For years we've been hearing how AI will build robots and wipe out humanity and the bollocks that is the trolley problem. I remember when I was reading the Unsu

For years we've been hearing how AI will build robots and wipe out humanity and the bollocks that is the trolley problem. I remember when I was reading the Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Generation[1] paper and my immediate thought was "yep, I can see this going south". And sure enough, not long after deepfakes became a thing. GPT-3 is absolutely astonishing in terms of it's capabilities and I'd love to be able to dig into it's inner workings and scroll through it's code. The truth is there are three stoppers for the large majority of people who would love to exploit it. 1. Data. For better or worse obtaining a dataset that big isn't a great deal if you really want to. Gutenberg project, wiki corpus, the reddit dumps - difficult but definitely doable. 2. Costs - training the model costs $5M which is a considerable amount of money by anyone's standard(rich people will also have a second thought when they hear that number). But there is a catch - the hardware is becoming more and more accessible. Remember when a server grade GPU like P100 was ~10k a piece? And now the high end 30X series are 1/10th of that and have better specs... Adjust those numbers and you get something close to 20x price decrease in the course of 4 years(iirc p100 came out 2016). 3. Finding the people with the adequate knowledge to build something like this. This I think is the only blocker at this point. Realistically we are talking a few dozen people on earth that have the mental capacity to build something like this. If there is one thing that I see as a potential threat in this field: information losing credibility. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02200 https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02200