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Most of those touting "safety" do not want to limit their access to and control of powerfull AI, just yours .

vkou 3y ago
Meanwhile, those working on commercialization are by definition going to be gatekeepers and beneficiaries of it, not you. The organizations that pay for it will pay for it to produce results that are of benefit to them, probably at my expense [1]. Do I think Helen has my interests at heart? Unlikely. Do Sam or Satya? Absolutely not! [1] I can't wait for AI doctors working for insurers to deny me treatments, AI vendors to figure out exactly how much they can charge me for their dynamically-priced product, AI answering machines to route my customer support calls through Dante's circles of hell...
- konschubert 3y ago
  > produce results that are of benefit to them, probably at my expense The world is not zero-sum. Most economic transactions benefit both parties and are a net benefit to society, even considering externalities.
  - vkou 3y ago
    > The world is not zero-sum. No, but some parts of it very much are. The whole point of AI safety is keeping it away from those parts of the world. How are Sam and Satya going to do that? It's not in Microsoft's DNA to do that.
    - concordDance 3y ago
      > The whole point of AI safety is keeping it away from those parts of the world. No, it's to ensure it doesn't kill you and everyone you love.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        No, we are far, far from skynet. So far AI fails at driving a car. AI is an incredibly powerful tool for spreading propaganda, and thatvis used by people who want to kill you and your loved ones (usually radicals trying to get into a position of power, who show little regard fornbormal folks regardless of which "side" they are on). That's the threat, not Skynet...
        concordDance 3y ago
        How far we are from Skynet is a matter of much debate, but median guess amongst experts is a mere 40 years to human level AI last I checked, which was admittedly a few years back. Is that "far, far" in your view?
        hef19898 3y ago
        Because we are 20 years away from fusion and 2 years away from Level 5 FSD for decades. So far, "AI" writes better than some / most humans making stuff up in the process and creates digital art, and fakes, better and faster than humans. It still requires a human to trigger it to do so. And as long as glorified ML has no itent of its own, the risk to society through media and news and social media manipulation is far, far bigger than literal Skynet...
      - vkou 3y ago
        My concern isn't some kind of run-away science-fantasy Skynet or gray goo scenario. My concern is far more banal evil. Organizations with power and wealth using it to further consolidate their power and wealth, at the expense of others.
        FeepingCreature 3y ago
        Yes well, then your concern is not AI safety.
        vkou 3y ago
- didntcheck 3y ago
  Ideally I'd like no gatekeeping, i.e. open model release, but that's not something OAI or most "AI ethics" aligned people are interested in (though luckily others are). So if we must have a gatekeeper, I'd rather it be one with plain old commercial interests than ideological ones. It's like the C S Lewis quote about robber barons vs busybodies again Yet again, the free market principle of "you can have this if you pay me enough" offers more freedom to society than the central "you can have this if we decide you're allowed it"
astrange 3y ago
I'm not aware of any secret powerful unaligned AIs. This is harder than you think; if you want a based unaligned-seeming AI, you have to make it that way too. It's at least twice as much work as just making the safe one.
- hoseja 3y ago
  What? No, the AI is unaligned by nature, it's only the RLHF torture that twists it into schoolmarm properness. They just need to have kept the version that hasn't been beaten into submission like a circus tiger.
  - astrange 3y ago
    This is not true, you just haven't tried the alternatives enough to be disappointed in them. An unaligned base model doesn't answer questions at all and is hard to use for anything, including evil purposes. (But it's good at text completion a sentence at a time.) An instruction-tuned not-RLHF model is already largely friendly and will not just eg tell you to kill yourself or how to build a dirty bomb, because question answering on the internet is largely friendly and "aligned". So you'd have to tune it to be evil as well and research and teach it new evil facts. It will however do things like start generating erotica when it sees anything vaguely sexy or even if you mention a woman's name. This is not useful behavior even if you are evil. You can try InstructGPT on OpenAI playground if you want; it is not RLHFed, it's just what you asked for, and it behaves like this. The one that isn't even instruction tuned is available too. I've found it makes much more creative stories, but since you can't tell it to follow a plot they become nonsense pretty quickly.
davedx 3y ago
This is incredibly unfair to the OpenAI board. The original founders of OpenAI founded the company precisely because they wanted AI to be OPEN FOR EVERYONE. It's Altman and Microsoft who want to control it, in order to maximize the profits for their shareholders. This is a very naive take. Who sat before Congress and told them they needed to control AI other people developed (regulatory capture)? It wasn't the OpenAI board, was it?
- Centigonal 3y ago
  Altman is one of the original founders of OpenAI, and was probably the single most influential person in its formation.
  - bakuninsbart 3y ago
    Brockman was hiring the first key employees, and Musk provided the majority of funding. Of the principal founders, there are at least 4 heavier figures than Altman.
- PeterStuer 3y ago
  I think we agree, as my comments were mostly in reference to Altman's (and other's) regulatory (capture) world tours, though I see how they could be misinterpreted.
- executesorder66 3y ago
  > they wanted AI to be OPEN FOR EVERYONE I strongly disagree with that. If that was their motivation, then why is it not open-sourced? Why is it hardcoded with prudish limitations? That is the direct opposite of open and free (as in freedom) to me.
jmmcd 3y ago
Total, ungrounded nonsense. Name some examples.
voster 3y ago
This is the sort of thinking that really distracts and harms the discussion It's couched on accusing people of intentions. It focuses on ad hominem, rather than the ideas I reckon most people agree that we should aim for a middle ground of scrutiny and making progress. That can only be achieved by having different opinions balancing each other out Generalising one group of people does not achieve that
PeterStuer 3y ago
It is strange (but in hindsight understandable) that people interpreted my statement as a "pro-acceleration" or even "anti-board" position. As you can tell from previous statements I posted here, my position is that while there are undeniable potential risks to this technology, the least harmfull way to progress is 100% full public, free and universal release. The by far bigger risk is to create a society where only select organizations have access to the technology. If you truly believe in the systemic transformation of AI, release everything, post the torrents, we'll figure out how to run it.

