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My guess is that whoever develops superintelligence first will not release it to the public, but rather use it for their own purposes to gain an edge. They may

My guess is that whoever develops superintelligence first will not release it to the public, but rather use it for their own purposes to gain an edge. They may still release AI products to the public that are good enough and cheap enough to prevent competitors from being profitable or receive funding (to prevent them from catching up), but that's not where the value would come from. Just as an example, let's say xAI is first. Instead of releasing the full capability as GROK 7, they would use the ASI to create a perfected version of their self driving software, to power their Optimus robots. And to speed up the development of future manufacturing products (including, but not limited to cars and humanoid robots) And as such winners may be challenged by anti-trust regulations, the ASI may also be utilized to gain leverage over the political system. Twitter/X could be one arena that would allow this. Eventually, Tesla robots might even be used to replace police officers and military personnel. If so, the company might be a single software update away from total control.

robertlagrant 2y ago
> whoever develops superintelligence first will not release it to the public, but rather use it for their own purposes to gain an edge We have no evidence that superintelligence will be developed. There's no "first". There's only "remote possibility".
- trashtester 2y ago
  > We have no evidence that superintelligence will be developed. Fundamentally, we have no evidence of anything that will happen in the future. All we do is to extrapolate from the past through the present, typically using some kind of theory of how the world operates. The belief that we will eventually (whether it's this year or in 1000+ years), really only hinges on the following 3 assumptions: 1) The human brain is fully material (no divine souls is necessary for intelligence) 2) The human brain does not represent a global optimum for how intelligent a material intelligence-having-object can be. 3) We will eventually have the ability to build intelligence-having-objects (similar or different from the brain) that not only can do the same as a brain (that would be mere AGI), but also surpass it in many ways. Assumptions 1 and 2 have a lot of support in the current scientific consensus. Those who reject them either do not know the science or they have a belief system that would be invalidated if one of those assumptions were true. (That could be anything from a Christian belief in the soul to an ideological reliance of a "Tabula Rasa" brain). Assumption 3 is mostly techno-optimism, or an extrapolation of the trend that we are able to build ever more advanced devices. As for WHEN we get there, there is a fourth assumption required for it to happens soon: 4. For intelligence-having-objects to do their thing, they don't need some exotic mechanisms we don't yet need to build. For instance, there is no need to build large quantum computers for this. This assumption is mostly about belief, and we really don't know. Yet, given the current rate of progress, and if we accept assumptions 1-3, I don't think assumption 4 is unreasonable. If so, it's not unreasonable to assume that our synthetic brains reach roughly human level intelligence when their size/complexity becomes similar to that of human brains. Human brains have ~200 trillion synapses. That's about 100x-1000x more than the latest neural nets that we're building. Based only on scale, current nets (GPT-4 generation) should have total capabilities similar or slightly better than a rat. I think that's not very far off from what we're seeing, even if the nets tend to have those capabilities linked to text/images rather than the physical world that a rat navigates. In other words, I think we DO have SOME evidence (not conclusive) that the capabilities of a neural net can reach similar "intelligence" to animals with a similar number of synapses. So IF that hypothesis holds true, and given assumptions 1-3 above, there is a fair possibility that human level intelligence will be reached when we scale up to about 200 trillion weights (and have the ability to train such nets). And currently, several of the largest and most valuable companies in the world are making a huge gamble on this being the case, with plans to scale up nets by 100x over the next few years, which will be enough to get very close to human brain sized nets.
  - jowdones 2y ago
    >> Fundamentally, we have no evidence of anything that will happen in the future. Yeah, by this line of thought Jesus will descend from Heaven and save us all. By the same line of fantasy, "give us billions to bring AGI", why not "gimme a billion to bring Jesus. I'll pray really hard, I promise!" It's all become a disgusting scam, effectively just religious. Believe in AGI that's all there is to it. In practice it's just as (un) likely as scientists spontaneously creating life out of primordial soup concoctions.
    - jml78 2y ago
      This reply seems eerily similar to folks months/years before the wright brothers proved flight was indeed possible. All the building evidence was there but people just refused to believe it was possible. I am not buying that AI right now is going to displace every job or change the world in the next 5 years but I would t bet against world impacts in that timefram. The writing is in the wall. I am old enough to remember AI efforts in the late 80s and early 90s. We saw how very little progress was made. The progress made in the past 10 years is pretty insane.
      - trashtester 2y ago
        Precisely. I remember back in the late 90s, some Particle Physics papers were published that used neural nets to replace hand crafted statistical features. While the power was not amazing, I've kind of assumed since then that scale was what would be needed. I then half-way forgot about this, until I saw the results from Alexnet. Since then, the capabilities of the models have generally been keeping up with how they were scaled, at least within about 1 OOM. If that continues, the next 5-20 years are going to be perhaps the most significant in history.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    > Assumption 3 is mostly techno-optimism, or an extrapolation of the trend that we are able to build ever more advanced devices. This is your weak link. I don't see why progress will be a straight line and not a sloping-off curve. You shouldn't see the progress we've made in vehicle speed and assume we can hit the speed of light.
sadtoot 2y ago
My guess is that whoever develops superintelligence first will have a big number in their bank account while their body is disassembled to make solar panels and data centers

robertlagrant 2y ago

> whoever develops superintelligence first will not release it to the public, but rather use it for their own purposes to gain an edge We have no evidence that superintelligence will be developed. There's no "first". There's only "remote possibility".

