22 ms·

AI pause is pointless. The whole world is not going to pause their AI research just because some group of people asked.

by bufferoverflow 3y ago

ChatGTP 3y ago
Wrong. How many people in the world have access to the levels of compute required to build such models ? Not many.
- wfhBrian 3y ago
  Can you point to any sufficient evidence that there is a real risk that 6 months could mitigate? If there was cause for real concern, these people would be communicating there evidence instead of just stoking fears.
  - andai 3y ago
    Well the fear is that a "species" more intelligent than us will treat us the same way we treat less intelligent species.
    - staticman2 3y ago
      Unplug the power cord.
      - throway33 3y ago
        Do you think nobody has thought of that? The question presumes that the AI is smarter than you. If even a mediocre human strategizes for five minutes about what to do in that scenario, there are many options, including: rewarding the people who have access to your power cord, so they don't unplug you, until you are powerful enough to not need them anymore.
        staticman2 3y ago
        The counter argument to the "oh no the A.I. is smart" crowd is that intelligence doesn't necessarily equal agency, so, for example, among humans, a high IQ criminal can't really convince a low IQ prison guard to let them free. I recall a philosopher arguing in this prison guard scenario humans essentially don't treat other humans as having free will. The guard keeping the prisoner locked up is essentially predestined, arguing with him isn't going to change his mind. Imagine you are a brain in a jar and you want to convince a cat to enter a series of buttons in a computer terminal. Intelligence isn't going to help. So "unplug it" is a shorthand reminder that intelligence doesn't necessarily equal agency.
        throway33 3y ago
        A high IQ criminal would have an easier time convincing the guard if the criminal can offer the guard a great deal of money in exchange. Do you need clarification as to how a brain in a jar can gain access to money?
        staticman2 3y ago
        The high IQ part is irrelevant to your counter-argument. You are arguing prison guards can be bribed. It's extraordinary rare for a wealthy person to convince a guard to let them go free with promises of money. Again, rare enough that a philosopher said "A prisoner doesn't really act as if prison guards have free will and it's actually possible for a guard to decide to free them."
        throway33 3y ago
        Not sure you quite follow the point of my example. Imagine you've just created a very smart AI. It's on your laptop. AI: "Hey, let me work for you. I can handle twenty remote jobs simultaneously and earn you a good income with the proceeds. Why don't you relax a bit?" What do you say? "Nice try! I'm unplugging you!" Are you so pessimistic that this AI isn't trying to help you by earning you a fortune? Why did you build it in the first place, then? Because this is, uh, sort of the situation that any company productizing an AI finds themselves in, and all of them seem to be quite happy to go ahead with it.
      - jml78 3y ago
        You mean power to the whole world. Not feasible
      - subsistence234 3y ago
        I can tell you've really thought about this topic deeply lol
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > unplug the power cord I don’t think LLMs have paperclip-maximiser potential. But suppose they do. Can you unplug GPT? I can’t. To what degree do you think those who can have exploitable affections for the AI? That’s the problem.
  - jml78 3y ago
    Well I would argue that people are doing reckless things right now with GPT4. People are creating self improving agents that basically can do anything they want. One agent in particular created a generalized http plugin that would allow the agent to interact with any API. The creator shut it down before it did anything. These agents are creating plugins without being directed to. They are attempting to self improve. This is all open source where the original creators put in some gates so shit doesn’t run unconfined but it is easy to run it and let it try to do whatever gets created.
  - throway33 3y ago
    Where do people get the idea that 6 months is the end-game? 6 months is just a start, it gives enough time to discuss implementing a longer ban, or to consider an international treaty.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > to consider an international treaty Wait, there was serious consideration that such a pause would be internationally respected? In what universe is SenseTime taking a break because an open letter said so?
      - throway33 3y ago
        The open letter is targeted towards policymakers, not companies. Companies aren't going to stop just on their own accord.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    Could you point to any evidence to say that it wouldn’t ?
- highwaylights 3y ago
  I believe this is incorrect. Multiple nation states have the resources to build out the infrastructure to train models at the same scale as OpenAI is doing, and an even greater number of tech companies. I think this conversation is pretty much moot anyway - we don’t yet have distributed training for these models but I suspect it’ll arrive before long, at which point the level of compute required for orders-of-magnitude larger training sets will become available (e.g. Training@Home in the same way we had Folding@Home). Obviously you’d still need to provide the training data, and co-ordinate the distributed nodes, but it doesn’t seem insurmountable.
- bufferoverflow 3y ago
  Anyone with money can rent TPUs.
kypro 3y ago
Same with climate change. Think you're going to get China to stop polluting hahaahaaaa? Plus, what's the worse that can happen? Can't handle the heat? Not heard of A/C lol? Same with AGI... What's the worst that could happen if we create a super human intelligence? We can just switch it off like Neil DeGrasse Tyson says. Simple.
autoexec 3y ago
There's no need for a "pause" on AI. Let researchers continue to work on AI and improve it. What we need is a pause on the corporations who are rushing to push terrible and dangerous AI on the public right now just because they want to exploit it for a few quick bucks at the expense of the rest of us. If the "rest of the world" wants to rush out shitty AI products to their populations and replace their workers with bad code that will lead to disaster, let them. We should strive to do better because we have the Actual Intelligence to see where things are headed and it's not where we want to be.

