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Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

reuters.com

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Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#71
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you're correct about the capabilities of LLMs (I don't think you are), there are still obvious dangers here. I wrote a comment recently trying to explain how even if you believe all LLMs can (and will ever) do is regurgitate their training data that you should still be concerned. For example, imagine in 5 years we have GPT-7, and you ask GPT-7 to solve humanity's great problems. From its training data GPT-7 m…

People have been able to commit malicious acts by themselves historically, no AI needed. In other words, LLMs are only as dangerous as the humans operating them, and therefore the solution is to stop crime instead of regulating AI, which only seeks to make OpenAI a monopoly.

This isn't a trick question, genuinely curious – do you agree that guns are not the problem and should not be regulated – yes, while they can be used for harm, the right approach to gun violence is to police the crime.

I think the objection to this would be that currently not everyone in the world an expert in biochemistry or at hacking into computer systems. Even if you're correct in principal, perhaps the risks of the technology we're developing here is too high? We typically regulate technologies which can easily be used to cause harm.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#72
post #64

While I'd agree with sentiment in this threat that GPT-4 and current AI models are not dangerous yet, I guess what I don't understand is why so many people here believe we should allow private companies to continue to develop the technology until someone develops something dangerous? Those here who don't believe AI should be regulated, do you not believe AI can be dangerous? Is that you believe a dangerous AI is so f…

They are already dangerous in the way they cause global anxiety and fear in people, and also because the effects of their usage to the economy and real lives of the people are unpredictable.

AI needs to be regulated and controlled, the alternative is chaos.

Unfortunately the current demented fossile and greedy monopolist lead system is most likely incapable of creating a sane & fair environment for the development of AI. I can only hope I'm wrong.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#74
One of the side effects of the crypto craze has been a lot of general citizens possessing quite a few GPUs. It turns out those GPUs are just as good at training models as they are at mining crypto.

The big companies don't like that.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#75
post #48
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this, I don't get how even on this website people are so clueless. Give them a semi human sounding puppet and they think skynet is coming tomorrow. If we learned anything from the past few months is how gullible people are, wishful thinking is a hell of a drug

I’m open minded about this, I see people more knowledgeable than me on both sides of the argument. Can someone explain how Geoffrey Hinton can be considered to be clueless?

He doesn't talk about skynet afaik

> Some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “quite scary”, he told the BBC, warning they could become more intelligent than humans and could be exploited by “bad actors”. “It’s able to produce lots of text automatically so you can get lots of very effective spambots. It will allow authoritarian leaders to manipulate their electorates, things like that.”

You can do bad things with it but people who believe we're on the brink of singularity, that we're all going to lose our jobs to chatgpt and that world destruction is coming are on hard drugs.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#76
post #9

Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it. Then imagine willfully hyping up and scaring people who don't understand, and because it can predict words you take advantage of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, so it follows that it is something capable of generalized and adaptable intelligence. Shame on all of the people involved in…

Why is it so hard to hear this perspective? Like, genuinely curious. This is the first I hear of someone cogently putting this thought out there, but it seems rather painfully obvious -- even if perhaps incorrect, but certainly a perspective that is very easy to comprehend and one that merits a lot of discussion. Why is it almost nonexistent? I remember even in the hay day of crypto fever you'd still have A LOT of fo…

I'm not against machine learning, I'm against regulatory capture of it. It's an amazing technology. It still doesn't change the fact that they're just function approximators that are trained to minimize loss on a dataset.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#77
post #67
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m open minded about this, I see people more knowledgeable than me on both sides of the argument. Can someone explain how Geoffrey Hinton can be considered to be clueless?

Hinton, in his own words, asked PaLM to explain a dad joke he had supposedly come up with and was so convinced that his clever and advanced joke would take a lifetime of experience to understand, despite PaLM perfectly articulating why the joke was funny, he quit Google and is, conveniently, still going to continue working on AI, despite the "risks." Not exactly the best example.

Hinton said that the ability to explain a joke was among the first things that made him reassess their capabilities. Not the only thing. You make it sound as though Hinton is obviously clueless yet there are few people with deeper knowledge and more experience working with neural networks. People told him he was crazy for thinking neural networks could do anything useful, now it seems people are calling his crazy for the reverse. I’m genuinely confused about this.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#78
post #75
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m open minded about this, I see people more knowledgeable than me on both sides of the argument. Can someone explain how Geoffrey Hinton can be considered to be clueless?

He doesn't talk about skynet afaik > Some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “quite scary”, he told the BBC, warning they could become more intelligent than humans and could be exploited by “bad actors”. “It’s able to produce lots of text automatically so you can get lots of very effective spambots. It will allow authoritarian leaders to manipulate their electorates, things like that.” You can do bad things with it b…

I’ll have to dig it up but the last interview I saw with him, he was focused more on existential risk from the potential for super intelligence, not just misuse.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#80
post #9

Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it. Then imagine willfully hyping up and scaring people who don't understand, and because it can predict words you take advantage of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, so it follows that it is something capable of generalized and adaptable intelligence. Shame on all of the people involved in…

While I think it needs goals to be some kind of AGI, it certainly can plan and convince people of things. Also, seems like the goal already exists maximize shareholder value. In fact if AI can beat someone at chess and figure out protein folding and figure out fusion plasma design, why is it a stretch to think it can't be good at project management. To me a scenario where it leads to an immediate reduction in the human population of some moderately large % would still be a bad outcome. So, even it you just think of it as an index of most human knowledge it does need some kind of mechanism to manage who has access to what. I don't want every to know how to make a bomb.

Is a license the best way forward I don't know but I do feel like this is more than a math formula.

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