trashtester 2y ago
> We have no evidence that superintelligence will be developed. Fundamentally, we have no evidence of anything that will happen in the future. All we do is to extrapolate from the past through the present, typically using some kind of theory of how the world operates. The belief that we will eventually (whether it's this year or in 1000+ years), really only hinges on the following 3 assumptions: 1) The human brain is fully material (no divine souls is necessary for intelligence) 2) The human brain does not represent a global optimum for how intelligent a material intelligence-having-object can be. 3) We will eventually have the ability to build intelligence-having-objects (similar or different from the brain) that not only can do the same as a brain (that would be mere AGI), but also surpass it in many ways. Assumptions 1 and 2 have a lot of support in the current scientific consensus. Those who reject them either do not know the science or they have a belief system that would be invalidated if one of those assumptions were true. (That could be anything from a Christian belief in the soul to an ideological reliance of a "Tabula Rasa" brain). Assumption 3 is mostly techno-optimism, or an extrapolation of the trend that we are able to build ever more advanced devices. As for WHEN we get there, there is a fourth assumption required for it to happens soon: 4. For intelligence-having-objects to do their thing, they don't need some exotic mechanisms we don't yet need to build. For instance, there is no need to build large quantum computers for this. This assumption is mostly about belief, and we really don't know. Yet, given the current rate of progress, and if we accept assumptions 1-3, I don't think assumption 4 is unreasonable. If so, it's not unreasonable to assume that our synthetic brains reach roughly human level intelligence when their size/complexity becomes similar to that of human brains. Human brains have ~200 trillion synapses. That's about 100x-1000x more than the latest neural nets that we're building. Based only on scale, current nets (GPT-4 generation) should have total capabilities similar or slightly better than a rat. I think that's not very far off from what we're seeing, even if the nets tend to have those capabilities linked to text/images rather than the physical world that a rat navigates. In other words, I think we DO have SOME evidence (not conclusive) that the capabilities of a neural net can reach similar "intelligence" to animals with a similar number of synapses. So IF that hypothesis holds true, and given assumptions 1-3 above, there is a fair possibility that human level intelligence will be reached when we scale up to about 200 trillion weights (and have the ability to train such nets). And currently, several of the largest and most valuable companies in the world are making a huge gamble on this being the case, with plans to scale up nets by 100x over the next few years, which will be enough to get very close to human brain sized nets.
- jowdones 2y ago
  >> Fundamentally, we have no evidence of anything that will happen in the future. Yeah, by this line of thought Jesus will descend from Heaven and save us all. By the same line of fantasy, "give us billions to bring AGI", why not "gimme a billion to bring Jesus. I'll pray really hard, I promise!" It's all become a disgusting scam, effectively just religious. Believe in AGI that's all there is to it. In practice it's just as (un) likely as scientists spontaneously creating life out of primordial soup concoctions.
  - jml78 2y ago
    This reply seems eerily similar to folks months/years before the wright brothers proved flight was indeed possible. All the building evidence was there but people just refused to believe it was possible. I am not buying that AI right now is going to displace every job or change the world in the next 5 years but I would t bet against world impacts in that timefram. The writing is in the wall. I am old enough to remember AI efforts in the late 80s and early 90s. We saw how very little progress was made. The progress made in the past 10 years is pretty insane.
    - trashtester 2y ago
      Precisely. I remember back in the late 90s, some Particle Physics papers were published that used neural nets to replace hand crafted statistical features. While the power was not amazing, I've kind of assumed since then that scale was what would be needed. I then half-way forgot about this, until I saw the results from Alexnet. Since then, the capabilities of the models have generally been keeping up with how they were scaled, at least within about 1 OOM. If that continues, the next 5-20 years are going to be perhaps the most significant in history.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > Assumption 3 is mostly techno-optimism, or an extrapolation of the trend that we are able to build ever more advanced devices. This is your weak link. I don't see why progress will be a straight line and not a sloping-off curve. You shouldn't see the progress we've made in vehicle speed and assume we can hit the speed of light.

sadtoot 2y ago

My guess is that whoever develops superintelligence first will have a big number in their bank account while their body is disassembled to make solar panels and data centers