AI Labs Urged to Pump the Brakes in Open Letter | Hacker News Reader

AI Labs Urged to Pump the Brakes in Open Letter

time.com

32 pointsktamura41 comments

I find it really hard to see how productive a collective pause and 'think' about something so inherently unpredictable will be.

> "implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts"

Who deserves to be called an expert on this? Feels like Economics or something, where you have camps of thought advocating for themselves but little way of knowing who's right. Best to break things and develop antibodies whilst the stakes are still low.

So Musk was outed from OpenAI and is now salty? Or are they trying to build a competitor and are falling behind and want OpenAI to get a break so they can catch up? In either way, the ethics talk is total bullshit.

> So Musk was outed from OpenAI and is now salty?

Outed? AFAIK he quit.

That's my speculation. If I was Musk, I wouldn't voluntarily quit OpenAI.

> That's my speculation. If I was Musk, I wouldn't voluntarily quit OpenAI.

In hindsight. Back in 2018 it wasn’t at all obvious they would be in the position they are today. Google released the Transformer paper just a year before and were commonly seen as being in the lead.

Back then he said it was because of "conflict of interest" with Tesla. But that wasn't entirely true, he wanted to be the boss and run the company. Altman said no. [citation needed]

Was thinking the same thing. Just a few days ago Elon was criticizing ChatGPT to be too "woke" which basically means it's careful to not push any hot buttons and that it needs to be less politically correct all the time.

It's funny because the other day I asked ChatGPT that the only thing that holds back AI tech. is regulatory issues. Of course it denied cuz it didn't know any better, but when GPT-4 paper came out, this was explicitly mentioned, that they were solely working on safety issues for months before release.

I felt the same way when I really wanted a super soaker 2000 and then the neighbor kid got one before me. "MOOOOM!!!"

This is exactly my feeling from the whole letter. I don't understand why are people scared of ChatGPT and similar, when it is just better IntelliSense

People are really freaking out about AI aren’t they?

Why bother? It’s moving super fast, just wait and see what happens.

And even if you could control or regulate it, exactly how would you do that? What would you be regulating/controlling? How would you define it?

And why would you want to anyway? The party has just started, if you think the revolution has arrived, your completely wrong - this is just the beginning - the most amazing stuff is yet to come.

These people begging for the pace to slow, it’s analogous to the newspapers and music companies wanting the internet to slow down as they were being rapidly involuntarily made redundant.

> It’s moving super fast, just wait and see what happens.

This seems like bad advice in almost any context.

Why?

We didn’t have to slow down and wait when the web arrived…. and tons of people lost their jobs because of the web.

Did you read the article or letter? They list a lot of very valid reasons. I won't bother quoting because I would just be copy/pasting the article (which is very short).

For a more detailed list of reasons, go read what AI alignment scientists think, since they have been working on how to align an AI in order to not "turn everything into paperclips" since the 1970s and it seems as though many are rather skeptical about us having any future if we keep up at this rate (spoiler: many believe the end of humanity will occur soon after the creation of any superintelligence): https://www.alignmentforum.org

My personal takeaway: continued development might mean the end of humans and maybe even our planet (if an ASI can deploy nanotech to convert everything into substrate). As it already stands, nobody knows why LLMs work as well as they do - they are already a black box. Sure, plenty of people can explain the math behind each of steps involved: training, matrices, transformers, inference, et al. but it's still a big black box which spits out "magic" answers. You can't just drop a breakpoint inside a model during inference to see what's going on, you will just get a long list of unintelligible floating point numbers at any step of the process.

Your question about regulation is valid... but something needs to be done. I feel like we're standing very close to one of the Big Filters.

Comparing AI/AGI/ASI to anything we have currently seen is probably pointless, they are worlds apart. Would you bother comparing a smartphone to a book? The rate of AI/ML progress is sufficient to measure in hours instead of months or years.

It could also present the only realistic way we avoid the many other human-ending threats we've introduced ourselves.

This isn't a one sided coin flip.

You have nuclear war, emerging bioweapon capabilities, global warming, pollution, and a number of other existential concerns. And yes, AI is one on that list.

But how many solutions to those other items do we realistically have right now? Because it keeps seeming to be that nothing is getting done outside people pointing out the sky is falling.

