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The difference here is that these aren't standard-issue HR/legal issues. The technology they're working on poses the gravest of dangers. This is uncharted terri

The difference here is that these aren't standard-issue HR/legal issues. The technology they're working on poses the gravest of dangers. This is uncharted territory, not just for the tech sector, but period. Whether the recent public back-and-forth is just internal drama/politics spilling out, or there really is a lack of gravitas around the handling of these issues within the company-- neither is good. Others have said in comments below, and I agree: this organization is increasingly looking like a circus, and arguably worse, one that has taken its eye off the ball. It's extremely disconcerting that this is the group of people "leading" the commercialization of this technology (and generally setting the tone for the industry). Particularly when it seems many of the key players who joined on principled/moral grounds are dropping like flies. I guess we're on the fast track to finding out how well putting all of this money, power, responsibility, and faith into SV works out for us.

Terretta 2y ago
Text continuation poses "the greatest of dangers"?
- hn_go_brrrrr 2y ago
  While we're being overly reductionist: it's just moving bits around, what harm could that possibly do?
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    "AI" is one of two things depending on whether you think it's actually intelligent: * If "AI" is actually intelligent, then it's no worse a threat than any living being known to man. * If "AI" is not actually intelligent, then it's no worse a threat than any other computer program. Both threat models are very thoroughly known and understood. I second parent commenter's sentiment that calling "AI" the "gravest of dangers" is a gross misrepresentation.
    - comp_throw7 2y ago
      > * If "AI" is actually intelligent, then it's no worse a threat than any living being known to man. ...does not follow? "If an atom bomb is actually a bomb, then it's no worse a threat than any other existing bomb known to man."
      - Dalewyn 2y ago
        An atomic bomb explodes. A bomb explodes. Both are very destructive. Is there a difference? I say no, and I say that as a Japanese-American who visited Hiroshima Peace Memorial numerous times and never felt anything particular from the exhibits. People die when they are killed. Likewise, if "AI" is actually intelligent then it is no worse a threat than a bumbling baby or a Vladimir Putin or a dog, among other living beings.
        mlyle 2y ago
        > Likewise, if "AI" is actually intelligent then it is no worse a threat than a bumbling baby or a Vladimir Putin or a dog, among other living beings. I think a dog and a dictator might both be able to have negative impacts, but treating them as equal just shows a desire to troll. A dog can only bite so many people.
        comp_throw7 2y ago
        > People die when they are killed. Yes, indeed, which is why we should avoid creating something that will kill everyone... ...so I guess I'm glad to hear there's no difference in the amount of damage that can be inflicted by a baby, and by Vladimir Putin, and superintelligent AI really can't be any worse than either.
        BuyMyBitcoins 2y ago
        >”An atomic bomb explodes. A bomb explodes. Both are very destructive. Is there a difference? I say no” Atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs are orders of magnitude more destructive and also produce fallout. How in the world can that difference be dismissed?
  - yehabut 2y ago
    That’s the thing though; reducing the risk rhetorically reduces existential threat. If it is propagated as “just electrons” no one gets anxious If it’s propagated as “end is nigh” everyone panics Both are reasonable in their grammatical correctness but only one seems a reasonable philosophy
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  Yes. The pen is mightier than the sword after all.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Yes, we have already been shown this is true in Indiana Jones Last Crusade
- wokwokwok 2y ago
  Can we move beyond the “man made climate change isn’t real” discourse where you somehow pretend that AI “Is no big deal”. Let’s have a closer look at the actual parent comment hm? > this organization is increasingly looking like a circus, and arguably worse, one that has taken its eye off the ball.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    This isn't like climate change. "AI" is a successful marketing term for a loosely related collection of technologies that push the boundaries of what computation has hitherto been capable of. There are very real disagreements between very real experts on just how dangerous these new technologies are and just how far they'll actually be able to push the boundaries of computation. Comparing skepticism about AI alarmism to climate change denial is just lazy internet rhetoric. (One major difference between the two is that billion-dollar corporations stand to gain quite a bit if they can persuade governments that AI is so dangerous that it needs to be tightly regulated, so they're incentivized to play up the dangers. With climate change it's the opposite: the billion-dollar corporations are incentivized to downplay the risks so they can continue business as usual.)
