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After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

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Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#61

Post by adrians1 »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #10
not_your_vase wrote: post #2

But is there a real AI-threat, that would need real AI-safety? To me it still looks like a nice bar-trick, not AI. It is very clever, very nice, even astounding. But doesn't look threatening - at some cases it is even dumb. The fear-mongering looks more like scare-marketing. Which is also clever, in my opinion. But maybe I'm just out of touch.

Most of the ai safety arguments revolve around “once it’s powerful enough to cause damage it’ll be too late to come up with a strategy”. If you accept that it doesn’t matter that ai systems now suck, since we don’t know when they’ll improve.

> Most of the ai safety arguments revolve around “once it’s powerful enough to cause damage it’ll be too late to come up with a strategy”

I don't see any reason to accept this argument. The AI safety people should also prove their assertions, not expect us to take them at face value.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#62

Post by subharmonicon »

crazygringo wrote: post #52

It's so confusing because people keep (intentionally?) conflating two separate ideas of "AI safety". The first is the kind of humdrum ChatGPT safety of, don't swear, don't be sexually explicit, don't provide instructions on how to commit crimes, don't reproduce copyrighted materials, etc. Or preventing self-driving cars from harming pedestrians. This stuff is important but also pretty boring, and by all indications c…

> We're so far away from AGI

Although I personally suspect this is correct, the issue seems to be that there are a lot of people who feel otherwise, whether right or wrong, including some of the people involved in the research and/or running these companies.

I've seen several prominent people say things to the effect of "We just don't know if we're six months or 600 years from AGI,", which to me is a little like saying, "We don't know if we'll have time travel and ray guns in six months or 600 years."

No, we don't know, but all signs seem to be pointing toward a longer timeframe rather than a short one.

The counterargument to that seems to be, "If we can make something that appears to be able to mimic human responses, isn't that AGI in practice even if it's not in principle?", which is a sentiment I have also seen expressed by some of the same people.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#63

Post by jacquesm »

That's the wrong conclusion entirely, besides the mixup about safe AI and aligned AGI. AGI Safety is a real thing. But you can't have AGI Safety whilst at the same time ignoring both geopolitics and to be working on creating AGI. Those are incompatible, it's like being against nuclear weapons but developing one all the same. Every bit of knowledge you develop will be used to bring AGI into the world, also by those that would be your enemy or that don't give a rats ass about safety. The only people that can credibly claim to be on the side of AI safety are the ones that are not helping to bring it into this world. As soon as you start creating it and/or commercialize what's there already to create a stream of funds that can be used to further the development you're automatically increasing the risk.

To believe that you are sharp enough to go right up to the point that the pile is going critical so you can destroy it is utter madness.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#64

Post by azinman2 »

crazygringo wrote: post #52

It's so confusing because people keep (intentionally?) conflating two separate ideas of "AI safety". The first is the kind of humdrum ChatGPT safety of, don't swear, don't be sexually explicit, don't provide instructions on how to commit crimes, don't reproduce copyrighted materials, etc. Or preventing self-driving cars from harming pedestrians. This stuff is important but also pretty boring, and by all indications c…

Sounds like according to other articles there was concern that a new breakthru they called Q* had the potential for AGI. I’d be shocked if this were the case, but of course nothing is public yet. I’m firmly in the camp that we’re very far away… especially for anything I’d consider calling general, but perhaps I simply don’t know what I don’t know.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#65

Post by taf2 »

fatherzine wrote: post #54
taf2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just view the current gpt llm as a better search engine. It’s not self learning. It’s stateless when queried - so really the concern is we can create content on demand and create responses that intuitively make the llm very useful tool. Until it’s self learning I’m only concerned with how humans would use it just like any other tool in the hands of humans it can be both super useful and super destructive.

"just like any other tool in hands of humans" -- the scale of damage a tool can do matters, e.g. civilization cannot withstand nukes being sold at walmart. and, of course, self learning will be here this decade.

I agree llms are powerful but they are not explosive - conflating the two is IMO even more dangerous

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#66

Post by needadvicebadly »

golol wrote: post #15

Look, there is ASI/AGI safety, and "please don't swear and scam and misinform, and be unbiased" safety. ASI/AGI safety is only a concern right now if you believe in foom , i.e. that an AGI would rapidly self improve to an ASI and extinction level threat. I think it is absurd to believe that because AI right now is compute limited and any first AGI will only be able to run on large data centers. The latter kind of saf…

I don't mean to be facetious in any way, but how does AGI/ASI protect itself from humans simply pulling the plug?

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#67

Post by nradov »

dota_fanatic wrote: post #60
nradov wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Help us out here. Let's say that known bad actor Vladimir Putin gets an AGI. How does that allow him to take over the world despite many other countries having nuclear weapons? Take us through it step by step, and no hand waving please.

One cannot predict what a smarter-than-themself agent will do ahead of time, if they could then they’re just as smart. Just as a dolphin cannot predict how a human will come up with novel and utterly overwhelming ways to farm them, you and this other poster cannot predict how an AGI will achieve dominance of its environment to achieve its goals, so your request is impossible to fulfill. Lee Sedol couldn’t “take us th…

How ridiculous. This is just sci-fi bullshit without a shred of logic or scientific evidence. You would have just as much credibility claiming that we are at risk of an alien invasion. I mean I can prove that it's impossible.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#69

Post by hackerlight »

datameta wrote: post #30
insanitybit wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What damage will it cause? I feel like there's "AI will replace jobs" level of damage, which, why would we regulate that? An insane amount of technology is developed with the purpose of improving productivity or outright replacing workers. Then there's the "AI will go rogue", which I don't think is substantiated at all. Like, one can theorize about some novel, distinct system that is able to interact with the externa…

That's the thing - we don't know . Why play it fast and loose? Nobody is recommending stoppering research and making it squeeze through obcene bureaucratic pinholes. I for one think the near-term question is rather what kinds of conglomerated effects will there be from people being proto-transhuman through a connection to pre-AGI assistants in their pockets at all times? That's even before assuming bad actors and how…

Because it's an arms race guaranteed to occur given the incentives created by our capitalist system and our competitive multipolar geopolitical reality. If you don't get there first then an unscrupulous company will, or some entity in an authoritarian regime will, and that will be more risky even if it is delayed by 10 additional years.

The counter-argument is that those 10 extra years are necessary for additional AI safety research to occur.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#70

Post by _yb2s »

crazygringo wrote: post #52

It's so confusing because people keep (intentionally?) conflating two separate ideas of "AI safety". The first is the kind of humdrum ChatGPT safety of, don't swear, don't be sexually explicit, don't provide instructions on how to commit crimes, don't reproduce copyrighted materials, etc. Or preventing self-driving cars from harming pedestrians. This stuff is important but also pretty boring, and by all indications c…

Why are you so sure we are that far from AGI? Looking at current capabilities, and rate of improvement I would be surprised if it is more than a few years off.
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