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Google, Microsoft CEOs Called to AI Meeting at White House

reuters.com

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Re: Google, Microsoft CEOs Called to AI Meeting at White House

#61

Post by taywrobel »

soup10 wrote: post #32
taywrobel wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real risk of AI actually is related to that, IMO. Vinod Khosla estimated in an event a few weeks ago that 80% of human jobs will be automated in the next 10-20 years. We’re going to be living in an era of extreme abundance, which in theory could lead to an absolute human utopia. The reality is that our society as it is currently run requires everyone to work in some capacity to earn a living. We’re about to hit a…

The automation revolution has been "just around the corner" forever. Still hasn't happened, some jobs are lost, some jobs are created, some are displaced, the welfare safety net gets a little bigger.

Let’s look at another technological timeline to see what progression actually looks like…

Jules Verne wrote “Robur the Conquerer” about heavier-than-air flight in 1886.

The Wright Brothers first flight was in 1903.

The first commercial flight was in 1914.

The first trans-Atlantic flight was in 1919.

And now the interesting one; the Hindenburg disaster was in 1937. 51 years after science fiction theorized about winged flight, 34 years after it was accomplished, 23 years after it was commercialized… people were still using dirigibles, and it wasn’t going great.

And I’m sure the whole time those people were saying “we’ve been promised that flight is just around the corner forever”.

So to me the interesting question is where on this general timeline are we at with AI? It’s been theorized, been proven experimentally, is now commercialized. Up next is the “transatlantic” stage where its actual value becomes apparent and it becomes more widely available. We may already be there with GPTs.

I’m just hoping we figure out where we are before we hit the Hindenburg point.

Re: Google, Microsoft CEOs Called to AI Meeting at White House

#62

Post by visarga »

zamnos wrote: post #42
rwmj wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone? Things like intelligence, consciousness, alignment etc are open research areas with a lot of noise but barely even agreement on the basics.

By who? The philosophy students are busting a gut at the laughable job we computer scientists are doing, redefining "thinking" and "consciousnesses" from first principles on every HN thread about GPT, as if parts of humanity haven't been pondering and writing books and books about those very questions for centuries, if not millenia. How many GPTs can fit on the head of a pin?

> as if parts of humanity haven't been pondering and writing books and books about those very questions for centuries, if not millenia

They have, but unfortunately missed the mark badly with dualism and more recently computational and representational approaches.

I am pinning my hopes on 5E's: embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted cognition - this is the closest to reinforcement learning. In my opinion RL is how we should see things - agent and environment, action and effect, reward and learning, exploration and exploitation. No need to use imprecise words like consciousness, let's prefer concrete words like observation, state, value and action.

I am waiting to see the philosophical community take note of the AI advancements in the last 3 years but I don't see it. It's as if they are in a bubble. They still talk theoretically about things the AI people can already build (p-zombies, Chinese rooms). There's probably a slowness in philosophy, it usually takes decades or centuries for changes to happen.

Re: Google, Microsoft CEOs Called to AI Meeting at White House

#63

Post by jonhohle »

permo-w wrote: post #49
jjoonathan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: how should we fight LLM astroturfing?

stop using the internet

With the exception (currently) of in person conversation, AI can be used basically every other form of communication (phone calls, written communication, TV, radio, etc). It’s not just an Internet issue.

Re: Google, Microsoft CEOs Called to AI Meeting at White House

#65

Post by permo-w »

GalenErso wrote: post #30
barelyauser wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who gets to decide who that person is? Back to square one.

That person will naturally impose himself or herself through the strength of their achievements and sheer willpower in such a way that there will be not a shred of doubt in the mind of the public that this individual is worthy of deference and reverence. No one decided Einstein was the greatest scientist of the 20th century. Einstein did his thing and let the results speak for themselves.

if you cut the second paragraph, this would be decent satire

Re: Google, Microsoft CEOs Called to AI Meeting at White House

#67

Post by pc86 »

Mistletoe wrote: post #27
hospitalJail wrote: post #3

> "expectation that companies like yours must make sure their products are safe before making them available to the public." Lets make a guess, they are going to say its dangerous and we need regulation to prevent competitio---terorrism. Here is what you need to do instead, get some smart people from various agencies that are trustworthy, have them use the openAI playground and see what can be accomplished. Then show…

Why are regulations bad? When there are no regulations the results are usually not pretty. Current big tech dystopia, stock market crash of 1929, UK textile mills worked by children in the Industrial Revolution... Why should we expect AI to not repeat the same abuses and errors?

Regulations are good when they're made by smart people who are experts in what they're regulating, with an eye toward creating an environment of fair competition, and perhaps protecting US interests for things like export controls, etc.

Regulations are bad when they are made from a position of emotion, partisan hackery, protectionism of either incumbents as we are likely to see here or specific industries/sectors, or written by out of touch, mentally declining octogenarians (I don't mean Biden, I mean half of Congress, of both parties).

Are there any executive agencies or legislative committees qualified to regulate development of AI? I just mean on basis of knowledge and education, not authority.

Re: Google, Microsoft CEOs Called to AI Meeting at White House

#68

Post by pc86 »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #15
hospitalJail wrote: post #3

> "expectation that companies like yours must make sure their products are safe before making them available to the public." Lets make a guess, they are going to say its dangerous and we need regulation to prevent competitio---terorrism. Here is what you need to do instead, get some smart people from various agencies that are trustworthy, have them use the openAI playground and see what can be accomplished. Then show…

1A makes regulating software basically impossible. I can’t imagine what additionally regulation they think they’re going to implement that will survive the judiciary. The only legal barrier I can see that could influence these AI services is that that their output is obviously not shielded from liability by Section 230. But that will play out in the civil courts, if at all. I’d say the more likely outcome is the far…

Software is not speech.

Re: Google, Microsoft CEOs Called to AI Meeting at White House

#69

Post by JieJie »

jjoonathan wrote: post #34
gordian-mind wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are not the only ones who have something to gain from that exchange. Democratization of AI will also be used to push harsher legislation on the internet, in the guise of fighting "misinformation" (now possibly AI-generated!).

Genuine question: how should we fight LLM astroturfing?

In my humble opinion, LLM astroturfing is only a productivity increase over what is currently already a very automated process (social media bot farms, etc).

While this seems like it would exacerbate an already existing problem, it may not have so profound an effect. You see, while LLMs may be able to increase the amount and quality of fake information, fake information isn't currently in short supply, so increasing the amount and quality of it may not have that strong an effect.

In short, we already have 24-hour fake news cable channels and infinite doom scrolls. The bottleneck is there, not in the quality or quantity of fake news.

Now, if they invented a LLM that doomscrolled Twitter and voted based on generated summaries, we would have much greater grounds for concern.

[edit: I hope this doesn't sound too snarky. What I mean to say is that we should fight it by creating less gullible consumers of information, a project in which AI may be uniquely qualified to assist us.]

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