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Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

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Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#701

Post by Zuiii »

endtime wrote: post #669
jongjong wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. As always, it's always the good guys who follow the rules and the bad guys who don't. This pause would just allow the bad guys to catch up. The solution is to allow as many different entities as possible to develop their own AIs so that they end up competing with each other and providing alternatives. What we don't want is a single AI which dominates our entire belief system.

Ah yes the old "give everyone in the world their own nuclear weapon" solution.

Seeing the geopolitical condition of those who have them and those who don't, I can't say that idea is without merit.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#702

Post by RUN12 »

endtime wrote: post #669
jongjong wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. As always, it's always the good guys who follow the rules and the bad guys who don't. This pause would just allow the bad guys to catch up. The solution is to allow as many different entities as possible to develop their own AIs so that they end up competing with each other and providing alternatives. What we don't want is a single AI which dominates our entire belief system.

Ah yes the old "give everyone in the world their own nuclear weapon" solution.

What, exactly, do you think would happen if western nations didn't have nuclear weapons?

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#703

Post by richardw »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #681
richardw wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And add in just one peer-level war where one side has their back against the wall. Then give it 100 years where anyone can create such a model on their phone. We’d need a constantly evolving inoculation function to compete. And it would probably lose because the other side has fewer restrictions. In my darker thoughts about this, this is why we see no aliens. To get this to work we need a far smarter entity with no p…

We all die, someday the species will too, I don't see it as any more dark than individual mortality or as dramatic as we always make it out to be.

Best scene: Russ & Martin in the car, True Detective.

https://youtu.be/A8x73UW8Hjk

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#704

Post by DonHopkins »

int_19h wrote: post #608
biscottigelato wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we need is more funding into AI Alignment research. An X-Prize equivalent. All current big AI companies should fund it, to the tune of 20%+ of revenue from AI businesses. And I am okay to have government enforce this if needed even tho I'm mostly a libertarian. Government should only be there to remedy tragedy of the commons and nothing else. This is exactly the biggest tragedy of the commons.

How exactly do you envision the enforcement? Only sell GPUs to people with a "certified ethical AI researcher" license? Purge torch, transformers etc from PyPI and only provide controlled access to them? Remove all the books and papers on the building blocks from public libraries and online?

We could create an all-powerful world-encompassing AI called AligNet that would monitor all human communication and control space lasers and autonomous drones to destroy the facilities and murder the families of anyone researching AI who isn't a "certified ethical AI researcher".

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#705

Post by cthalupa »

permo-w wrote: post #308
thomastjeffery wrote: post #302

The dumb criticize the blind. What an absurd situation! How did we get here? Here are the steps: 1. Large Language Models have been presented as "AI", which personifies them instead of describing how they work. 2. Goals for LLM development were set for the personified attributes, and not the actual functionally of the real thing. OpenAI brags about how GPT4 scores at human tests: as if that has any bearing on the mod…

I'm not concerned about how they work or whether they're attaining personhood or not. I'm concerned at what people can and will use them for to the detriment of our civilisation

> I'm concerned at what people can and will use them for to the detriment of our civilisation

Maybe? But there's already all sorts of untapped resources for that - and we mostly just don't choose to use them. A lot of the misinformation and "fake news" that came out during prior election cycles in the US came from former Soviet bloc countries, and there is already significant untapped human capital in those places where it could be done for cheap, perhaps even cheaper than the cost of doing inference on premiere LLMs.

Meanwhile we see all sorts of efficiency improvements occurring for generally positive use cases from these LLMs, and it is hardly unique for technology to have some risks to it as well as positive benefits.

Things like GPT and Midjourney have been a qualitative leap over their predecessors from two decades ago, but they fundamentally are not doing something new - and even another qualitative leap wouldn't bring them to the level of existential threat that this letter seems to be afraid of.

I think there are significant and real concerns about AGI and similar, but I can't seem to find any reason to share these same concern around the types of "AI" we are seeing today.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#706

Post by justrealist »

dekhn wrote: post #563
lend000 wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to use GPT-4 for my hard science startup, and it really has nothing to offer when you push the boundaries of what has been done by even a little, but it's great for speeding up coding. Once we do have an AI capable of extraordinary innovation (hopefully in 10 years! But probably a lot longer), it will be obvious, and it will unfortunately be removed from the hands of the plebs based on fearmongering…

My personal threshold for AGI is literally: discover something new and significant in science (preferably biology) that is almost certainly true by describing an experiment that could be replicated by a large number of scientists and whose interpretation is unambiguous. For example, the Hershey/Chase and Avery/McCleod experiments convinced the entire biological community that DNA, not protein, was almost certainly th…

At least recognize that the definition of AGI is moving from the previous goalpost of "passable human-level intelligence" to "superhuman at all things at once".

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#708

Post by int_19h »

drdeca wrote: post #663
int_19h wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly do you envision the enforcement? Only sell GPUs to people with a "certified ethical AI researcher" license? Purge torch, transformers etc from PyPI and only provide controlled access to them? Remove all the books and papers on the building blocks from public libraries and online?

I think you are talking about enforcing different things? The thing to enforce, which the parent commenter described, seemed to be a 20% tax on AI profits of “big AI companies”, to be paid to AI safety research groups. That doesn’t sound unenforceable to me. That’s just like, a tax on a kind of business.

The end goal of giving money to AI safety research groups is presumably to come up with some definition of "safe AI" that will then have to be actually enforced. Otherwise it's just a sinecure.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#709

Post by lukeplato »

gcau wrote: post #687

This seems really dumb. We don't have AI, we have language models that can't add 2 and 2. Their biggest danger is saying something offensive. Let's have this discussion when we're somewhat close to developing an actual AI? We could be 100 years away for all we know.

This take is a little outdated. Many people actively working on this technology no longer view it this simplistically. ex: https://twitter.com/bio_bootloader/status/164051244495839641...

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#710

Post by xwdv »

JCharante wrote: post #387
comment_ran wrote: post #283

"The Dark Forest" is a science fiction novel by Liu Cixin, which introduces a concept called "suspicion."(“猜疑链”) In this concept, the interaction between civilizations is viewed as an ongoing game of suspicion, where each civilization is worried that the other civilization may pose a threat to it. This kind of suspicion makes it difficult for civilizations to establish trust, thereby making the universe a dark forest…

Was this comment generated by a LLM?

Yes, it has some of the classic markers of an LLM. Downvoted.
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