7 ms·

Sam Altman's Second Coming Sparks New Fears of the AI Apocalypse

31 points by zerohalo 3y ago

zerohalo 3y ago
Despite the hyperbolic title, the article outlines pretty clearly the outcomes of the OpenAI debacle and where things are headed. "Mission-oriented" AI research is dead; it's just another tech race by the big boys now.
- baking 3y ago
  I would have appreciated more on the challenges facing the new OpenAI board. The quote at the end from Satya was a bit of a shocker.
proc0 3y ago
Right now, at worse, AI will have a similar impact as social media. It's definitely worth thinking about the potential harm it could cause to the different industries, but thinking it's an existential risk is still premature. We don't have any cognitive architecture that will reach self-awareness and become an unstoppable bad actor. This entire ordeal more or less proved that people are a little too paranoid.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  We don't have a dangerous AI yet, but because we are talking about an existential risk, yes we do want to start thinking about it now. AI does not have to be alive or truly conscious or anything to be dangerous. It just needs to be very effective at problem solving and have someone take the guardrails off and tell it to act in a self-interested way. Especially without humans in the loop. It seems likely that the systems will continue to get much faster and more robust in terms of problem solving. It is easy to anticipate the possibility within just a few years of agent swarms being connected to pretty much everything (as directed by their human owners), and no human being able to compete. This will be a precarious position.
  - Moldoteck 3y ago
    But it can't act in self interest way bc of hardware&phisical limitations. I mean what can it do worst case? We have both systems to prevent abuse for critical things & resources to power such an ai are limited too(hardware, energy, network connection). It can't even replicate to create self powered robots like in matrix fantasy bc we don't even have such fully automated production. So about what risks are we talikng here? Imo worst case it can mess up with stock market...
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    Maybe I am just daft but how is this not a simple privelege escalation issue? Just don't give it admin, what's the problem?
    - BoiledCabbage 3y ago
      Because in software we've defined an environment where every sw method of gaining privilege/escalation is hardened. As a result, usually the most reliable way to get escalation is via social engineering. LLMs exist in an environment whose vulnerabke surface area is social engineering. How do you lock down a system against all possible social engineering? Oh yah and the "system" isn't any computer system somewhere, it's the entire world itself. So one of the problems the safetiests are trying to solve is How do you protect a messy system, the size/complexity of the entire world from social engineering? The answer is clearly not using traditional approaches which consistently fail. And that's just one of the problems they're trying to solve.
      - Obscurity4340 3y ago
        Does my conflation here make any sense or have any applicabillity even tho the system is far more distributed or...I don't think I have a sufficiently robust mental model of any of this but I just don't know enough to dispute it.
      - Obscurity4340 3y ago
        But why does the LLM itself have "access to root" whatver that means in the OS equivalent of whatever it is they operate within in terms of the larger context?
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  All the top brass domain experts of these systems, like 95% besides Yann LeCunn, believe it's an existential risk. Nothing has "proved that people are a little too paranoid." Why people listen to HN prognosticators over Hinton, Bengio, Sutskever, Altman, Amodei, Hassabis, etc. is beyond me.
  - proc0 3y ago