Quite possibly the ONLY real, well funded, viable solution to these issues would be a straight up deus ex machina being pulled out of our rear ends.

So yeah, it's a scary coin flip that could add to the massive list of other things inevitably going to kill us all, or maybe end up being the coin flip to negate the rest of that list.

So a letter that only points out a possible threat model isn't genuinely pursuing discussion over the ethical considerations - it's just fear mongering. And looking at signatures much further down the list of "concerned parent" or "fearful citizen" it's having the intended (and very sketch) effect.

> People are really freaking out about AI aren’t they?

AI touches the domain of software development the most (since we have put a lot of data about it on the Internet). It touches other things too like writing, and design. It doesn't touch things like food delivery, construction, or a farmer.

Currently, they happen to be at the lower tier of society. For some reason. Despite the fact that you can't go two days at a row without food. AI can flip this. There is no need for this army of developers, designers, marketers and bureaucrats. Some people are afraid.

Tl;dr: The people who are freaked out about AI are the people who are bound to lose the most by it.

> Tl;dr: The people who are freaked out about AI are the people who are bound to lose the most by it.

And some probably used ML assistance to contribute to the draft:

> "At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models." We agree. That point is now.

This would lead to emphasis on algorithmic compute efficiency, quickly decreasing reliance on mega-actor cooperation! Hah!

Logistics and farming seem like poor examples: both can be solved with programming and a little hardware.

Also, the letter only presents threats.

Part of the ethical consideration needs to be the opportunity cost a six month delay could cause.

As an example, let's say that GPT-N will cure cancer.

Over a six month period that's at least 5 million people dead if the date it arrives and cures cancers broadly was pushed by that long.

What about negotiating foreign policy treaties to prevent war, or identifying a way to reverse climate changes, or any number of other positive effects?

The fact the letter even positions 'should' such an advanced AI exist as a legitimate question I find pretty gross.

Should we hold back the progress of intelligent life in the universe out of the ego of humanity?

I get superintelligence is an unsettling idea.

But inherent to that name is an indication that there's a seat at the debate table that's currently vacant which might have important and interesting things to say on the subject, and anyone suggesting aborting it is a valid course of action (particularly given the myriad of existential threats we already face from fellow humans) I can only regard as being quite far from super.

If this sort of prevention didn't work for nuclear weapons it'll not work for anything ever.

we did at least relatively okay with nuclear weapons? I notice that there are a whole lot less of them now than there were, nobody has used any, and several countries under extreme pressure still haven't developed them (taiwan, japan, south korea, armenia, venezuela, syria)

This basically worked perfectly with nuclear weapons. Everyone took their development extremely seriously, and we’ve managed to avoid a nuclear apocalypse. If anyone could get on their computer and buy a nuke from Amazon, we would all be dead within the week.

Of course, software production and testing is a hell of a lot harder to detect via satellite imaging and seismographs and can be performed using readily available materials, so it's a good deal harder to control.

It worked — after destroying two whole cities.

The letter: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime...

I don't see any way to verify the signatures. Though the mention of Sam Harris' signature disappearing suggests they're being moderated at least?

This, indeed, I'm also wondering why we'd learn about it only through that site, wouldn't the people signing be posting about it too ?

The posters here seem to be highly skeptical of the need to regulate emerging AI.

I find that pretty disappointing and surprising.

Recently, they gave gpt-4 access to a terminal, the internet, and money. And gpt-4 itself is a software (and software in general has bugs, vulnerabilities, etc) black box that is incredibly, unprecedentedly powerful and not fully understood. Part of its training data is almost every known security vulnerability.

You guys really don’t see any potential problems with this? I mean really? Get a little creative here.

Reminds me that fire is dangerous and making it would have been patent-able today. There is no guarantee that once taken away from the masses, AI research wont continue in walled gardens with only the rich, connected, and powerful having access. Had people been egalitarian or safety oriented, a lot of other things wouldn't have been developed, like nukes, robotics& automation, or self driving cars for example. There wouldn't have been billionaires setting up rules for everyone else.

The only reason this is an issue for "them" is that this tech isn't under their complete control and it seems to threaten the rent extraction model in a bunch of other industries.