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> 1) AGI is not around the corner, so no worries I agree with this. I no longer agree that the "safety" people want the same things we do. I suspect after the

> 1) AGI is not around the corner, so no worries I agree with this. I no longer agree that the "safety" people want the same things we do. I suspect after the bard debacle a bit back that "safety" looks a lot more like 1984. > He no longer cares ... I missed something Sam was gone, none of these people spoke up, and now they are leaving. I think the story is plain as day but we're pretending it isnt. Sam isnt a leader, he never has been. This is not what leadership looks like, its want a megalomanic trying to keep control looks like.

_heimdall 2y ago
> I no longer agree that the "safety" people want the same things we do. I suspect after the bard debacle a bit back that "safety" looks a lot more like 1984. AI Safety will inevitably look a lot like DEI programs. They're trying to thread a needle with two fundamentally opposed ideas, and with a bit of time it turns into little more than a combination of Cover Your Ass policies. The ridiculous thing is that we actually need initiatives that follow what both AI safety and DEI set out to be. Somehow along the way they get ruined though, leaving us in an even worse spot because for a while we have an excuse to think there are adults in the room actually making sure things are moving in the right direction.
- Analemma_ 2y ago
  Have you actually talked to any AI safety people? They despise the DEI-flavored AI ethics "make sure it generates enough black people" stuff just as much as you do, and I think you're lumping the two of them together just based on your own dislike, without checking whether that's actually reflective of the reality on the ground.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    I didn't actually mean to refer to the DEI-flavored AI ethics. That was totally unintentional on my part, I should have caught that. I raised both because I see them going down very similar paths. DEI conceptually is a really important idea and could lead to really important change or course correction. As implemented today though, it seems to most often be implemented as a much more surface level program that sure feels more like PR or legal protection than anything else. With AI safety, based on those in the industry I have spoken with, there's a very real risk the same happens. AI safety, again as I've seen implemented and what I've heard from people working in the field, is much more concerned with minor risks and has given up on concerns like the alignment problem. AI safety isn't concerned with moral or ethical questions of what happens as the technology progresses. I'm not just talking about job loss concerns. Thinking bigger for a minute, what rights would a real AI have? Can it be turned off? Can it commit crimes or be punished? Does it have rights? No one in AI safety is realistically considering whether these systems should be on the public internet at all, unless there are drastically more powerful systems kept under wraps due to these risks. No one is seriously asking about risks to privacy, I'm sure some in the field share those worries but they are the outlier and don't seem to be given the ability to meaningfully move the industry.
    - zer00eyz 2y ago
      > Thinking bigger for a minute, what rights would a real AI have? None, and the court has already spoken on this. It's a pretty dead issue. > Can it be turned off? Yes it's a machine. Save state, power down. > Can it commit crimes or be punished? See PGE and its own death toll. > Does it have rights? No, and we aren't even on a path where these questions are relevant. It's all an exercise in mental mastrubation. If you think that were going to accidentally stumble into sentience never mind sapenenc I have a bridge I would like to sell you.
      - kazinator 2y ago
        We can't formally stumble into sentience because we don't have a definition of it let alone a test which can confirm or refute its presence. People will think they "know it when they see it". The arguing will be fun.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        > None, and the court has already spoken on this. It's a pretty dead issue. The question of rights would be legislative rather than judicial. More importantly, the discussion should actually be among the people first in anything resembling a democracy, the few in charge are meant to represent us not rule us. > See PGE and its own death toll. Unless I'm mistaken, PGE isn't an artificial intelligence or sentient. > No, and we aren't even on a path where these questions are relevant. It's all an exercise in mental mastrubation. If you think that were going to accidentally stumble into sentience never mind sapenenc I have a bridge I would like to sell you. OpenAI's explicit goal is to create and release an AGI. A majority of experts in the industry I have either talked with personally or heard in long form interviews expect that we could be very close to AGI, on the order of a couple years up to maybe 15 or 20 years on the high end. Given how slowly any societal discussion related to rights of a population move, do you think we'll have plenty of time to decide this after an AGI is released in some spectacularly Silicon Valley product release party?
        zer00eyz 2y ago
