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To those saying "this is impossible in our society", there is a long history of scientific fields mutually agreeing to pause certain work until safety and regul
by reso 4y ago
To those saying "this is impossible in our society", there is a long history of scientific fields mutually agreeing to pause certain work until safety and regulations could be put in place. The Asilomar Conference is an example. [1]
The idea that "you can't put the genie back in the bottle" is very popular in tech culture, but many have suggested that simply extending elements of copyright or tort law to AI would be sufficient to majorly slow down current research directions by creating liability. In the art world, the reason we don't see music being used in major movies without the rights-holders permission is because of liability, and this works very well.
I think finding consensus on an intelligent way forward is very possible here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asilomar_Conference_on_Recombinant_DNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asilomar_Conference_on_Recombi...
- lannisterstark 4y agoIt's not about it being impossible. I guess the major issue right now is that people are focusing on the wrong aspect of it. They should be focusing on how most LLMs are currently only controlled by bigger coroporations. Democratizing the LLMs and Giving access to people would resolve the x-poly we have currently. This also solves the "safety and regulations" issue to an extent - Do you really trust that Microsoft, Google, or govt-entities will not have their own biases and will want to regulate the citizens who want to use their products more, sometimes in unethical ways (because we all know, corps and govts never do anything bad)? This "Open letter" reeks of "we are behind, let us play catch up, you cant take all the money!" or, of baseless fearmongering where LLMs and future assistants could be used to help countless people with disabilities for example. "Make the world a better place, but no, not like that, not by democratizing it, but under OUR CONTROL" seems to be the motto here.
- invig 4y agoThe corporations pay for people to learn how to do this stuff. Eventually, someone will leave and build the open-source version (when it's feasible to do it / the price has come down).
- ntr-- 4y ago> you cant take all the money! A cursory reading of the list of signatories shows mostly academics, so your summary of their motivations appears to be incorrect. > not like that, not by democratizing it, but under OUR CONTROL I also don't know how you came to that conclusion, from TFA: > Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders
- jamilton 4y agoWhat do you mean by "democratizing the LLMs"? There are already open source LLMs. Making Claude, GPT-4, and whatever else is being worked on open source wouldn't make them any less capable of doing harm.
- lannisterstark 4y agoI mean in the sense of getting capable models in the hands of people, rather than only a few companies who will arguably steer them towards their own goals. The open source models we currently have are vastly inferior to proprietary ones. Fragmentation reduces any danger. It doesn't amplify it. Imagine just chrome and Google pushing pwas at you.
- JamesBarney 4y agoHow much do you think Asilomar slowed down DNA research? Do you think without it we'd more more than 10 year ahead? I doubt it. Optimistically we'd maybe have 6 months to a year of additional progress in those fields without it. And this would only slow it down in a handful of countries. That's not going to keep China from trying to build AGI. If we are in a world where building an AGI is possible and near, I trust OpenAI far more than the CCP to both align it with it's creators, and for that alignment to match up with my values.
- nonbirithm 4y agoThis has been repeated often, but even if it's true, I have to wonder why it's treated as a given with no further exploration. Is it because we as a species will inevitably accept any technological progress once sometime after it's been discovered, before the consequences can be suffered? What will that imply for any other species intelligent enough to get to where we are? The kinds of theories I mull over tend to delve into the realm of speculative fiction more often than not. The comments section here feels like it could be replicated in the opening chapters of such a novel. We might never know if the speculation pans out before it's too late.
- le-mark 4y agoThis is all speculative, but not fiction at this point clearly. Sci-fi authors have explored this possibility for decades, maybe their ideas could be of some help? I struggle to see how though; how to train Asimovs three laws for example?
- staunton 4y agoThe very point of Asimovs laws is that you can't just make up a couple simple laws and rest assured nothing bad will happen
- ChatGTP 4y agoIt’s dangerous parrot talking to keep saying “China”. I mean we really have no idea about their thoughts on it because we’re clearly not talking to them. China has good people living there too you know ?