    I'm just commenting, and have some basic understanding. It's good to start thinking about it but I seriously doubt GPT or anything that can be built with it can have a direct existential risk, meaning it would somehow free itself and go rogue. Otherwise I don't know how it would be an existential risk (outside of massive impact in society, but that's technically a different problem). My argument hinges on not being able to accidentally stumble upon AGI without a theory first. At least not an AGI that thinks and has agency like a human, with selfish goals.
  - Nasrudith 3y ago
    Existential risk is a doomsday prediction. And we all know the track record of doomsday predictions. 99% of the time it shows a simple lack of a sense of proportion that cannot tell the difference between merely "bad" or "very bad" and "annihilation". A personal bankruptcy is bad but it isn't an existential risk to a person.
    - reducesuffering 3y ago
      99% throughout history. During that time, humanity has gained an accelerating command over our environment; Industrial Revolution to the Information Era. We are increasingly able to create unimaginably powerful things, yet coinciding with the fundamental that it is easier to destroy than create. Nuclear weapons should dispel anyone of the notion that certain “doomsday” don’t have teeth. We are quite capable of obliterating ourselves out of existence by our unsophisticated control of technical might.
  - voitvodder 3y ago
    [dead]
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  > but thinking it's an existential risk is still premature Even ignoring what the technology can do, it feels me with dread that we basically have IMHO some of the worst possible people leading the charge - people who are greedy, slimy, and ruthless; who only care about money. Such a bad timeline we are in.
  - Qiu_Zhanxuan 3y ago
    Capitalism at its finest. That's what the USA is all about.
  - ornornor 3y ago
    > the worst possible people leading the charge - people who are greedy, slimy, and ruthless; who only care about money. And who have luxury bunkers to move to in NZ or wherever for if/when it all goes wrong.
  - proc0 3y ago
    Well at least Demis Hassabis seems cool.
barrysteve 3y ago
LLMs in theory can absorb a stream of integers into a pattern of weighted nodes. Every program written is vulnerable of being generalized into an LLM pattern. The outputs of AI and the predictive abilities, are not scary. The input capacity of AI will eventually eat every programmer's lunch and their programs too. The existential risk is mapping out computer programming as an entire field and locking it away.
- ithkuil 3y ago
  I'm not an AI doomer myself but I want to do my best to understand (and steelman) the argument of those who are concerned about existential risks. If you really think that the job of programmers is at risk because the current wave of AI can write any program, that also means that AI can now write a new generation of AI systems that is potentially much more powerful than the previous generation and presumably this iteration process can proceed N times until the end result is sufficiently incomprehensible for humans. Eventually such systems will work very well and be very useful and we'll rely on it more and more. At that point the people worried about existential risk will point out that when a vastly superior intelligence is tasked to love and protect us, a lower intelligence, it may do things for 'our own good' that we may find appealing. I'm just about to neuter my cat today
  - barrysteve 3y ago
    I said nothing about writing any program. I explicitly said I don't care what AIs can output. It can read and devour every program. Imagine a database where all possible programs are stored. Any github project, any private repository of source code is reduced to an LLM pattern and stored away. We can now generalize the meaning of integers and capture every single program that has been written and that you could write. I'm not going to rewrite my comment a third time. The idea is plainly explained. LLMs can map out and store all possible programs. Think about the structural implications of this fact. If you make money from programming, you won't like where it leads. What AIs generate is irrelevant and non-theeatening. What AIs are capable of storing, is a threat to programming. A "complete map". I'm about to set my mongoose on the snakes today.

