Reading Bloomberg news too much makes me think AI research will only be used to classify ads and make more efficient securities trading algorithms.
I will love to be proven wrong though.
Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI
41–50 of 186 posts
Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI
#42Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK - I should have not mentioned Flint, MI. My intention is not to play-down funding for fundamental research. But really, I think the NSF would agree with the non-urgent nature of funding "reducing potential risks from advanced AI". They probably get proposals for things that are much more immediate, say algebraic geometry research that produces quantum-resistant cryptography at the similar computational complexity…
I don't think they are just using the money for preventing Apocalypse. As Andrew Ng says worrying about this is kin to worrying about overpopulation on Mars. Openai will probably use the money to hire world class researchers and give them tools necessary to advance AI in a meaningful way that benefits humanity. The other big labs from Google, Facebook and MS seems to be driven by gathering as much data as possible fr…
I agree with what I take to be the main point of your argument, which is that OpenAI will use the money for a variety of different things, many of which aren't averting the apocalypse, and that those things are good. I think it's important to note, though, that Andrew Ng's perspective is far from a consensus one. For one thing, overpopulation on Mars is something that can easily be dealt with when it happens, whereas an intelligence explosion is much more of a flipped switch. For another, though there is a lot of uncertainty in the expert forecasts, a non-negligible amount of experts think there's a reasonable chance of human-level AI within the next 10-20 years, and that's absolutely something we should be worrying about right now. In a 2014 survey of the top 100 most cited living AI scientists[1], the median estimate of the year at which there was a 10% chance we'd have human-level AI was 2024. Multiply that by whatever chance you think human-level AI leads to an intelligence explosion and potential apocalypse, and then multiply it by the impact of that event… I think for most reasonable inputs you get a pretty huge EV as the result.
Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI
#44If some of the comments I read on other AI related articles here on HN are correct,
1 mil / year per expert * 10 experts per year = 30 Mil in 3 years
Maybe $30 mil isn't as much as we think it is in AI business?
Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI
#45That's awesome! Open Philanthropy reminds me of https://80000hours.org/ . In their relationship disclosure: > OpenAI researchers Dario Amodei and Paul Christiano are both technical advisors to Open Philanthropy and live in the same house as Holden. In addition, Holden is engaged to Dario’s sister Daniela. This is so tangled. I don't mean it as a criticism as I'm sure a lot of SV investments would have a much longer R…
Well, I would use it as a criticism. This is a tangled web of like-minded people giving money to each other and calling it charity. Some people conflate this with Effective Altruism, which I think sucks. Compared to the rigorous work done by GiveWell, there's no way to tell if this is effective, or even altruistic. It's just people assuming that the world will be a better place if more people who think like them have…
One of my favorite lines in Mad Men was Bert Cooper telling Don Draper Philanthropy is the gateway to power.
Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI
#46If some of the comments I read on other AI related articles here on HN are correct, 1 mil / year per expert * 10 experts per year = 30 Mil in 3 years Maybe $30 mil isn't as much as we think it is in AI business?
1 mil / year per expert
Is this realistic?
I don't think it's impossible for a dev to be pulling $1M/yr in total comp, but it seemed more likely happen at Google or FB rather than AI.
Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI
#47I think there are more important causes than "reducing potential risks from advanced AI". Honest to god, $30M will go a long way in saving lives TODAY. Flint, MI anyone?
There are always going to be more important causes, under any particular person's view of "more important", which depends very strongly on both subjective values and (in the case of AI alignment work) on precise probabilities of far-future outcomes. A dollar given to the Against Malaria Foundation will do a lot more good, in QALY terms, than the same dollar spent in Flint. And both dollars will do more (direct) good…
Nothing about OpenAI actually addresses any real world problem. So i have a problem with their rhetoric as much as their research agenda.
Nothing they're writing about addresses any of the real world problems with how AI can or might be applied in society. They're a non-profit research lab with no clear agenda and no clear connection to how they plan to interrogate the world which seems like an important part of the equation if you care about outcomes.
So, irrespective of subjective judgements, please explain to me how any of this is supposed to help anyone?
Or, alternatively, how isn't this just free R&D for industry unshackled and unconnected to ethics or society?
Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I would use it as a criticism. This is a tangled web of like-minded people giving money to each other and calling it charity. Some people conflate this with Effective Altruism, which I think sucks. Compared to the rigorous work done by GiveWell, there's no way to tell if this is effective, or even altruistic. It's just people assuming that the world will be a better place if more people who think like them have…
Holden's dedicated a huge chunk of his career to moving hundreds of millions of dollars to alleviating poverty and disease. He's one of the founders of the effective altruism movement. You may disagree with his decision here, but to dismiss his efforts, saying it "sucks" and isn't "effective, or even altruistic", while ignoring the extensive public writing he's done on the subject that led him to these views and stra…
> strawmanning his position as nepotism
So, you obviously feel strongly about this, but let me explain why your comments are less persuasive for those of us outside this subculture:
The non-profit they donated to is (by any reading of their mission statement) an organization designed to create new technology that "will be the most significant technology ever created by humans" according to their own statements. It doesn't disburse cash or benefits to _anyone_, and actually pledges to keep some of the research secret, and "we expect to create formal processes for keeping technologies private when there are safety concerns" -- a situation the organization claims will happen, presumably regularly!
Creating influential technology is typically done for-profit, and research is typically funded in ways much less open to individual favoritism (review boards are a great anti-corruption tool), and the results of that research are typically available to (among others) the people that fund it. There is a lot about this situation that a reasonable person would describe as unusual.
In addition, all of these changes -- introducing more direct funding with less oversight, lack of access to results, lack of expectation of benefit to the targets of the charity -- all lend themselves to obscuring a fraud. That doesn't mean a fraud is present, but I'd be extremely aggressive about oversight.
What kind of oversight are we getting? Well, right now they list one of their major goals as the "tricky" goal of figuring out of they're making any progress at all.
I would not give this organization money. Dismissing these critiques as "character assassination" ignores the fact that I've only described aspects of the organization, not of the people involved, whom I have little information about.
Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI
#49If some of the comments I read on other AI related articles here on HN are correct, 1 mil / year per expert * 10 experts per year = 30 Mil in 3 years Maybe $30 mil isn't as much as we think it is in AI business?
1 mil / year per expert Is this realistic? I don't think it's impossible for a dev to be pulling $1M/yr in total comp, but it seemed more likely happen at Google or FB rather than AI.
Note that this says "per expert". I'm not sure what exactly you'd consider an "expert", but I think a reasonable definition of "expert" could result in your average expert being a million-dollar-a-year engineer.
Re: Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>high impact / low probability EV calculations in other domains Yeah but there isn't a calculation of the risk/probability of AGI there's just the appeal to the idea.
That's… not at all true? There have been numerous thorough attempts at coming up with as reasonable an estimate as possible, involving in-depth conversations with most of the experts in the field. Maybe it's not strictly a "calculation", but it's a hell of a lot more than just an appeal to the idea of AGI.
Except that there's no such thing as the field of "AGI" (or if there is, its a subfield of philosophy). Asking modern ML and Deep Learning researchers about their thoughts on AGI is like asking the wright brothers about a mars mission.
Sure, they're the closest thing we have to "experts", but there's not just one, but likely 5 or 10 more field, if not world-changing leaps we need to make before the technologies we have will resemble anything like AGI.
And that's ignoring the people who ascribe diety-like powers to some potential AGI. Air gap the computer and control the inputs and outputs. We can formally prove what a system is capable of. That fixes the problem.