        >> on the order of a couple years up to maybe 15 or 20 years Fusion, flying cars, AI in the 50's and in the 70's... Hell Hal was born in 97 and the film was in 68. For as impressive as LLM's are once you dig into them they aren't magical at all. A sophisticated model of language that predicts the next word is about as likely to become an AGI as whether predictions are likely to control the weather. Ask any expert in AGI what the "next token" is and they are going to fucking disagree. This isnt us building the bomb where we have a pretty good idea of how to do it and just need to put all the parts together. This is a bunch of people stabbing in the dark and getting lucky here and there. Were not going to bumble fuck our way forward on this, and the path were going down has potential to be a game changer but its not going to give us a super intelligence...
  - pram 2y ago
    If most people think the lobotomized and sanitized commercial model behavior is the product of "safety" and "alignment" and that isn't really the case, then the "AI safety people" have done an extremely poor job of communicating exactly what their actual goals are.
- zer00eyz 2y ago
  I didn't say DEI for a reason, here is the other side talking rather overtly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnhJWusyj4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnhJWusyj4I ... Pick a topic and someone is gonna have a really bent take on how things would be... and keen on jamming that take down someone else's throat so they can feel better. Everyone has shitty takes that they want others to buy into... everyone. Is Taiwan a country? I would say yes, most Americans would (I hope). Ask ChatGPT... 4chan is still a thing, the library is still a thing. The nuclear boy scouts made a giant mess before there was an internet. As for safety, well, it's gonna be a long time before shutting down the world isnt a weekend project for a hand full of people if they are allowed.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    I raised DEI as an example of a field started with good intentions to solve very real and important problems that, in my experience, completely lost its way. That's not to say there isn't good work being done or good people doing it, but from what I've seen DEI has in many ways been whittled down to a combination of public relations and CYA policies. DEI has definitely become a political trope, but regardless of what Newt Gingrich or any other talking head might say, there are plenty of valid critiques that can and should be made of the field if its going to get back on track.
- gcr 2y ago
  I’m confused. How are AI safety and DEI opposed?
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    They aren't opposed, I may not have been clear enough there. I raised DEI as an example of a system that, in my opinion, is further down the path that I see AI safety going down. They both started with strong intentions to help guide or redirect an industry but, again in my opinion, both fields have ended up playing a role of PR and "cover your ass" more than anything else.
0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
>I no longer agree that the "safety" people want the same things we do. I suspect after the bard debacle a bit back that "safety" looks a lot more like 1984. It's interesting that's how it looks like to you from the outside. If you look a little closer at the "AI Safety" community, it consists of two competing factions: the faction responsible for the Bard debacle, and the faction that's focused on trying to prevent human extinction -- "AI notkilleveryoneism", as in https://x.com/aisafetymemes https://x.com/aisafetymemes They both insist that the other faction is "distracting everyone from the real issues".
- talldayo 2y ago
  > They both insist that the other faction is "distracting everyone from the real issues". Because in part, it's a false dichotomy. AI safety just is. It's like airplane safety; we can write all these cool guidelines and track people from hell and back, but there's still a degree of determinative capability that pilots assume when they fly a plane. Same goes for operating AI; the onus of not using it to kill everyone falls on everyone, not one person. Both sides are distracting each other because neither of them have anything to support without their valueless tribal politics. AI research operates independently of their discourse, and gets deployed without ever consulting any of them. They are armchair experts at best, and stoop to being Twitter reactionaries when they demand respect from their core audience. The only dichotomy that exists in AI is the stuff that gets made and the stuff that doesn't. I say this as someone that despises the field by now and wishes it never existed in my lifetime; if you don't make it, they will. How's that for an AI safety policy?
  - comp_throw7 2y ago
    > AI research operates independently of their discourse, and gets deployed without ever consulting any of them. They are armchair experts at best, and stoop to being Twitter reactionaries when they demand respect from their core audience. Astonishing claim, when some such researchers have (unfortunately) been responsible for many of the most impressive capabilities advancements in the last few years, and the three most cited AI researchers of all time are all doing extinction-risk-mitigation work (with Bengio and Sutskever both doing technical work; Hinton mostly seems to be focusing on outreach).
moomoo11 2y ago
Wasn't sama a YC CEO or something?