31 points by zerohalo 3y ago

Despite the hyperbolic title, the article outlines pretty clearly the outcomes of the OpenAI debacle and where things are headed. "Mission-oriented" AI research is dead; it's just another tech race by the big boys now.

baking 3y ago
I would have appreciated more on the challenges facing the new OpenAI board. The quote at the end from Satya was a bit of a shocker.

proc0 3y ago

Right now, at worse, AI will have a similar impact as social media. It's definitely worth thinking about the potential harm it could cause to the different industries, but thinking it's an existential risk is still premature. We don't have any cognitive architecture that will reach self-awareness and become an unstoppable bad actor. This entire ordeal more or less proved that people are a little too paranoid.

ilaksh 3y ago
We don't have a dangerous AI yet, but because we are talking about an existential risk, yes we do want to start thinking about it now. AI does not have to be alive or truly conscious or anything to be dangerous. It just needs to be very effective at problem solving and have someone take the guardrails off and tell it to act in a self-interested way. Especially without humans in the loop. It seems likely that the systems will continue to get much faster and more robust in terms of problem solving. It is easy to anticipate the possibility within just a few years of agent swarms being connected to pretty much everything (as directed by their human owners), and no human being able to compete. This will be a precarious position.
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  But it can't act in self interest way bc of hardware&phisical limitations. I mean what can it do worst case? We have both systems to prevent abuse for critical things & resources to power such an ai are limited too(hardware, energy, network connection). It can't even replicate to create self powered robots like in matrix fantasy bc we don't even have such fully automated production. So about what risks are we talikng here? Imo worst case it can mess up with stock market...
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  Maybe I am just daft but how is this not a simple privelege escalation issue? Just don't give it admin, what's the problem?
  - BoiledCabbage 3y ago
    Because in software we've defined an environment where every sw method of gaining privilege/escalation is hardened. As a result, usually the most reliable way to get escalation is via social engineering. LLMs exist in an environment whose vulnerabke surface area is social engineering. How do you lock down a system against all possible social engineering? Oh yah and the "system" isn't any computer system somewhere, it's the entire world itself. So one of the problems the safetiests are trying to solve is How do you protect a messy system, the size/complexity of the entire world from social engineering? The answer is clearly not using traditional approaches which consistently fail. And that's just one of the problems they're trying to solve.
    - Obscurity4340 3y ago
      Does my conflation here make any sense or have any applicabillity even tho the system is far more distributed or...I don't think I have a sufficiently robust mental model of any of this but I just don't know enough to dispute it.
    - Obscurity4340 3y ago
      But why does the LLM itself have "access to root" whatver that means in the OS equivalent of whatever it is they operate within in terms of the larger context?
reducesuffering 3y ago
All the top brass domain experts of these systems, like 95% besides Yann LeCunn, believe it's an existential risk. Nothing has "proved that people are a little too paranoid." Why people listen to HN prognosticators over Hinton, Bengio, Sutskever, Altman, Amodei, Hassabis, etc. is beyond me.
- proc0 3y ago
  I'm just commenting, and have some basic understanding. It's good to start thinking about it but I seriously doubt GPT or anything that can be built with it can have a direct existential risk, meaning it would somehow free itself and go rogue. Otherwise I don't know how it would be an existential risk (outside of massive impact in society, but that's technically a different problem). My argument hinges on not being able to accidentally stumble upon AGI without a theory first. At least not an AGI that thinks and has agency like a human, with selfish goals.
- Nasrudith 3y ago
  Existential risk is a doomsday prediction. And we all know the track record of doomsday predictions. 99% of the time it shows a simple lack of a sense of proportion that cannot tell the difference between merely "bad" or "very bad" and "annihilation". A personal bankruptcy is bad but it isn't an existential risk to a person.
  - reducesuffering 3y ago
    99% throughout history. During that time, humanity has gained an accelerating command over our environment; Industrial Revolution to the Information Era. We are increasingly able to create unimaginably powerful things, yet coinciding with the fundamental that it is easier to destroy than create. Nuclear weapons should dispel anyone of the notion that certain “doomsday” don’t have teeth. We are quite capable of obliterating ourselves out of existence by our unsophisticated control of technical might.
- voitvodder 3y ago
  [dead]
TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
> but thinking it's an existential risk is still premature Even ignoring what the technology can do, it feels me with dread that we basically have IMHO some of the worst possible people leading the charge - people who are greedy, slimy, and ruthless; who only care about money. Such a bad timeline we are in.
- Qiu_Zhanxuan 3y ago
  Capitalism at its finest. That's what the USA is all about.
- ornornor 3y ago
  > the worst possible people leading the charge - people who are greedy, slimy, and ruthless; who only care about money. And who have luxury bunkers to move to in NZ or wherever for if/when it all goes wrong.
- proc0 3y ago
  Well at least Demis Hassabis seems cool.

barrysteve 3y ago

LLMs in theory can absorb a stream of integers into a pattern of weighted nodes. Every program written is vulnerable of being generalized into an LLM pattern. The outputs of AI and the predictive abilities, are not scary. The input capacity of AI will eventually eat every programmer's lunch and their programs too. The existential risk is mapping out computer programming as an entire field and locking it away.

ithkuil 3y ago
I'm not an AI doomer myself but I want to do my best to understand (and steelman) the argument of those who are concerned about existential risks. If you really think that the job of programmers is at risk because the current wave of AI can write any program, that also means that AI can now write a new generation of AI systems that is potentially much more powerful than the previous generation and presumably this iteration process can proceed N times until the end result is sufficiently incomprehensible for humans. Eventually such systems will work very well and be very useful and we'll rely on it more and more. At that point the people worried about existential risk will point out that when a vastly superior intelligence is tasked to love and protect us, a lower intelligence, it may do things for 'our own good' that we may find appealing. I'm just about to neuter my cat today
- barrysteve 3y ago
  I said nothing about writing any program. I explicitly said I don't care what AIs can output. It can read and devour every program. Imagine a database where all possible programs are stored. Any github project, any private repository of source code is reduced to an LLM pattern and stored away. We can now generalize the meaning of integers and capture every single program that has been written and that you could write. I'm not going to rewrite my comment a third time. The idea is plainly explained. LLMs can map out and store all possible programs. Think about the structural implications of this fact. If you make money from programming, you won't like where it leads. What AIs generate is irrelevant and non-theeatening. What AIs are capable of storing, is a threat to programming. A "complete map". I'm about to set my mongoose on the snakes today.