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Comment by 13years | Hacker News Reader

I expect AI is going to take the lead for societal concerns of unintended consequences. The advancement pace is way ahead of our ability to reason about the potential effects of what we are building.

We will have completed many iterations before we have even a moment to review the feedback loop. Thus, we will likely compound many mistakes before we realize it.

I have no idea how it will slow down. Someone just figured out how to reduce the cost of building a multi million dollar model to around $600. That was supposed to take another decade.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about what the picture looks like in this advancement. I think we are going to trip over many landmines in this new tech gold rush. I've written my own perspectives on that here - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things

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The problem is this kind of discourse is coming almost entirely from people who haven't made a good-faith effort to understand the technology. You're engaging with Hollywood illusions that don't resemble reality. There are genuine concerns related to AI developments but they have nothing to do with "alignment", it's all that boring stuff like shifts in power dynamics and biases in decision making. Really important, but not exciting enough for a gripping pop narrative. Less basilisk, more... failing to assemble adequately debiased training datasets for your mortgage approval app, or realizing someone can actually identify certain individuals in an anonymized medical dataset.

If you find yourself feeling anxious about AI, spend time learning how modern transformer-based predictive and generative models actually work. From resources rooted in math, statistics, and computer science; not doomer bloggers.

there are genuine concerns related to AI developments but they have nothing to do with "alignment"

My reference has very little to do with alignment. It is mostly about all of the societal implications, biases and how AI will actually be utilized.

Nonetheless, the doomer viewpoint derives from AI researchers themselves.

I agree here. LLMs aren't going to destroy the world, but they may do a hell of a job destroying society.

Now, once we have a continuous learning feedback loop AI, especially one that is multimodal over many dimensions, that's when things can quickly spiral out of control.

> but they may do a hell of a job destroying society.

Agreed. I feel they might actually become so disruptive that they interrupt the progress towards AGI/ASI.

When it comes to the actual topic of alignment for AGI/ASI. Under the current premise, it appears to be an unsolvable paradox for more reason than I can list here. I've written on that in more detail as well, FYI - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-singularity-the-hubris-trap

I’ve always wondered if in my lifetime exponential growth of economic and technological developments would hit a velocity where one or both expands faster than I can even process the changes.

At this point all I have to offer is “strap the fuck in”

EDIT: I’m not even talking about some world ending thing - even GPT4 in its current form has me questioning how many comments I read are real or not - the thing can beat the Turing test in many cases!

> even GPT4 in its current form has me questioning how many comments I read are real or not

We are about to enter a very disturbing era of unverifiable truth and reality. It is an untenable situation for societal order and stability.

>I’m not even talking about some world ending thing - even GPT4 in its current form has me questioning how many comments I read are real or not - the thing can beat the Turing test in many cases!

> We are about to enter a very disturbing era of unverifiable truth and reality. It is an untenable situation for societal order and stability.

When did this stop being the case, I was raised to assume everything on the internet is a fricking lie and that every woman was actually a man in their parents basement, every child was an FBI agent, and every piece of advice I was given was for the purpose of getting me to nuke my machine for the lulz.

There were a simple rules

1. Never share any PII on the internet.

2. Never take anything on the internet seriously.

3. Don't believe anything you read on the internet.

It seems almost every major problem we are facing on the internet is because we broke one of those rules, from social media, to misinformation.

Sure, but it was still possible as there were communication formats that have been useful such as audio and video recordings good enough for evidence in court.

That is about to be lost. Soon the fakes will not be distinguishable from reality. They are good enough already to fool enough people to be disruptive. This becomes an order of magnitude worse than what we had before.

There's a few particular problems here... "The internet" is pretty much everything that you're not physically present at. Any form of communication not in person is subject to the same rules. That TV broadcast... no idea if its actually real. Someone calling you on the phone... Yea, the voice replication AIs are insane these days.

The things that used to bind societies together are quickly falling apart and will lead to distrust. Culture can quickly break down that way. Humans require culture to exist in our modern world of convenience. For example businesses require trust between each other to have exchanges for resources. You know, resources like coal for power. Or long term chemical supplies so we can keep chlorinating our water.

The Foundation series had humanity breaking down because our systems got to complex and we stopped learning. But I think a bigger part is for us at least, is we'll stop trusting anything we see or hear.

I'm now catching myself checking the date on internet comments which seem 'off', to see if it's possible a language model wrote them.

That will never go away now. The people who compared pre-2023 internet content to low-background steel were on the money.

> I have no idea how it will slow down. Someone just figured out how to reduce the cost of building a multi million dollar model to around $600. That was supposed to take another decade.

I don't think this is accurate. The Stanford team used LLaMA as base model and added a smaller model on top of it - training the joint model using data (generated from ChatGPT) is what cost $600. Nobody trained a GPT-like model from scratch for $600 - this experiment took advantage of the millions of USD used to train the larger models.

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