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Statement on AI Risk

safe.ai

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Re: Statement on AI Risk

#621

Post by toth »

londons_explore wrote: post #513
toth wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are wrong. The risks are real and, while I am sure OpenAI and others will position themselves to take advantage of regulations that emerge, I believe that the CEOs are doing this at least in part because they believe this. If this was all about regulatory capture and marketing, why would Hinton, Bengio and all the other academics have signed the letter as well? Their only motivation is concern about the r…

The risks are real, but I don't think regulations will mitigate them. It's almost impossible to regulate something you can develop in a basement anywhere in the world. The real risks are being used to try to built a regulatory moat, for a young industry who famously has no moat.

State of the art AI models are definitely not something you can develop in a basement. You need a huge amount of GPUs running continuously for months, huge amounts of electrical power, and expensive-to-create proprietary datasets. Not to mention large team of highly-in-demand experts with very expensive salaries.

Many ways to regulate that. For instance, require tracking of GPUs and that they must connect to centralized servers for certain workloads. Or just go ahead and nationalize and shutdown NVDA.

(And no, fine-tuning LAMA based models is not state of the art, and is not where the real progress is going to come from)

And even if all the regulation does is slow down progress, every extra year we get before recursively self improving AGI increases the chances of some critical advance in alignment and improves our chances a little bit.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#622

Post by scrum-treats »

Tried to say it here[1] and here[2]. The government has advanced AI, e.g., 'An F-16 fighter jet controlled by AI has taken off, taken part in aerial fights against other aircraft and landed without human help'[3]. Like, advanced-advanced.

At any rate, I hope we (humans) live!

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35966335

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35759317

[3]https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/13vrpr9/an_f16...

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#623

Post by AnimalMuppet »

patrec wrote: post #548
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and if someone can join the two, that could be something genuinely formidable. But does anyone have a credible path to joining the different flavors to produce a unity that actually works?

Are you willing to make existential bets that no one does and no one will? Personally, I wouldn't even bet substantial money against it.

Even if someone will, I don't think it's an "existential risk". So, yes, I'm willing to make the bet. I'm also willing to make the bet that Santa never delivers nuclear warheads instead of presents. It's why I don't cap my chimney every Christmas Eve.

Between Covid, bank failures, climate change, and AI, it's like everyone is looking for something to be in a panic about.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#624

Post by lowbloodsugar »

randomdata wrote: post #217
pixl97 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany, for example would disagree with you. They believe violent speech is an act of violence in itself. >AI is an application of math. It turns out that people hook computers to 'things' that exist in the physical world. You know like robot bodies, or 3D printers. And as mentioned above, even virtual things like social media can cause enough problems. People hook AI to tools. And this is just the maybe not quite g…

> 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.

>It seems you are trying to go down the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" line of thinking.

"Guns don't kill people, AIs kill people" is where we are going, I think. This is the discussion: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

The discussion is not about a mathematical representation of AI. The discussion is about the actual implementation of AI on physical computing infrastructure which is accessible by at least one human on planet earth.

The credible danger, argued in various places, including superintelligence by Nick Bostrom, is that the "system under review" here is "every physical system on planet earth" because an AI could gain access to whatever systems exist on said planet, including human minds (see "Nazis").

So much as we might discuss the problems of letting a madman get control of the US, Russian, UK, French or Chinese nuclear arsenals, we might discuss the problem of building an AI if the act of building the AI could result in it taking over the nuclear arsenals of those countries and using it against humans. That takeover might involve convincing a human it should do it.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#625

Post by jazzyjackson »

kbash9 wrote: post #545
AlexandrB wrote: post #303

This 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.

