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Statement on AI Risk

safe.ai

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Re: Statement on AI Risk

#841

Post by q1w2 »

blueblimp wrote: post #35
valine wrote: post #17

I have yet to see a solution for “AI safety” that doesn’t involve ceding control of our most powerful models to a small handful of corporations. It’s hard to take these safety concerns seriously when the organizations blowing the whistle are simultaneously positioning themselves to capture the majority of the value.

There is a way, in my opinion: distribute AI widely and give it a diversity of values, so that any one AI attempting takeover (or being misused) is opposed by the others. This is best achieved by having both open source and a competitive market of many companies with their own proprietary models.

Like giving nuclear weapons to everyone. What could go wrong?

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#842

Post by aoeusnth1 »

pharmakom wrote: post #768

I don't understand how people are assigning probability scores to AI x-risk. It seems like pure speculation to me. I want to take it seriously, given the signatories, any good resources? I'm afraid I have a slight bias against Less wrong due to the writing style typical of their posts.

Check out Robert Miles’ YouTube channel.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#843

Post by aussieguy1234 »

It's too late to regulate.

It's now possible to run an AI almost as powerful as ChatGPT on high end consumer hardware with the latest gaming GPUs.

Since this became possible a couple of months ago, the open source AI community has exploded. There are now dozens, if not more, open source LLMs that approach the capabilities of ChatGPT.

Good luck regulating what individual hackers can now create offline at home.

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#844

Post by scrum-treats »

nullsense wrote: post #775
scrum-treats wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This really is the crux of the issue isn't it? All this pushback for the first petition, because "Elon Musk," but now GPT wonder Sam Altman "testifies" that he has "no monetary interest in OpenAI" and quickly follows up his proclamation with…

We should also stay skeptical of all the internet conspiracy theories too. I don't think anyone can actually tell which is which on this topic.

Agreed. Do add a mental /s on my above comment. It's a bit tongue and cheek.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#845

Post by hucgyuo »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #411
olalonde wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no issue with her choice of pronouns. I just find it odd that she states them when ~100% of the population would infer them correctly from her name Emily (and picture). My guess is she put them there for ideological signaling.

This is unnecessarily cynical. Why should people who are androgynous or trans be the only ones who state pronouns? By creating a norm around it we can improve their comfort at extremely minimal cost to ourselves.

[flagged]

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#846

Post by nopinsight »

nico wrote: post #644
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…

Maybe these people have good intentions and are just being naive They might not be getting paid, but that doesn’t mean they are not being influenced AI at this point is pretty much completely open, all the papers, math and science behind it are public Soon, people will have advanced AI running locally on their phones and watches So unless they scrub the Internet, start censoring this stuff, and pretty much ban comput…

You are attributing naivety on a technical matter to many people who have done world class research and some of them are even a pioneer of their subfield of study.

To do that level of research, one needs strong independent thinking skills and deep technical expertise. We have plenty of evidence on this very site how hard it is to influence technical people and change their opinion.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#847

Post by olalonde »

hackermatic wrote: post #630
olalonde wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I might look past the fact that she was sexist/racist if the topic of interest wasn't ethics. But since it is, I'd say those quoted tweets are pretty relevant.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#848

Post by zarzavat »

jhanschoo wrote: post #752
HDThoreaun wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today's real issues are not that important compared to human extinction.

It seems to me that the most viable routes to human extinction are through superscaled versions of contemporary disasters: war, disease, and famine.

Although war, disease and famine may kill many people, they are extraordinarily unlikely to cause extinction per se. The human species has so many individuals that only very special risks are capable of reducing 8 billion to zero.

For most mammalian species if they have a stable 100k individuals then they are doing pretty well. So we have 80000x more humans than what would be considered a healthy population in other species.

The risks of human extinction tend to be more long-tail events that have a planet wide effect. For example, a large impact, supervolcano eruption, or engineered bio weapon. AI certainly deserves its place on that list.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#849

Post by nopinsight »

skybrian wrote: post #681
nopinsight wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s why AI risks are real, even if our most advanced AI is merely a ‘language’ model: Language can represent thoughts and some world models. There is strong evidence that LLMs contain some representation of world models it learned from text. Moreover, LLM is already a misnomer; latest versions are multimodal. Current versions can be used to build agents with limited autonomy. Future versions of LLMs are most likel…

A lot of things are called "world models" that I would consider just "models" so it depends on what you mean by that. But what do you consider to be strong evidence? The Othello paper isn't what I'd call strong evidence.

I'd say stronger evidence than the Othello paper is the ability to answer what-if questions coherently and plausibly.

I just asked GPT-4 "What would happen to Northern Thailand if elephants behave like kangaroos?".

The answers are probably better than what 90+% of humans could give after spending an hour researching on the internet.

The Sparks of AGI paper provides much more evidence and examples: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#850

Post by tjmc »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #624
randomdata wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 discus…

I don't understand this argument (the "Terminator" scenario). AI could conceivably self replicate and evolve as software but it still needs hardware to run on, power, networking etc etc. There's no better way to kill that than to start a nuclear war or engineer some super virus that kills everyone.

It's hard to see any scenario where AI could become a dominant force without significant human collaboration. Perhaps somewhere like North Korea where a very small elite has complete control over the the population it could happen but it sounds a lot like sci-fi to me. I'd love to hear some plausible scenarios for the counter-argument. I've seen a lot of "I think there's an x% chance we're in trouble" arguments which might be convincing for job losses, but I don't find at all plausible as a case for human extinction or indentured servitude (the "Matrix" scenario).

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