    - wokwokwok 2y ago
      I didn’t say it was like climate change, I said it was like claiming climate change is not real. > There are very real disagreements between very real experts on just how dangerous these new technologies are …but they do not dispute that the technology is impactful. In fact, anyone who claims it is just “Text continuation”(quote) is being deliberately disingenuous and deliberately downplaying it. > Comparing skepticism about AI alarmism to climate change denial is just lazy internet rhetoric Unlike calling AI “Text continuation”? It’s awfully convenient it’s only lazy internet rhetoric when it’s coming from the other side. Hm? Why is only one side allowed to do that? Would you care to call out the other side for being reductionist? That’s a very high horse you’re sitting on.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- tummler 2y ago
  Hoo boy... if you think chatbots are all this is... wait til you find out what's next.
  - ta988 2y ago
    What's next?
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    - optomas 2y ago
      Are you capable of being manipulated through text? How about an AI trained to generate text that will extract exactly the desired response from you? An advertiser's wet dream.
      - EGreg 2y ago
        That’s thinking too small. Most people are nudged or coerced into taking action or supporting an action by the people who surround them. Their friends. Their coworkers. Their community. Like why people were on facebook 20 years ago, or forwarding chain emails, for instance. Unleashing an army of AI bots to infiltrate an online community and shift its discourse can be done at scale. While at the same time those humans who resist can be endlessly distracted by either arguing with bots or their own friends who have been affected by bots. All that is possible to do with CURRENT TECHNOLOGY.
- conception 2y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/17/ai-weapons-palantir-war-technology https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/17/a... "...I also went to a panel in Palantir’s booth titled Civilian Harm Mitigation. It was led by two “privacy and civil liberties engineers” – a young man and woman who spoke exclusively in monotone. They also used countless euphemisms for bombing and death. The woman described how Palantir’s Gaia map tool lets users “nominate targets of interest” for “the target nomination process”. She meant it helps people choose which places get bombed. After she clicked a few options on an interactive map, a targeted landmass lit up with bright blue blobs. These blobs, she said, were civilian areas like hospitals and schools. The civilian locations could also be described in text, she said, but it can take a long time to read. So, Gaia uses a large language model (something like ChatGPT) to sift through this information and simplify it. Essentially, people choosing bomb targets get a dumbed-down version of information about where children sleep and families get medical treatment." Definitely not dangerous at all.
  - badestrand 2y ago
    That rather sounds like Palantir is dangerous and not OpenAI.
  - Skgqie1 2y ago
    Yes, having eyes is incredibly dangerous. It allows people to select a target from anything they can see.
    - mnyary 2y ago
      ”Another Lavender user questioned whether humans’ role in the selection process was meaningful. “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.” This article is more than 1 month old ‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets; Guardian, 2 Apr 2024
  - mr_mitm 2y ago
    But the claim was "th gravest of dangers". While your scenario is a nightmare, I'm not sure it qualifies as "the gravest".
- tracerbulletx 2y ago
  Well as you surely must know transformers are general sequence continuation machines and have been proven to work well with almost any type of input and output sequence. You also must be aware that people are trying to plug these general sequence continuation machines in to all kinds of different sequences and giving them all kinds of power to take action. These sequence continuation machines are also getting more complex and multi layered every day and also being wired together in novel ways. This is a dangerous thing to do depending on what actions you allow them to take because of the impact on society of having agents taking actions without oversight.
- dheera 2y ago
  If it's used to write code that runs on an ICBM without verification, yes. If it is used to write the firmware that runs inside 1 million lithium battery BMS systems that causes them all to catch on fire after 65536 seconds of runtime due to an integer overflow and code crashing and a FET getting left in the on state, then yes. I'm not an AI safety nut and don't think AI itself is a threat, but what is a threat is lazy humans using shitty AI to take over things that humans should be doing.
- EGreg 2y ago
  I will assume you’re asking in good faith. Text continuation to match what people around the internet are saying requires the model internally to “program itself”. It is a non-von-neumann architecture but it encodes durable structures in BILLIONS of bytes, that’s like a codebase of gigabytes. It can pass the Bar exam, various pre-med exams, knows more than any particular human on every subject, and it’s only been a couple years. The text continuation was the first interface, now they are doing multimodal. As it learns to predict the latent space for those things, it will be like predicting things in the real world. Training physical robots will become faster and easier too. In short, this is basically a system to search through the space of all possible alhorithms in order to “reason about” a huge model of the world, enough to understand it and predict it with small loss. AlphaZero used MCTS and can beat every human in chess now, and even every program written by a human, with beautiful gameplay. And even without AI, just the fact that the best performing algorithms are downloaded onto millions of computers is already multiplying the power far more than the 1% of humans who might do better in some area. So it can be better than 95% of humans at most tasks !
