5 ms·

I think superalignment is absurd, and model "safety" is the modern AI company's "think of the children" pearl clutching pretext to justify digging moats. All th

• refulgentis 2y ago
  Adding a disclaimer for people unaware of context (I feel same as you): OpenAI made a large commitment to super-alignment in the not-so-distant past. I beleive mid-2023. Famously, it has always taken AI Safety™ very seriously. Regardless of anyone's feelings on the need for a dedicated team for it, you can chalk to one up as another instance of OpenAI cough leadership cough speaking out of both sides of it's mouth as is convenient. The only true north star is fame, glory, and user count, dressed up as humble "research" To really stress this: OpenAI's still-present cofounder shared yesterday on a podcast that they expect AGI in ~2 years and ASI (superpassing human intelligence) by end of the decade.
  • jasonfarnon 2y ago
    To really stress this: OpenAI's still-present cofounder shared yesterday on a podcast that they expect AGI in ~2 years and ASI (superpassing human intelligence) by end of the decade. What's his track record on promises/predictions of this sort? I wasn't paying attention until pretty recently.
    • refulgentis 2y ago
      honestly, I hadn't heard of him until 24-48 hours ago :x (he's also the new superalignment lead, I can't remember if I heard that first, or the podcast stuff first. Dwarkesh Patel podcast for anyone curious. Only saw a clip of it)
    • NomDePlum 2y ago
      As a child I used to watch a TV programme called Tomorrows World. On it they predicted these very same things in similar timeframes. That programme aired in the 1980's. Other than vested promises is there much to indicate it's close at all? Empty promises aside there isn't really any indication of that being likely at all.
      • zdragnar 2y ago
        In the early 1980's we were just coming out of the first AI winter and everyone was getting optimistic again. I suspect there will be at least continued commercial use of the current tech, though I still suspect this crop is another dead end in the hunt for AGI.
        • NomDePlum 2y ago
          I'd agree with the commercial use element. It will definitely find areas that it can be applied. Just currently it's general application by a lot of the user base feel more like early Facebook apps or subjectively better Lotus Notes than an actual leap forward of any sort.
      • Davidzheng 2y ago
        are we living in the same world?????
        • NomDePlum 2y ago
          I would assume so. I've spent some time looking into AI for software development and general use and I'm both slightly impressed and at the same time don't really get the hype. It's better and quicker search at present for the area I specialise in. It's not currently even close to being a x2 multiplier for me, it possibly even a negative impact, probably not but I'm still exploring. Which feels detached from the promises. Interesting but at present more hype than hyper. Also, it's energy inefficient so cost heavy. I feel that will likely cripple a lot of use cases. What's your take?
        • refulgentis 2y ago
  • N0b8ez 2y ago
    >To really stress this: OpenAI's still-present cofounder shared yesterday on a podcast that they expect AGI in ~2 years and ASI (superpassing human intelligence) by end of the decade. Link? Is the ~2 year timeline a common estimate in the field?
    • ctoth 2y ago
      https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/john-schulman https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/john-schulman
      • N0b8ez 2y ago
        Is the quote you're thinking of the one at 19:11? > I don't think it's going to happen next year, it's still useful to have the conversation and maybe it's like two or three years instead. This doesn't seem like a super definite prediction. The "two or three" might have just been a hypothetical.
        • HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
          Right at the end of the interview Schulman says that he expects AGI to be able to replace himself in 5 years. He seemed a bit sheepish when saying it, so hard to tell if he really believed it, or if was just saying what he'd been told to say (I can't believe Altman is allowing employees to be interviewed like this without telling them what they can't say, and what they should say).
    • dboreham 2y ago
      It's the "fusion in 20 years" of AI?
      • dinvlad 2y ago
        Just like Tesla "FSD" :-)
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
• thorum 2y ago
  The superalignment team was not focused on that kind of “safety” AFAIK. According to the blog post announcing the team, https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/ > Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented, and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems. But the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction. > While superintelligence seems far off now, we believe it could arrive this decade. > Managing these risks will require, among other things, new institutions for governance and solving the problem of superintelligence alignment: > How do we ensure AI systems much smarter than humans follow human intent? > Currently, we don't have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue. Our current techniques for aligning AI, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, rely on humans’ ability to supervise AI. But humans won’t be able to reliably supervise AI systems much smarter than us, and so our current alignment techniques will not scale to superintelligence. We need new scientific and technical breakthroughs.
  • ndriscoll 2y ago
    That doesn't really contradict what the other poster said. They're calling for regulation (digging a moat) to ensure systems are "safe" and "aligned" while ignoring that humans are not aligned, so these systems obviously cannot be aligned with humans; they can only be aligned with their owners (i.e. them, not you).
    • ihumanable 2y ago
      Alignment in the realm of AGI is not about getting everyone to agree. It's about whether or not the AGI is aligned to the goal you've given it. The paperclip AGI example is often used, you tell the AGI "Optimize the production of paperclips" and the AGI started blending people to extract iron from their blood to produce more paperclips. Humans are used to ordering around other humans who would bring common sense and laziness to the table and probably not grind up humans to produce a few more paperclips. Alignment is about getting the AGI to be aligned with the owners, ignoring it means potentially putting more and more power into the hands of a box that you aren't quite sure is going to do the thing you want it to do. Alignment in the context of AGIs was always about ensuring the owners could control the AGIs not that the AGIs could solve philosophy and get all of humanity to agree.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• xpe 2y ago
  > I think superalignment is absurd Care to explain? Absurd how? An internal contradiction somehow? Unimportant for some reason? Impossible for some reason?
  • llamaimperative 2y ago
    Impossible because it’s really inconvenient and uncomfortable to consider!
• xpe 2y ago
  > I think superalignment is absurd, and model "safety" is the modern AI company's "think of the children" pearl clutching pretext to justify digging moats. All this after sucking up everyone's copyright material as fair use, then not releasing the result, and profiting off it. How can I be confident you aren't committing the fallacy of collecting a bunch of events and saying that is sufficient to serve as a cohesive explanation? No offense intended, but the comment above has many of the qualities of a classic rant. If I'm wrong, perhaps you could elaborate? If I'm not wrong, maybe you could reconsider? Don't forget that alignment research has existed longer than OpenAI. It would be a stretch to claim that the original AI safety researchers were using the pretexts you described -- I think it is fair to say they were involved because of genuine concern, not because it was a trendy or self-serving thing to do. Some of those researchers and people they influenced ended up at OpenAI. So it would be a mistake or at least an oversimplification to claim that AI safety is some kind of pretext at OpenAI. Could it be a pretext for some people in the organization, to some degree? Sure, it could. But is it a significant effect? One that fits your complex narrative, above? I find that unlikely. Making sense of an organization's intentions requires a lot of analysis and care, due to the combination of actors and varying influence. There are simpler, more likely explanations, such as: AI safety wasn't a profit center, and over time other departments in OpenAI got more staff, more influence, and so on. This is a problem, for sure, but there is no "pearl clutching pretext" needed for this explanation.
  • portaouflop 2y ago
    An organisations intentions are always the same and very simple: “Increase shareholder value”
    • xpe 2y ago
      Oh, it is that simple? What do you mean? Are you saying these so-called simple intentions are the only factors in play? Surely not. Are you putting forth a theory that we can test? How well do you think your theory works? Did it work for Enron? For Microsoft? For REI? Does it work for every organization? Surely not perfectly; therefore, it can't be as simple as you claim. Making a simplification and calling it "simple" is an easy thing to do.