_heimdall 2y ago

> I no longer agree that the "safety" people want the same things we do. I suspect after the bard debacle a bit back that "safety" looks a lot more like 1984. AI Safety will inevitably look a lot like DEI programs. They're trying to thread a needle with two fundamentally opposed ideas, and with a bit of time it turns into little more than a combination of Cover Your Ass policies. The ridiculous thing is that we actually need initiatives that follow what both AI safety and DEI set out to be. Somehow along the way they get ruined though, leaving us in an even worse spot because for a while we have an excuse to think there are adults in the room actually making sure things are moving in the right direction.

Analemma_ 2y ago
Have you actually talked to any AI safety people? They despise the DEI-flavored AI ethics "make sure it generates enough black people" stuff just as much as you do, and I think you're lumping the two of them together just based on your own dislike, without checking whether that's actually reflective of the reality on the ground.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  I didn't actually mean to refer to the DEI-flavored AI ethics. That was totally unintentional on my part, I should have caught that. I raised both because I see them going down very similar paths. DEI conceptually is a really important idea and could lead to really important change or course correction. As implemented today though, it seems to most often be implemented as a much more surface level program that sure feels more like PR or legal protection than anything else. With AI safety, based on those in the industry I have spoken with, there's a very real risk the same happens. AI safety, again as I've seen implemented and what I've heard from people working in the field, is much more concerned with minor risks and has given up on concerns like the alignment problem. AI safety isn't concerned with moral or ethical questions of what happens as the technology progresses. I'm not just talking about job loss concerns. Thinking bigger for a minute, what rights would a real AI have? Can it be turned off? Can it commit crimes or be punished? Does it have rights? No one in AI safety is realistically considering whether these systems should be on the public internet at all, unless there are drastically more powerful systems kept under wraps due to these risks. No one is seriously asking about risks to privacy, I'm sure some in the field share those worries but they are the outlier and don't seem to be given the ability to meaningfully move the industry.
  - zer00eyz 2y ago
    > Thinking bigger for a minute, what rights would a real AI have? None, and the court has already spoken on this. It's a pretty dead issue. > Can it be turned off? Yes it's a machine. Save state, power down. > Can it commit crimes or be punished? See PGE and its own death toll. > Does it have rights? No, and we aren't even on a path where these questions are relevant. It's all an exercise in mental mastrubation. If you think that were going to accidentally stumble into sentience never mind sapenenc I have a bridge I would like to sell you.
    - kazinator 2y ago
      We can't formally stumble into sentience because we don't have a definition of it let alone a test which can confirm or refute its presence. People will think they "know it when they see it". The arguing will be fun.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      > None, and the court has already spoken on this. It's a pretty dead issue. The question of rights would be legislative rather than judicial. More importantly, the discussion should actually be among the people first in anything resembling a democracy, the few in charge are meant to represent us not rule us. > See PGE and its own death toll. Unless I'm mistaken, PGE isn't an artificial intelligence or sentient. > No, and we aren't even on a path where these questions are relevant. It's all an exercise in mental mastrubation. If you think that were going to accidentally stumble into sentience never mind sapenenc I have a bridge I would like to sell you. OpenAI's explicit goal is to create and release an AGI. A majority of experts in the industry I have either talked with personally or heard in long form interviews expect that we could be very close to AGI, on the order of a couple years up to maybe 15 or 20 years on the high end. Given how slowly any societal discussion related to rights of a population move, do you think we'll have plenty of time to decide this after an AGI is released in some spectacularly Silicon Valley product release party?
      - zer00eyz 2y ago
        >> on the order of a couple years up to maybe 15 or 20 years Fusion, flying cars, AI in the 50's and in the 70's... Hell Hal was born in 97 and the film was in 68. For as impressive as LLM's are once you dig into them they aren't magical at all. A sophisticated model of language that predicts the next word is about as likely to become an AGI as whether predictions are likely to control the weather. Ask any expert in AGI what the "next token" is and they are going to fucking disagree. This isnt us building the bomb where we have a pretty good idea of how to do it and just need to put all the parts together. This is a bunch of people stabbing in the dark and getting lucky here and there. Were not going to bumble fuck our way forward on this, and the path were going down has potential to be a game changer but its not going to give us a super intelligence...
- pram 2y ago
  If most people think the lobotomized and sanitized commercial model behavior is the product of "safety" and "alignment" and that isn't really the case, then the "AI safety people" have done an extremely poor job of communicating exactly what their actual goals are.
zer00eyz 2y ago
I didn't say DEI for a reason, here is the other side talking rather overtly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnhJWusyj4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnhJWusyj4I ... Pick a topic and someone is gonna have a really bent take on how things would be... and keen on jamming that take down someone else's throat so they can feel better. Everyone has shitty takes that they want others to buy into... everyone. Is Taiwan a country? I would say yes, most Americans would (I hope). Ask ChatGPT... 4chan is still a thing, the library is still a thing. The nuclear boy scouts made a giant mess before there was an internet. As for safety, well, it's gonna be a long time before shutting down the world isnt a weekend project for a hand full of people if they are allowed.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  I raised DEI as an example of a field started with good intentions to solve very real and important problems that, in my experience, completely lost its way. That's not to say there isn't good work being done or good people doing it, but from what I've seen DEI has in many ways been whittled down to a combination of public relations and CYA policies. DEI has definitely become a political trope, but regardless of what Newt Gingrich or any other talking head might say, there are plenty of valid critiques that can and should be made of the field if its going to get back on track.
gcr 2y ago
I’m confused. How are AI safety and DEI opposed?
- _heimdall 2y ago
  They aren't opposed, I may not have been clear enough there. I raised DEI as an example of a system that, in my opinion, is further down the path that I see AI safety going down. They both started with strong intentions to help guide or redirect an industry but, again in my opinion, both fields have ended up playing a role of PR and "cover your ass" more than anything else.