- tempodox 2y ago
  You're right, on the face of it it sounds absurd and by rights it should be. However, absurdity has never stopped mankind from doing horrible things. I for one don't see the gravest dangers in the tech itself, but in the stuff that people will (ab)use it for. And, of course, should AGI (which won't be text continuation, by the way) ever actually happen, then all bets are off. I just don't believe we're in any immediate danger of that.
- bmitc 2y ago
  Yes, exactly because it is just text continuation. It is being integrated into systems and used as a tool as if it is much, much more than text continuation. That is the danger. I've been using Copilot frequently lately, and it's startling just how often it is completely wrong despite being confidently presented as completely right.
- wk_end 2y ago
  I’m a bit of an AI skeptic and find the way people talk vaguely about the “dangers” of AI weird and maybe just more hype (or efforts for regulatory capture) rather than actual cause for concern. Still, to me, it seems like the two big scary things that might fall out of recent developments in generative AI are: 1. It might vacuum up an enormous number of jobs very quickly; enough jobs and quickly enough to cause serious social unrest. 2. The ability to generate convincing fake videos of basically anything might catastrophically erode our sense of truth or reality. Both of these strike me as plausible concerns in the near future (arguably they’re already happening). Not really sure what we could do about them, though - the cat is kind of out of the bag.
  - verisimi 2y ago
    Re 1 - aren't people mostly doing bullshit jobs already? Re 2 - fakery in videos and images has been a part since their inception. So, don't worry, I guess? The only thing is the scale of bs that could be put out, and whether the wider population lose trust in what they see on screens. Which would be a good thing, imo.
    - shinycode 2y ago
      Bullshit jobs yes but still they are paid. What happens in a capitalist society when thousands of people loose their job and can’t produce value and contribute to society ? It’s tearing apart the fabric of capitalism is some way. What happen when all those people without jobs won’t be able to train for better jobs (because they would have done it already and won’t have a bullshit job in the first place) and either fall poor or move to less paid jobs ?
      - wordpad 2y ago
        Technology and automation tends to create more jobs. As operational costs decrease, your end service or product becomes cheaper, so all your b2b or b2c customers can afford more of it which leads to more opportunities, doing things which were cost prohibitive before. Some of those things may too require manual labor.
- ignoramous 2y ago
  > the greatest of dangers The danger comes from humans themselves wielding this tech, under the assumption it will keep improving quadratically. Some truly unhinged already thriving there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39124666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39124666
- Nevermark 2y ago
  Text continuation defines a task. It does not limit the sophistication of the solution. The difference between problems and solutions seems to trip up a lot of people. —- It gets even more nuanced. At its basic level all types of digital AI are “just” arithmetic, or “just” Boolean logic. But arithmetic’s and Boolean logic’s simplicity don’t limit what systems can be built with them, as they are Turing Complete. Likewise, the training algorithm for deep learning models is “just” gradient descent (or a variation), it’s “just” a dumb optimizer. But again, gradient descent places no limits on what a system with enough resources can learn. The whole point of learning systems is the basic resources of the model are provided, and within those resource limits (parameters, computational speed and time) the “dumb” learning algorithm learns the patterns in the data. The data patterns define the complexity of the solution. And the amount of information in a large collection of human correspondence includes patterns, meta patterns and abstractions for things like science, philosophy, psychology, law, art, on and on, that incidentally have a real bearing on sentence completion in that context. So a model will actually have to learn those things to perform its task well. New Law of Algorithm Level Confusion: Whenever someone says some learning system is “just” doing some simple task, they are confusing a simple task definition with a simple solution, or a simple learning algorithm with simple learned relationships. In both cases, the simplicity of the former places no limits on the sophistication of the latter.
