Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think "pronouns" is ok but, yeah, "AI bros" is enough to get a pass from me to. Holier-than-thou name calling is still name calling.
There are a lot of AI-bros on twitter.
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Statement on AI Risk
501–510 of 964 posts
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. And it would be a complete break from the history of computing if human-level GPT doesn't get 100+ times faster in the next few years. Certainly within five years. All it takes is for someone to give an AI that thinks 100 times faster than humans an overly broad goal. Then the only way to counteract it is with another AI with overly broad goals. And you can't tell it to stop and wait for humans to check it's d…
Computational power does not grow at the rate of over 100x within the span of “a few years”. If that were the case we’d have vastly more powerful kit by now.
I didn't quite say that. The efficiency of this very specific application absolutely can and almost certainly will increase by more than one order of magnitude within four years.
It's got a massive new investment and research focus, is a very specific application, and room for improvement in AI model, software, and hardware.
Even if we have to "cheat" to get to 100 times performance in less than five years the effect will be the same. For example, there might be a way to accelerate something like the Tree of Thoughts in hardware. So if the hardware can't actually speed up by that much, the effectiveness of the system still has increased greatly.
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#503I have yet to see a solution for “AI safety” that doesn’t involve ceding control of our most powerful models to a small handful of corporations. It’s hard to take these safety concerns seriously when the organizations blowing the whistle are simultaneously positioning themselves to capture the majority of the value.
Ok, so if we take AI safety / AI existential risk as real and important, there are two possibilities:
1) The only way to be safe is to cede control to the most powerful models to a small group (highly regulated corporations or governments) that can be careful.
2) There is a way to make AI safe without doing this.
If 1 is true, then... sorry, I know it's not a very palatable solution, and may suck, but if that's all we've got I'll take it.
If 2 is true, great. But it seems less likely than 1, to me.
The important thing is not to unconsciously do some motivated reasoning, and think that AGI existential risk can't be a big deal, because if it is, that would mean that we have to cede control over to a small group of people to prevent disaster, which would suck, so there must be something else going on, like these people just want power.
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not clear at all that we have an avenue to super intelligence. I think the most likely outcome is that we hit a local maximum with our current architectures and end up with helpful assistants similar in capability to George Lucas's C3PO. The scary doomsday scenarios aren't possible without an AI that's capable of both strategic thinking and long term planning. Those two things also happen to be the biggest limit…
We don't need an avenue to super-intelligence. We just need a system that is better at manipulating human beliefs and behaviour than our existing media, PR, and ad industries. The problem is not science fiction god-mode digital quetta-smart hypercomputing. This is about political, social, and economic influence, and who controls it.
Effective dystopian mass-manipulation and monitoring are a real concern and we're closer to it[1] than to super intelligence. But super-intelligence going wrong is almost incomparably worse. So we should very much worry about it as well.
[1] I'm not even sure any further big breakthroughs in AI are needed, i.e. just effective utilization of existing architectures probably already suffices.
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#505I have mixed feelings about this.
This letter is much better than the earlier one. There is a growing percentage of legitimate AI researchers who think that AGI could occur relatively soon (including me). The concern is that it could be given objectives intentionally or unintentionally that could lead to an extinction event. Certainly LLMs alone aren't anything close to AGIs, but I think that autoregressive training being simple but resulting in remarkable abilities has some spooked. What if a similarly simple recipe for AGI was discovered? How do we ensure it wouldn't cause an extinction event, especially if then they can be created with relatively low-levels of resources?
As far as a pandemic or nuclear war, though, I'd probably put it on more of the level of an major asteroid strike (e.g., K-T extinction event). Humans are doing some work on asteroid redirection, but I don't think it is a global priority.
That said, I'm suspicious of regulating AI R&D, and I currently don't think it is a viable solution, except for the regulation of specific applications.
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think in order to use the plural form you really need to have two examples. Sam Altman is of course the least convincing signatory (except for the random physicist who does not seem to have any connection to AI).
> I think in order to use the plural form you really need to have two examples. Perhaps, but I don't see the value proposition in relaying another. Altman was fun to point out. I see no remaining enjoyment. > Sam Altman is of course the least convincing signatory Less convincing than Grimes?
Grimes would still have a job if AI got regulated though.
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, for example I believe that nukes represent an existential risk, because they have already been used to kill thousands of people in a short period of time. What you are saying doesn't really counter my point at all though, it is another vague theoretical argument.
It was clear that nukes were a risk before they were used; that is why there was a race to create them. I am not in the camp that is especially worried about the existential threat of AI, however, if AGI is to become a thing, what does the moment look like where we can see it is coming and still have time to respond?
>It was clear that nukes were a risk before they were used; that is why there was a race to create them.
Yes, because there were other kinds of bombs before then that could already kill many people, just at a smaller scale. There was a lot of evidence that bombs could kill people, so the idea that a more powerful bomb could kill even more people was pretty well justified.
>if AGI is to become a thing, what does the moment look like where we can see it is coming and still have time to respond?
I think this implicitly assumes that if AGI comes into existence we will have to have some kind of response in order to prevent it killing everyone, which is exactly the point I am saying in my original argument isn't justified.
Personally I believe that GPT-4, and even GPT-3, are non-superintelligent AGI already, and as far as I know they haven't killed anyone at all.
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It turns out that people hook computers to 'things' that exist in the physical world. But those physical things would be the danger, at least if you consider the nuclear missile to be the danger. It seems you are trying to go down the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" line of thinking. Which is fine, but outside of the discussion taking place.
>but outside of the discussion taking place. Drawing an artificial line between you and the danger is a great way to find yourself in a Maginot Line with AI driving right around it.
False premise. One can start new threads about complimentary subjects and they can be thought about in parallel. You don't have to try and shove all of the worlds concepts into just one thought train to be able to reason about them. That's how you make spaghetti.
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#509This reeks of marketing and a push for early regulatory capture. We already know how Sam Altman thinks AI risk should be mitigated - namely by giving OpenAI more market power. If the risk were real, these folks would be asking the US government to nationalize their companies or bring them under the same kind of control as nukes and related technologies. Instead we get some nonsense about licensing.
This is a bad take. The statement is signed by dozens of Academics who don't have much profit motive at all. If they did they wouldn't be academics, they could easily cash in by starting a company or joining one of the big players.
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I see a huge problem. Preventing damage is an order of magnitude more difficult than causing it.
For humans, maybe. Not an AI superintelligence.
This is not how entropy works. The problem with talking about logical physical systems, is you have to understand the gradient against entropy.
There are a trillion more ways to kill you then there are to keep you alive. There is only the tiniest sliver of states in which remain human and don't turn to chemical soup or physics. Any AI capable of it's power bill would be able to tell you that today, and that answer isn't going to change as they get better.