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

>I no longer agree that the "safety" people want the same things we do. I suspect after the bard debacle a bit back that "safety" looks a lot more like 1984. It's interesting that's how it looks like to you from the outside. If you look a little closer at the "AI Safety" community, it consists of two competing factions: the faction responsible for the Bard debacle, and the faction that's focused on trying to prevent human extinction -- "AI notkilleveryoneism", as in https://x.com/aisafetymemes https://x.com/aisafetymemes They both insist that the other faction is "distracting everyone from the real issues".

talldayo 2y ago
> They both insist that the other faction is "distracting everyone from the real issues". Because in part, it's a false dichotomy. AI safety just is. It's like airplane safety; we can write all these cool guidelines and track people from hell and back, but there's still a degree of determinative capability that pilots assume when they fly a plane. Same goes for operating AI; the onus of not using it to kill everyone falls on everyone, not one person. Both sides are distracting each other because neither of them have anything to support without their valueless tribal politics. AI research operates independently of their discourse, and gets deployed without ever consulting any of them. They are armchair experts at best, and stoop to being Twitter reactionaries when they demand respect from their core audience. The only dichotomy that exists in AI is the stuff that gets made and the stuff that doesn't. I say this as someone that despises the field by now and wishes it never existed in my lifetime; if you don't make it, they will. How's that for an AI safety policy?
- comp_throw7 2y ago
  > AI research operates independently of their discourse, and gets deployed without ever consulting any of them. They are armchair experts at best, and stoop to being Twitter reactionaries when they demand respect from their core audience. Astonishing claim, when some such researchers have (unfortunately) been responsible for many of the most impressive capabilities advancements in the last few years, and the three most cited AI researchers of all time are all doing extinction-risk-mitigation work (with Bengio and Sutskever both doing technical work; Hinton mostly seems to be focusing on outreach).

moomoo11 2y ago

Wasn't sama a YC CEO or something?