  - Terretta 2y ago
    > ... they are Turing Complete. OK, so all software must be regulated? Arguing that simple tools can be used for dangerous results and thus must be regulated or made “safe” is like saying since more murders in America are committed with hammers than long guns, you must show an ID to buy a hammer at Home Depot, and demanding "safety" training of text continuation models is like requiring hammers be redesigned to have pillows for hammerheads. We already have laws against bad acts. Hold wrongdoers accountable. Leave hammers alone.
    - Nevermark 2y ago
      I was responding directly to your comment: > Text continuation poses "the greatest of dangers"? The task of text continuation is no guarantee of safety. A language model trained on pure military information, communication and actions could be quite dangerous if given an ability to direct, or contribute, to actual action. Not arguing anything about regulation.
- VladimirGolovin 2y ago
  Text continuation doesn't. AGI does.
- hpeter 2y ago
  Yes because people are stupid and vulnerable and will believe things a computer tells them. They can make life decisions on chatGPT advice, instead of asking friends or family. Heck maybe they don't have family, vulnerable people like that can be exploited with convincing chatbots easily.
- gosub100 2y ago
  I haven't read all the replies to see if this has been posted yet, but one of the consequences is erosion of trust in reality itself: we're starting to see the comments "are you a bot?/is this real? I can't tell if you're serious or if this was from ChatGPT". It's quite possible that soon the majority of comments online will be with bots, or people will just avoid discourse more and more because they don't know/believe they are talking to a human.
bboygravity 2y ago
OpenAI is one of the few companies that is so messed up that even the name itself is a flat out lie. From there it's censorship, lies and manipulation all the way down from leadership to product. There's no ignoring that. There's no way any organization like that can succeed IMO. Just another technology development that Musk will eventually beat everyone else at IMO. Grok 1.5 is getting pretty good and the fact that it's the least censored IMO is obviously going to make it win from all the others that just can't help themselves from pleasing a hand full of people with money and power. TLDR: black Hitler.
- int_19h 2y ago
  Is it the "least censored", or does it just censor different things?
- ornornor 2y ago
  [flagged]
dragonwriter 2y ago
“The technology they’re working on poses the gravest of dangers.” Or, rather, its been actively marketed by Altman as doing so, as part of his effort to buy influence with government to restrict competition. The simplest explanation for the conflict is that it doesn’t, and that OpenAI internally has allocated resources based on reality rather than it’s public propaganda, and the team whose internal turf was built around that propaganda left in a huff.
- edanm 2y ago
  > Or, rather, its been actively marketed by Altman as doing so, as part of his effort to buy influence with government to restrict competition. I mean, maybe sama is also doing so. But you're ignoring the many people who have been warning of these dangers for years, some before OpenAI even existed, and many with no part of OpenAI and no monetary incentive. To describe everything as "Altman is marketing this as dangerous" is to completely ignore the majority of researchers ringing alarm bells.
  - RandomLensman 2y ago
    The world is full of dangers. AI danger has gotten some attention now - whether it turns out to be warranted beyond certain levels is still unclear. While there has been some regulatory action it also feels there is some "moving on" from the more apocalyptic risk views towards more mundane risks and their management (i.e., more vanilla product and technology risk management).
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      > it also feels there is some "moving on" from the more apocalyptic risk views towards more mundane risks and their management (i.e., more vanilla product and technology risk management). No surprise, when the public reception to AI x-risk was mostly, "big tech scaremonging / regulatory capture; why not focus on Real AI Dangers Right Now, like bias or offensive language". Seemingly refocusing on the mundane may be the only way now to do something about the apocalyptic.
fullspectrumdev 2y ago
> The technology they're working on poses the gravest of dangers Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
- mofeien 2y ago
  ChatGPT-4 won't kill us, and probably neither will the next generation of models. But if we keep building more and more powerful AI systems, eventually we will reach a point where one will become an existential threat. Present dangers of AI include Fake News, impersonation through deepfakes, biases and discrimination in the models, job loss and economic instability, loss of human purpose through individuals becoming redundant, individuals becoming addicted to the AI systems, use by authoritarian governments, autonomous weapons. Near future dangers include bioweapon engineering capabilities, computer hacks, human disempowerment, existential risk, or a state where the values of the world are locked in by an uncontrolled AI, and possibly filled with suffering if locked in in a bad way, e. g. as we lock in animals. It might take months until AGI, it might take decades, nobody knows for sure. However, we do know that the pace of AI progress is often grossly underestimated. Just three years ago we thought we’d have SAT-passing AI systems in 2055. We got there in April 2023. So it makes sense to act as if we have very little time.