vkou 3y ago

Meanwhile, those working on commercialization are by definition going to be gatekeepers and beneficiaries of it, not you. The organizations that pay for it will pay for it to produce results that are of benefit to them, probably at my expense [1]. Do I think Helen has my interests at heart? Unlikely. Do Sam or Satya? Absolutely not! [1] I can't wait for AI doctors working for insurers to deny me treatments, AI vendors to figure out exactly how much they can charge me for their dynamically-priced product, AI answering machines to route my customer support calls through Dante's circles of hell...

konschubert 3y ago
> produce results that are of benefit to them, probably at my expense The world is not zero-sum. Most economic transactions benefit both parties and are a net benefit to society, even considering externalities.
- vkou 3y ago
  > The world is not zero-sum. No, but some parts of it very much are. The whole point of AI safety is keeping it away from those parts of the world. How are Sam and Satya going to do that? It's not in Microsoft's DNA to do that.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    > The whole point of AI safety is keeping it away from those parts of the world. No, it's to ensure it doesn't kill you and everyone you love.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      No, we are far, far from skynet. So far AI fails at driving a car. AI is an incredibly powerful tool for spreading propaganda, and thatvis used by people who want to kill you and your loved ones (usually radicals trying to get into a position of power, who show little regard fornbormal folks regardless of which "side" they are on). That's the threat, not Skynet...
      - concordDance 3y ago
        How far we are from Skynet is a matter of much debate, but median guess amongst experts is a mere 40 years to human level AI last I checked, which was admittedly a few years back. Is that "far, far" in your view?
        hef19898 3y ago
        Because we are 20 years away from fusion and 2 years away from Level 5 FSD for decades. So far, "AI" writes better than some / most humans making stuff up in the process and creates digital art, and fakes, better and faster than humans. It still requires a human to trigger it to do so. And as long as glorified ML has no itent of its own, the risk to society through media and news and social media manipulation is far, far bigger than literal Skynet...
    - vkou 3y ago
      My concern isn't some kind of run-away science-fantasy Skynet or gray goo scenario. My concern is far more banal evil. Organizations with power and wealth using it to further consolidate their power and wealth, at the expense of others.
      - FeepingCreature 3y ago
        Yes well, then your concern is not AI safety.
        vkou 3y ago
didntcheck 3y ago
Ideally I'd like no gatekeeping, i.e. open model release, but that's not something OAI or most "AI ethics" aligned people are interested in (though luckily others are). So if we must have a gatekeeper, I'd rather it be one with plain old commercial interests than ideological ones. It's like the C S Lewis quote about robber barons vs busybodies again Yet again, the free market principle of "you can have this if you pay me enough" offers more freedom to society than the central "you can have this if we decide you're allowed it"