The risks are definitely real. Just look at the number of smart individuals speaking out about this. The argument that anybody can build this in their basement is not accurate at the moment - you need a large cluster of GPUs to be able to come close to state of the art LLMs (e.g. GPT4). Sam Altman's suggestion of having an IAEA [ https://www.iaea.org/ ] like global regulatory authority seems like the best course of a…

"There should be a world government that decides what software you're allowed to run"

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#626

Post by chefandy »

marricks wrote: post #596
chefandy wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm eternally skeptical of the tech business, but I think you're jumping to conclusions, here. I'm on a first-name basis with several people near the top of this list. They are some of the smartest, savviest, most thoughtful, and most principled tech policy experts I've met. These folks default to skepticism of the tech business, champion open data, are deeply familiar with the risks of regulatory capture, and don't…

They didn’t become such a wealthy group by letting competition foster. I have no doubt they believe they could be doing the right thing but I also have no doubt they don’t want other people making the rules. Truth be told, who else really does have a seat at the table for dictating such massive societal change? Do you think the copy editor union gets to sit down and say “I’d rather not have my lunch eaten, I need to…

The people I know on the list are academics and do not seem to be any wealthier than other academics I know. I'm quite certain the private industry signatories are going to entirely advocate for their interest just as they do in any other policy discussion.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#627

Post by revelio »

waterhouse wrote: post #143
Mizza wrote: post #56

Can anybody who really believes this apocalyptic stuff send me in the direction of a convincing _argument_ that this is actually a concern? I'm willing to listen, but I haven't read anything that tries to actually convince the reader of the worry, rather than appealing to their authority as "experts" - ie, the well funded.

The most obvious paths to severe catastrophe begin with "AI gets to the level of a reasonably competent security engineer in general, and gets good enough to find a security exploit in OpenSSL or some similarly widely used library". Then the AI, or someone using it, takes over hundreds of millions of computers attached to the internet. Then it can run millions of instances of itself to brute-force look for exploits i…

That's not an obvious path at all:

- Such exploits happen already and don't lead to extinction or really much more than annoyance for IT staff.

- Most of the computers attached to the internet can't run even basic LLMs, let alone hypothetical super-intelligent AIs.

- Very few cars (none?) let remote hackers kill people by controlling their acceleration. The available interfaces don't allow for that. Most people aren't driving at any given moment anyway.

These scenarios all seem absurd.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#628

Post by worik »

toth wrote: post #490
AlexandrB wrote: post #303

This 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.

I think you are wrong. The risks are real and, while I am sure OpenAI and others will position themselves to take advantage of regulations that emerge, I believe that the CEOs are doing this at least in part because they believe this. If this was all about regulatory capture and marketing, why would Hinton, Bengio and all the other academics have signed the letter as well? Their only motivation is concern about the r…

> I believe that the CEOs are doing this at least in part because they believe this.

Yes

People believe things that are in their interest.

The big dangers to big AI is they spent billions building things that are being replicated for thousands

They are advocating for what will become a moat for their business

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#629

Post by marricks »

chefandy wrote: post #626
marricks wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn’t become such a wealthy group by letting competition foster. I have no doubt they believe they could be doing the right thing but I also have no doubt they don’t want other people making the rules. Truth be told, who else really does have a seat at the table for dictating such massive societal change? Do you think the copy editor union gets to sit down and say “I’d rather not have my lunch eaten, I need to…

The people I know on the list are academics and do not seem to be any wealthier than other academics I know. I'm quite certain the private industry signatories are going to entirely advocate for their interest just as they do in any other policy discussion.

Got it, thank you for the clarification!

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#630

Post by hackermatic »

olalonde wrote: post #235
shafyy wrote: post #32

The issue I take with these kind of "AI safety" organizations is that they focus on the wrong aspects of AI safety. Specifically, they run this narrative that AI will make us humans go extinct. This is not a real risk today. Real risks are more in the category of systemic racism and sexism, deep fakes, over reliance on AI etc. But of course, "AI will humans extinct" is much sexier and collects clicks. Therefore, the…

> A good person to follow on real AI safety is Emily M. Bender (professor of computer linguistics at University of Washington): https://mstdn.social/@emilymbender@dair-community.social - Pronouns - "AI bros" - "mansplaining" - "extinction from capitalism" - "white supremacy" - "one old white guy" (referring to Geoffrey Hinton) Yeah... I think I will pass.

It sounds like you're making an ad hominem about her ad hominems.
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