  - jeffreygoesto 2y ago
    Reminds me of "now automated driving is only five years away" since 2008...
  - bitnasty 2y ago
    You, like many others, miss the number one danger of AI—making people dumber and less capable of reason.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      People have been saying that about everything at least since Socratese was dismissive of writing; probably longer, but we can't tell because writing hadn't been invented yet.

Terretta 2y ago

Text continuation poses "the greatest of dangers"?

hn_go_brrrrr 2y ago
While we're being overly reductionist: it's just moving bits around, what harm could that possibly do?
- brigadier132 2y ago
  [flagged]
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  "AI" is one of two things depending on whether you think it's actually intelligent: * If "AI" is actually intelligent, then it's no worse a threat than any living being known to man. * If "AI" is not actually intelligent, then it's no worse a threat than any other computer program. Both threat models are very thoroughly known and understood. I second parent commenter's sentiment that calling "AI" the "gravest of dangers" is a gross misrepresentation.
  - comp_throw7 2y ago
    > * If "AI" is actually intelligent, then it's no worse a threat than any living being known to man. ...does not follow? "If an atom bomb is actually a bomb, then it's no worse a threat than any other existing bomb known to man."
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      An atomic bomb explodes. A bomb explodes. Both are very destructive. Is there a difference? I say no, and I say that as a Japanese-American who visited Hiroshima Peace Memorial numerous times and never felt anything particular from the exhibits. People die when they are killed. Likewise, if "AI" is actually intelligent then it is no worse a threat than a bumbling baby or a Vladimir Putin or a dog, among other living beings.
      - mlyle 2y ago
        > Likewise, if "AI" is actually intelligent then it is no worse a threat than a bumbling baby or a Vladimir Putin or a dog, among other living beings. I think a dog and a dictator might both be able to have negative impacts, but treating them as equal just shows a desire to troll. A dog can only bite so many people.
      - comp_throw7 2y ago
        > People die when they are killed. Yes, indeed, which is why we should avoid creating something that will kill everyone... ...so I guess I'm glad to hear there's no difference in the amount of damage that can be inflicted by a baby, and by Vladimir Putin, and superintelligent AI really can't be any worse than either.
      - BuyMyBitcoins 2y ago
        >”An atomic bomb explodes. A bomb explodes. Both are very destructive. Is there a difference? I say no” Atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs are orders of magnitude more destructive and also produce fallout. How in the world can that difference be dismissed?
- yehabut 2y ago
  That’s the thing though; reducing the risk rhetorically reduces existential threat. If it is propagated as “just electrons” no one gets anxious If it’s propagated as “end is nigh” everyone panics Both are reasonable in their grammatical correctness but only one seems a reasonable philosophy
tbrownaw 2y ago
Yes. The pen is mightier than the sword after all.
- dylan604 2y ago
  Yes, we have already been shown this is true in Indiana Jones Last Crusade
wokwokwok 2y ago
Can we move beyond the “man made climate change isn’t real” discourse where you somehow pretend that AI “Is no big deal”. Let’s have a closer look at the actual parent comment hm? > this organization is increasingly looking like a circus, and arguably worse, one that has taken its eye off the ball.
- lolinder 2y ago
  This isn't like climate change. "AI" is a successful marketing term for a loosely related collection of technologies that push the boundaries of what computation has hitherto been capable of. There are very real disagreements between very real experts on just how dangerous these new technologies are and just how far they'll actually be able to push the boundaries of computation. Comparing skepticism about AI alarmism to climate change denial is just lazy internet rhetoric. (One major difference between the two is that billion-dollar corporations stand to gain quite a bit if they can persuade governments that AI is so dangerous that it needs to be tightly regulated, so they're incentivized to play up the dangers. With climate change it's the opposite: the billion-dollar corporations are incentivized to downplay the risks so they can continue business as usual.)
  - wokwokwok 2y ago
    I didn’t say it was like climate change, I said it was like claiming climate change is not real. > There are very real disagreements between very real experts on just how dangerous these new technologies are …but they do not dispute that the technology is impactful. In fact, anyone who claims it is just “Text continuation”(quote) is being deliberately disingenuous and deliberately downplaying it. > Comparing skepticism about AI alarmism to climate change denial is just lazy internet rhetoric Unlike calling AI “Text continuation”? It’s awfully convenient it’s only lazy internet rhetoric when it’s coming from the other side. Hm? Why is only one side allowed to do that? Would you care to call out the other side for being reductionist? That’s a very high horse you’re sitting on.