- mustacheemperor 4y agoNot having lived through either moment in history, I have to remark that the current discourse about regulating AI feels like it rhymes more with the efforts to lock up encryption technology with government regulation in the 90s than with the research community's conference on recombinant DNA.
- beepbooptheory 4y agoWell at least one difference there is all those cypherpunks, rightly or wrongly, felt like having access to encryption tech was synonymous with individual liberty, and in that there fights were an opposition to the state controlling them. But in this case I don't see how we can divorce this AI stuff from the huge companies that alone have the infrastructure and capital to train and sustain them (at the moment). As such, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with individualism/libertarianism as such. So, less punk, but way more technological determinism.
- biscottigelato 4y agoWhat 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.
- int_19h 4y agoHow 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?
- drdeca 4y agoI 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.
- int_19h 4y agoThe 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.
- drdeca 4y agoIf the safety groups figure out how to do things in a way which we can be confident is safe, this would make it at least possible for the capabilities researchers to do things in those ways. I would imagine people would prefer to do things in safe ways all else being equal. So, if the safety researchers find safety methods which have small enough capabilities costs, then presumably the people who should use those methods, would tend to do so?
- vntok 4y ago> To those saying "this is impossible in our society", there is a long history of scientific fields mutually agreeing to pause certain work until safety and regulations could be put in place. The Asilomar Conference is an example. Did China, India, South Africa, Cuba or the USSR comply with these Asilomar "put the genie back in the bottle" conclusions?
- twblalock 4y agoThe kind of research discussed at Asilomar had a high barrier to entry in terms of both scientific knowledge and access to laboratories and technology to pull off. Only scientists could really do it. The GPTs are at the point where anyone with money can buy cloud compute and train one. The methods for doing so are fairly well known. It won't be long before a teenager can train a GPT on commodity cloud VMs.
- zamalek 4y agoThe problem is that anyone with sufficient money could rent out the infrastructure required to train GPT5 or what-have-you. They need not share it publicly, they can use it for their nefarious purposes privately. The analogous scenario would be preventing your military from experimenting with TNT, when the recipe for TNT is public knowledge. You can't copyright away public knowledge.
- jongjong 4y agoGood 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.
- endtime 4y agoAh yes the old "give everyone in the world their own nuclear weapon" solution.
- streptomycin 4y agoI had a professor who was involved in that kind of research at the time of the Asilomar Conference. He said it was all very good, everyone agreed to pause their research until people established guidelines for safety. And then once the guidelines were established and research was allowed to resume, everyone immediately published all the research that they had never stopped working on during the "pause".
- thih9 4y agoHow long was the waiting period? Was not publishing the research for that duration enough to improve the safety?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- anileated 4y agoCopyright law should recognize that training models is already a copyright violation. If we just declare “no using AI generated work” unscrupulous people will simply pass it for their own work.
- evrydayhustling 4y agoWhat about the unintended consequences of pausing research? I know many people working in forestry, cancer, inequality, and the arts producing amazing new work in their fields via AI. What's the cost of delaying advacnces, or a new masterpiece? And what is the committee that should determine we are ready to proceed? Do we think our representative government is prepared for that task? (The constitution they swear to does not.). Is a conference of academics sufficient? I don't think there is one that represents the majority of world expertise, and certainly not world use cases. Perhaps the courts, but they are designed to seek consistency after the fact, not to extrapolate. A pause is intended to let alignment research and policy catch up. But can it catch up without the context of developing use cases? When research resumes, can alignment and policy keep the lead, or will we stop and go as adoption overtakes the scenarios we anticipated? I think a more serious direction for energy and concern is advancing the real safety research and policy decisions evolving around AI today.
- naillo 4y agoThe idea that laws can't stop ML research is insane. We've barely had open source progress on these things for 5 years due to the "safety" propaganda. Imagine if they were actually illegal to work on, we'd get nothing done in public and barely anything done at all.