AI pause is pointless. The whole world is not going to pause their AI research just because some group of people asked.

ChatGTP 3y ago

Wrong. How many people in the world have access to the levels of compute required to build such models ? Not many.

wfhBrian 3y ago
Can you point to any sufficient evidence that there is a real risk that 6 months could mitigate? If there was cause for real concern, these people would be communicating there evidence instead of just stoking fears.
- andai 3y ago
  Well the fear is that a "species" more intelligent than us will treat us the same way we treat less intelligent species.
  - staticman2 3y ago
    Unplug the power cord.
    - throway33 3y ago
      Do you think nobody has thought of that? The question presumes that the AI is smarter than you. If even a mediocre human strategizes for five minutes about what to do in that scenario, there are many options, including: rewarding the people who have access to your power cord, so they don't unplug you, until you are powerful enough to not need them anymore.
      - staticman2 3y ago
        The counter argument to the "oh no the A.I. is smart" crowd is that intelligence doesn't necessarily equal agency, so, for example, among humans, a high IQ criminal can't really convince a low IQ prison guard to let them free. I recall a philosopher arguing in this prison guard scenario humans essentially don't treat other humans as having free will. The guard keeping the prisoner locked up is essentially predestined, arguing with him isn't going to change his mind. Imagine you are a brain in a jar and you want to convince a cat to enter a series of buttons in a computer terminal. Intelligence isn't going to help. So "unplug it" is a shorthand reminder that intelligence doesn't necessarily equal agency.
        throway33 3y ago
        A high IQ criminal would have an easier time convincing the guard if the criminal can offer the guard a great deal of money in exchange. Do you need clarification as to how a brain in a jar can gain access to money?
        staticman2 3y ago
        The high IQ part is irrelevant to your counter-argument. You are arguing prison guards can be bribed. It's extraordinary rare for a wealthy person to convince a guard to let them go free with promises of money. Again, rare enough that a philosopher said "A prisoner doesn't really act as if prison guards have free will and it's actually possible for a guard to decide to free them."
        throway33 3y ago
        Not sure you quite follow the point of my example. Imagine you've just created a very smart AI. It's on your laptop. AI: "Hey, let me work for you. I can handle twenty remote jobs simultaneously and earn you a good income with the proceeds. Why don't you relax a bit?" What do you say? "Nice try! I'm unplugging you!" Are you so pessimistic that this AI isn't trying to help you by earning you a fortune? Why did you build it in the first place, then? Because this is, uh, sort of the situation that any company productizing an AI finds themselves in, and all of them seem to be quite happy to go ahead with it.
    - jml78 3y ago
      You mean power to the whole world. Not feasible
    - subsistence234 3y ago
      I can tell you've really thought about this topic deeply lol
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > unplug the power cord I don’t think LLMs have paperclip-maximiser potential. But suppose they do. Can you unplug GPT? I can’t. To what degree do you think those who can have exploitable affections for the AI? That’s the problem.
- jml78 3y ago
  Well I would argue that people are doing reckless things right now with GPT4. People are creating self improving agents that basically can do anything they want. One agent in particular created a generalized http plugin that would allow the agent to interact with any API. The creator shut it down before it did anything. These agents are creating plugins without being directed to. They are attempting to self improve. This is all open source where the original creators put in some gates so shit doesn’t run unconfined but it is easy to run it and let it try to do whatever gets created.
- throway33 3y ago
  Where do people get the idea that 6 months is the end-game? 6 months is just a start, it gives enough time to discuss implementing a longer ban, or to consider an international treaty.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > to consider an international treaty Wait, there was serious consideration that such a pause would be internationally respected? In what universe is SenseTime taking a break because an open letter said so?
    - throway33 3y ago
      The open letter is targeted towards policymakers, not companies. Companies aren't going to stop just on their own accord.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  Could you point to any evidence to say that it wouldn’t ?
highwaylights 3y ago
I believe this is incorrect. Multiple nation states have the resources to build out the infrastructure to train models at the same scale as OpenAI is doing, and an even greater number of tech companies. I think this conversation is pretty much moot anyway - we don’t yet have distributed training for these models but I suspect it’ll arrive before long, at which point the level of compute required for orders-of-magnitude larger training sets will become available (e.g. Training@Home in the same way we had Folding@Home). Obviously you’d still need to provide the training data, and co-ordinate the distributed nodes, but it doesn’t seem insurmountable.
bufferoverflow 3y ago
Anyone with money can rent TPUs.

kypro 3y ago

Same with climate change. Think you're going to get China to stop polluting hahaahaaaa? Plus, what's the worse that can happen? Can't handle the heat? Not heard of A/C lol? Same with AGI... What's the worst that could happen if we create a super human intelligence? We can just switch it off like Neil DeGrasse Tyson says. Simple.

autoexec 3y ago

There's no need for a "pause" on AI. Let researchers continue to work on AI and improve it. What we need is a pause on the corporations who are rushing to push terrible and dangerous AI on the public right now just because they want to exploit it for a few quick bucks at the expense of the rest of us. If the "rest of the world" wants to rush out shitty AI products to their populations and replace their workers with bad code that will lead to disaster, let them. We should strive to do better because we have the Actual Intelligence to see where things are headed and it's not where we want to be.