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tummler 2y ago
Hoo boy... if you think chatbots are all this is... wait til you find out what's next.
- ta988 2y ago
  What's next?
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  - optomas 2y ago
    Are you capable of being manipulated through text? How about an AI trained to generate text that will extract exactly the desired response from you? An advertiser's wet dream.
    - EGreg 2y ago
      That’s thinking too small. Most people are nudged or coerced into taking action or supporting an action by the people who surround them. Their friends. Their coworkers. Their community. Like why people were on facebook 20 years ago, or forwarding chain emails, for instance. Unleashing an army of AI bots to infiltrate an online community and shift its discourse can be done at scale. While at the same time those humans who resist can be endlessly distracted by either arguing with bots or their own friends who have been affected by bots. All that is possible to do with CURRENT TECHNOLOGY.
conception 2y ago
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/17/ai-weapons-palantir-war-technology https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/17/a... "...I also went to a panel in Palantir’s booth titled Civilian Harm Mitigation. It was led by two “privacy and civil liberties engineers” – a young man and woman who spoke exclusively in monotone. They also used countless euphemisms for bombing and death. The woman described how Palantir’s Gaia map tool lets users “nominate targets of interest” for “the target nomination process”. She meant it helps people choose which places get bombed. After she clicked a few options on an interactive map, a targeted landmass lit up with bright blue blobs. These blobs, she said, were civilian areas like hospitals and schools. The civilian locations could also be described in text, she said, but it can take a long time to read. So, Gaia uses a large language model (something like ChatGPT) to sift through this information and simplify it. Essentially, people choosing bomb targets get a dumbed-down version of information about where children sleep and families get medical treatment." Definitely not dangerous at all.
- badestrand 2y ago
  That rather sounds like Palantir is dangerous and not OpenAI.
- Skgqie1 2y ago
  Yes, having eyes is incredibly dangerous. It allows people to select a target from anything they can see.
  - mnyary 2y ago
    ”Another Lavender user questioned whether humans’ role in the selection process was meaningful. “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.” This article is more than 1 month old ‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets; Guardian, 2 Apr 2024
- mr_mitm 2y ago
  But the claim was "th gravest of dangers". While your scenario is a nightmare, I'm not sure it qualifies as "the gravest".
tracerbulletx 2y ago
Well as you surely must know transformers are general sequence continuation machines and have been proven to work well with almost any type of input and output sequence. You also must be aware that people are trying to plug these general sequence continuation machines in to all kinds of different sequences and giving them all kinds of power to take action. These sequence continuation machines are also getting more complex and multi layered every day and also being wired together in novel ways. This is a dangerous thing to do depending on what actions you allow them to take because of the impact on society of having agents taking actions without oversight.
dheera 2y ago
If it's used to write code that runs on an ICBM without verification, yes. If it is used to write the firmware that runs inside 1 million lithium battery BMS systems that causes them all to catch on fire after 65536 seconds of runtime due to an integer overflow and code crashing and a FET getting left in the on state, then yes. I'm not an AI safety nut and don't think AI itself is a threat, but what is a threat is lazy humans using shitty AI to take over things that humans should be doing.
EGreg 2y ago
I will assume you’re asking in good faith. Text continuation to match what people around the internet are saying requires the model internally to “program itself”. It is a non-von-neumann architecture but it encodes durable structures in BILLIONS of bytes, that’s like a codebase of gigabytes. It can pass the Bar exam, various pre-med exams, knows more than any particular human on every subject, and it’s only been a couple years. The text continuation was the first interface, now they are doing multimodal. As it learns to predict the latent space for those things, it will be like predicting things in the real world. Training physical robots will become faster and easier too. In short, this is basically a system to search through the space of all possible alhorithms in order to “reason about” a huge model of the world, enough to understand it and predict it with small loss. AlphaZero used MCTS and can beat every human in chess now, and even every program written by a human, with beautiful gameplay. And even without AI, just the fact that the best performing algorithms are downloaded onto millions of computers is already multiplying the power far more than the 1% of humans who might do better in some area. So it can be better than 95% of humans at most tasks !