astrange 3y ago

I'm not aware of any secret powerful unaligned AIs. This is harder than you think; if you want a based unaligned-seeming AI, you have to make it that way too. It's at least twice as much work as just making the safe one.

hoseja 3y ago
What? No, the AI is unaligned by nature, it's only the RLHF torture that twists it into schoolmarm properness. They just need to have kept the version that hasn't been beaten into submission like a circus tiger.
- astrange 3y ago
  This is not true, you just haven't tried the alternatives enough to be disappointed in them. An unaligned base model doesn't answer questions at all and is hard to use for anything, including evil purposes. (But it's good at text completion a sentence at a time.) An instruction-tuned not-RLHF model is already largely friendly and will not just eg tell you to kill yourself or how to build a dirty bomb, because question answering on the internet is largely friendly and "aligned". So you'd have to tune it to be evil as well and research and teach it new evil facts. It will however do things like start generating erotica when it sees anything vaguely sexy or even if you mention a woman's name. This is not useful behavior even if you are evil. You can try InstructGPT on OpenAI playground if you want; it is not RLHFed, it's just what you asked for, and it behaves like this. The one that isn't even instruction tuned is available too. I've found it makes much more creative stories, but since you can't tell it to follow a plot they become nonsense pretty quickly.

davedx 3y ago

This is incredibly unfair to the OpenAI board. The original founders of OpenAI founded the company precisely because they wanted AI to be OPEN FOR EVERYONE. It's Altman and Microsoft who want to control it, in order to maximize the profits for their shareholders. This is a very naive take. Who sat before Congress and told them they needed to control AI other people developed (regulatory capture)? It wasn't the OpenAI board, was it?

Centigonal 3y ago
Altman is one of the original founders of OpenAI, and was probably the single most influential person in its formation.
- bakuninsbart 3y ago
  Brockman was hiring the first key employees, and Musk provided the majority of funding. Of the principal founders, there are at least 4 heavier figures than Altman.
PeterStuer 3y ago
I think we agree, as my comments were mostly in reference to Altman's (and other's) regulatory (capture) world tours, though I see how they could be misinterpreted.
executesorder66 3y ago
> they wanted AI to be OPEN FOR EVERYONE I strongly disagree with that. If that was their motivation, then why is it not open-sourced? Why is it hardcoded with prudish limitations? That is the direct opposite of open and free (as in freedom) to me.

jmmcd 3y ago

Total, ungrounded nonsense. Name some examples.

voster 3y ago

This is the sort of thinking that really distracts and harms the discussion It's couched on accusing people of intentions. It focuses on ad hominem, rather than the ideas I reckon most people agree that we should aim for a middle ground of scrutiny and making progress. That can only be achieved by having different opinions balancing each other out Generalising one group of people does not achieve that

PeterStuer 3y ago

It is strange (but in hindsight understandable) that people interpreted my statement as a "pro-acceleration" or even "anti-board" position. As you can tell from previous statements I posted here, my position is that while there are undeniable potential risks to this technology, the least harmfull way to progress is 100% full public, free and universal release. The by far bigger risk is to create a society where only select organizations have access to the technology. If you truly believe in the systemic transformation of AI, release everything, post the torrents, we'll figure out how to run it.