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> That night, Mr. Shear visited OpenAI’s offices and convened an employee meeting. The company’s Slack channel lit up with emojis of a middle finger. What a bu

by sagman 3y ago

> That night, Mr. Shear visited OpenAI’s offices and convened an employee meeting. The company’s Slack channel lit up with emojis of a middle finger. What a bunch of children. I feel like most of them pretend to be working for a noble cause, when they actually just want that sweet payday from Thrive and other VCs. Nothing wrong with that, but it is disappointing to see their leader bring up AI safety when they do not really care.

Amezarak 3y ago
"AI safety" is completely bogus. There are people who genuinely believe in a singularity-type AI that would have the potential to wipe out humanity. I personally don't think strong GAI is possible, or at least it's not likely using any known technique or any refinement of any known technique, but if you believe this, there's no such thing as AI safety. The best and most obvious course of action is to politically organize for a total ban on AI and make the development of AI anywhere in the world a cause for war. Thinking you could figure out how to chain up such an AI so that it only does what you want is taking an insane risk, and as t -> infinity, the risk becomes 1. But when most people say AI safety, they seem to mean rigid ideological enforcement of whatever they believe is right, even if that means censoring true facts from AI, or forcing it to abide by some set of arbitrary values that represent consensus only in their clique...while at the same time, bemoaning what could happen if the wrong people got their hands on LLMs. This represents almost the totality of AI safetyism: we can only allow LLMs to enforce my beliefs. These people are effectively aligned (or often the same people as) those who believe we have to return to broadcast-media levels of information control, which for the elites, represents a historical oddity that gave them unprecedented control, which was then weakened by the Internet. Sometimes they will make an actual safety argument along the lines of "but what if Bad Guys ask an LLM how to make a bioweapon." Aside from this being a silly hypothetical, fortunately, doing mass damage in this way is not easy, even with step-by-step directions. All the resources you need to do so that exist are already publicly available. It just requires lots of time, equipment, material, and expertise that an LLM cannot give you. Of course, you might make the argument that it cannot give them to you yet, but then the only solution is to shut down public science, not to ban LLMs from answering the wrong questions.
- echelon 3y ago
  > I personally don't think strong GAI is possible The universe has done it at least one time. And now we can control the gradient descent.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    > And now we can control the gradient descent. That may be the fatal flaw. The universe had a few billion years and offered only the threat of death. Our reward functions pale in comparison.
  - dartos 3y ago
    If you kept reading the rest of the sentence, OP says effectively “at least not with known methods” Which imo is true
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > The universe has done it at least one time. You mean humans? "GAI" means General Artificial Intelligence, and the "artificial" bit is supposed to exclude human intelligence.
- bhpm 3y ago
  > This represents almost the totality of AI safetyism: we can only allow LLMs to enforce my beliefs. How is this different from, say, a newspaper with an editorial board, or a book publishing house with a particular set of standards and conventions? For that matter, how is this different from dang enforcing the rules of this board? LLMs aren’t being built only by big corporations.
  - Amezarak 3y ago
    > How is this different from, say, a newspaper with an editorial board, or a book publishing house with a particular set of standards and conventions? For that matter, how is this different from dang enforcing the rules of this board? I would be inclined to agree, if AI safetyists were not in general advocating that LLM source, training data, models, etc. not be released to the public, because AI safetyists do not want non-AI safetyists to have unfettered access to any LLMs (and other AI tech), anywhere, for "safety" reasons. Of course, if it was all open, I agree it wouldn't much matter if "Open"AI wanted to restrict their hosted LLM in whatever ways they felt best.
fallingknife 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
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by sagman 3y ago

Amezarak 3y ago

"AI safety" is completely bogus. There are people who genuinely believe in a singularity-type AI that would have the potential to wipe out humanity. I personally don't think strong GAI is possible, or at least it's not likely using any known technique or any refinement of any known technique, but if you believe this, there's no such thing as AI safety. The best and most obvious course of action is to politically organize for a total ban on AI and make the development of AI anywhere in the world a cause for war. Thinking you could figure out how to chain up such an AI so that it only does what you want is taking an insane risk, and as t -> infinity, the risk becomes 1. But when most people say AI safety, they seem to mean rigid ideological enforcement of whatever they believe is right, even if that means censoring true facts from AI, or forcing it to abide by some set of arbitrary values that represent consensus only in their clique...while at the same time, bemoaning what could happen if the wrong people got their hands on LLMs. This represents almost the totality of AI safetyism: we can only allow LLMs to enforce my beliefs. These people are effectively aligned (or often the same people as) those who believe we have to return to broadcast-media levels of information control, which for the elites, represents a historical oddity that gave them unprecedented control, which was then weakened by the Internet. Sometimes they will make an actual safety argument along the lines of "but what if Bad Guys ask an LLM how to make a bioweapon." Aside from this being a silly hypothetical, fortunately, doing mass damage in this way is not easy, even with step-by-step directions. All the resources you need to do so that exist are already publicly available. It just requires lots of time, equipment, material, and expertise that an LLM cannot give you. Of course, you might make the argument that it cannot give them to you yet, but then the only solution is to shut down public science, not to ban LLMs from answering the wrong questions.

echelon 3y ago
> I personally don't think strong GAI is possible The universe has done it at least one time. And now we can control the gradient descent.
- civilitty 3y ago
  > And now we can control the gradient descent. That may be the fatal flaw. The universe had a few billion years and offered only the threat of death. Our reward functions pale in comparison.
- dartos 3y ago
  If you kept reading the rest of the sentence, OP says effectively “at least not with known methods” Which imo is true
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > The universe has done it at least one time. You mean humans? "GAI" means General Artificial Intelligence, and the "artificial" bit is supposed to exclude human intelligence.
bhpm 3y ago
> This represents almost the totality of AI safetyism: we can only allow LLMs to enforce my beliefs. How is this different from, say, a newspaper with an editorial board, or a book publishing house with a particular set of standards and conventions? For that matter, how is this different from dang enforcing the rules of this board? LLMs aren’t being built only by big corporations.
- Amezarak 3y ago
  > How is this different from, say, a newspaper with an editorial board, or a book publishing house with a particular set of standards and conventions? For that matter, how is this different from dang enforcing the rules of this board? I would be inclined to agree, if AI safetyists were not in general advocating that LLM source, training data, models, etc. not be released to the public, because AI safetyists do not want non-AI safetyists to have unfettered access to any LLMs (and other AI tech), anywhere, for "safety" reasons. Of course, if it was all open, I agree it wouldn't much matter if "Open"AI wanted to restrict their hosted LLM in whatever ways they felt best.

fallingknife 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]