tempodox 2y ago
You're right, on the face of it it sounds absurd and by rights it should be. However, absurdity has never stopped mankind from doing horrible things. I for one don't see the gravest dangers in the tech itself, but in the stuff that people will (ab)use it for. And, of course, should AGI (which won't be text continuation, by the way) ever actually happen, then all bets are off. I just don't believe we're in any immediate danger of that.
bmitc 2y ago
Yes, exactly because it is just text continuation. It is being integrated into systems and used as a tool as if it is much, much more than text continuation. That is the danger. I've been using Copilot frequently lately, and it's startling just how often it is completely wrong despite being confidently presented as completely right.
wk_end 2y ago
I’m a bit of an AI skeptic and find the way people talk vaguely about the “dangers” of AI weird and maybe just more hype (or efforts for regulatory capture) rather than actual cause for concern. Still, to me, it seems like the two big scary things that might fall out of recent developments in generative AI are: 1. It might vacuum up an enormous number of jobs very quickly; enough jobs and quickly enough to cause serious social unrest. 2. The ability to generate convincing fake videos of basically anything might catastrophically erode our sense of truth or reality. Both of these strike me as plausible concerns in the near future (arguably they’re already happening). Not really sure what we could do about them, though - the cat is kind of out of the bag.
- verisimi 2y ago
  Re 1 - aren't people mostly doing bullshit jobs already? Re 2 - fakery in videos and images has been a part since their inception. So, don't worry, I guess? The only thing is the scale of bs that could be put out, and whether the wider population lose trust in what they see on screens. Which would be a good thing, imo.
  - shinycode 2y ago
    Bullshit jobs yes but still they are paid. What happens in a capitalist society when thousands of people loose their job and can’t produce value and contribute to society ? It’s tearing apart the fabric of capitalism is some way. What happen when all those people without jobs won’t be able to train for better jobs (because they would have done it already and won’t have a bullshit job in the first place) and either fall poor or move to less paid jobs ?
    - wordpad 2y ago
      Technology and automation tends to create more jobs. As operational costs decrease, your end service or product becomes cheaper, so all your b2b or b2c customers can afford more of it which leads to more opportunities, doing things which were cost prohibitive before. Some of those things may too require manual labor.
ignoramous 2y ago
> the greatest of dangers The danger comes from humans themselves wielding this tech, under the assumption it will keep improving quadratically. Some truly unhinged already thriving there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39124666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39124666
Nevermark 2y ago
Text continuation defines a task. It does not limit the sophistication of the solution. The difference between problems and solutions seems to trip up a lot of people. —- It gets even more nuanced. At its basic level all types of digital AI are “just” arithmetic, or “just” Boolean logic. But arithmetic’s and Boolean logic’s simplicity don’t limit what systems can be built with them, as they are Turing Complete. Likewise, the training algorithm for deep learning models is “just” gradient descent (or a variation), it’s “just” a dumb optimizer. But again, gradient descent places no limits on what a system with enough resources can learn. The whole point of learning systems is the basic resources of the model are provided, and within those resource limits (parameters, computational speed and time) the “dumb” learning algorithm learns the patterns in the data. The data patterns define the complexity of the solution. And the amount of information in a large collection of human correspondence includes patterns, meta patterns and abstractions for things like science, philosophy, psychology, law, art, on and on, that incidentally have a real bearing on sentence completion in that context. So a model will actually have to learn those things to perform its task well. New Law of Algorithm Level Confusion: Whenever someone says some learning system is “just” doing some simple task, they are confusing a simple task definition with a simple solution, or a simple learning algorithm with simple learned relationships. In both cases, the simplicity of the former places no limits on the sophistication of the latter.
- Terretta 2y ago
  > ... they are Turing Complete. OK, so all software must be regulated? Arguing that simple tools can be used for dangerous results and thus must be regulated or made “safe” is like saying since more murders in America are committed with hammers than long guns, you must show an ID to buy a hammer at Home Depot, and demanding "safety" training of text continuation models is like requiring hammers be redesigned to have pillows for hammerheads. We already have laws against bad acts. Hold wrongdoers accountable. Leave hammers alone.
