The hubris.

So much irony there.

No, the planet is not becoming uninhabitable. Bits of it are, and this is bad, and this is leading to mass migration which is causing political drama.

Lots of people out there get benefits from the things that cause all the various kinds of pollution, from hyper-local things like littering and fly tipping to global things like CO2 and CFCs, and the arguments they use are sometimes the same ones you just used — things like "I am so tired of these Greta Thunberg people thinking humans can change the environment. The hubris."

Also, no, nobody thinks we've already created a machine god. We think we might, eventually, with a lot of concerted effort, be able to make something that's somewhat better at every cognitive task than any human, but not only do even the most optimistic estimates place that several years away, but quite a lot of people are already going "that has so many ways it can go wrong, let's not do that".

Finally, one of the ways it can go wrong is basically hyper-capitalism: an AI tasked with making as much money as possible, doesn't necessarily come with the sort of mind that we have which feels shame and embarrassment when their face is put on an effigy and burned by people that would like their environment to not be polluted.

> The birds eye view is that we need tons of major breakthroughs to allow us to overcome this climate disaster while also figuring out how to make 8 Billion+ comfortable and happy without turning the earth into a toxic waste dump, and we need this ASAP. This nonsense about AI safety is going to have a negative net affect on the lives of Billions of people, by slowing down the progress thay could be made.

Nah, don't need a single breakthrough, we've got sufficient known solutions to solve it all already even if there's not a single new idea. Just building out the existing research-level tech for storage and renewables is more than good enough for energy and transport, similarly there already exists solutions for other domains.

Also, AI isn't just LLMs and non-LLM AIs do actually help with this kind of research, it's just not exciting to the general public because 50 pages of "here's how we Navier-Stoked ourselves a new turbine design" will have most people's eyes glaze over.

Unfortunately, and directly relevant to your concerns about pollution, the fact AI means more than LLMs also means that last year a team working on using AI to test chemicals for safety before they get manufactured… found 40,000 new chemical weapons in 6 hours by flipping a sign from "find safe" to "find unsafe": https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983197/ai-new-possible-...

> Science requires the scientific method, which requires physical embodiment, trial and error, and disciplined observation and measurment.

Yes.

> AI has 0 ability to do any of that, we don't even have online learning(I think that's the term, where the model learns from its usage) in any of these large models.

False, all false. AI can easily follow the scientific method, and indeed AI is basically just applied statistics so it does this by default and the hard part is to give it heuristics so it doesn't have to on things we are literally born knowing, like faces.

Likewise, trial and error: that's what almost every model is doing almost all the time during their training. Only the most trivial ones can have weights calculated directly.

Also, physical embodiment is a huge field all by itself. Tesla's cars and robots, Boston Dynamics — and, surprisingly, there's even a lot of research connecting robots to LLMs: https://github.com/GT-RIPL/Awesome-LLM-Robotics

Finally, "online learning" is only one of many ways to update models from usage; ChatGPT does something (not necessarily online learning but it could be) with the signals from the thumbs up/down and regenerate buttons to update either the model or the RLHF layer in response to them. Even the opposite of online learning, offline learning (AKA batch learning), can update models in response to new data. The term you were probably after is "incremental learning" (which can be implemented in either a batched or online fashion), and one way you can tell that an LLM (OpenAI or other) is doing this by watching the version number change over time.

> If he's a crank, it should be easy to explain specifically why he's wrong.

Sure. The premise that a super intelligent AI can create runaway intelligence on its own is completely insane. How can it iterate? How does it test? Humans run off consensus. We make predictions and test them against physical reality, then have others test them. Information has to be gathered and verified, it's the only rational way to build understanding.