  - Nevermark 2y ago
    I was responding directly to your comment: > Text continuation poses "the greatest of dangers"? The task of text continuation is no guarantee of safety. A language model trained on pure military information, communication and actions could be quite dangerous if given an ability to direct, or contribute, to actual action. Not arguing anything about regulation.
VladimirGolovin 2y ago
Text continuation doesn't. AGI does.
hpeter 2y ago
Yes because people are stupid and vulnerable and will believe things a computer tells them. They can make life decisions on chatGPT advice, instead of asking friends or family. Heck maybe they don't have family, vulnerable people like that can be exploited with convincing chatbots easily.
gosub100 2y ago
I haven't read all the replies to see if this has been posted yet, but one of the consequences is erosion of trust in reality itself: we're starting to see the comments "are you a bot?/is this real? I can't tell if you're serious or if this was from ChatGPT". It's quite possible that soon the majority of comments online will be with bots, or people will just avoid discourse more and more because they don't know/believe they are talking to a human.

bboygravity 2y ago

OpenAI is one of the few companies that is so messed up that even the name itself is a flat out lie. From there it's censorship, lies and manipulation all the way down from leadership to product. There's no ignoring that. There's no way any organization like that can succeed IMO. Just another technology development that Musk will eventually beat everyone else at IMO. Grok 1.5 is getting pretty good and the fact that it's the least censored IMO is obviously going to make it win from all the others that just can't help themselves from pleasing a hand full of people with money and power. TLDR: black Hitler.

int_19h 2y ago
Is it the "least censored", or does it just censor different things?
ornornor 2y ago
[flagged]

dragonwriter 2y ago

“The technology they’re working on poses the gravest of dangers.” Or, rather, its been actively marketed by Altman as doing so, as part of his effort to buy influence with government to restrict competition. The simplest explanation for the conflict is that it doesn’t, and that OpenAI internally has allocated resources based on reality rather than it’s public propaganda, and the team whose internal turf was built around that propaganda left in a huff.

edanm 2y ago
> Or, rather, its been actively marketed by Altman as doing so, as part of his effort to buy influence with government to restrict competition. I mean, maybe sama is also doing so. But you're ignoring the many people who have been warning of these dangers for years, some before OpenAI even existed, and many with no part of OpenAI and no monetary incentive. To describe everything as "Altman is marketing this as dangerous" is to completely ignore the majority of researchers ringing alarm bells.
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  The world is full of dangers. AI danger has gotten some attention now - whether it turns out to be warranted beyond certain levels is still unclear. While there has been some regulatory action it also feels there is some "moving on" from the more apocalyptic risk views towards more mundane risks and their management (i.e., more vanilla product and technology risk management).
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > it also feels there is some "moving on" from the more apocalyptic risk views towards more mundane risks and their management (i.e., more vanilla product and technology risk management). No surprise, when the public reception to AI x-risk was mostly, "big tech scaremonging / regulatory capture; why not focus on Real AI Dangers Right Now, like bias or offensive language". Seemingly refocusing on the mundane may be the only way now to do something about the apocalyptic.

fullspectrumdev 2y ago

> The technology they're working on poses the gravest of dangers Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

mofeien 2y ago
ChatGPT-4 won't kill us, and probably neither will the next generation of models. But if we keep building more and more powerful AI systems, eventually we will reach a point where one will become an existential threat. Present dangers of AI include Fake News, impersonation through deepfakes, biases and discrimination in the models, job loss and economic instability, loss of human purpose through individuals becoming redundant, individuals becoming addicted to the AI systems, use by authoritarian governments, autonomous weapons. Near future dangers include bioweapon engineering capabilities, computer hacks, human disempowerment, existential risk, or a state where the values of the world are locked in by an uncontrolled AI, and possibly filled with suffering if locked in in a bad way, e. g. as we lock in animals. It might take months until AGI, it might take decades, nobody knows for sure. However, we do know that the pace of AI progress is often grossly underestimated. Just three years ago we thought we’d have SAT-passing AI systems in 2055. We got there in April 2023. So it makes sense to act as if we have very little time.
- jeffreygoesto 2y ago
  Reminds me of "now automated driving is only five years away" since 2008...
- bitnasty 2y ago
  You, like many others, miss the number one danger of AI—making people dumber and less capable of reason.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    People have been saying that about everything at least since Socratese was dismissive of writing; probably longer, but we can't tell because writing hadn't been invented yet.