The call for a 6 month moratorium on AI progress beyond GPT-4 is a terrible idea
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The idea that somehow everyone would miraculously stop working with the LLM models that are out there because someone declared a moratorium is madness. That would be like saying a 6 month moratorium on malware development should be declared.
The only players who would keep developing would be those who recognize that the moratorium is pointless, or people who are already wanting to use the tech maliciously.
The idea behind GPT-4 is out there, it is something that is going to be reproduced regardless of what is discussed and unlike, say, nuclear weapons, it doesn't require a complicated infrastructure to implement and build. We need to continue to build this, and organizations with critical access to infrastructure and such need to take their security more seriously moving forward.
"Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.
"AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt.[4] This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities."
https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime...
Is doesn't say stop doing AI, it says stop going beyond GPT-4 (for 6 months).
HOW??? what does this even mean? does Kamala Harris get to put a camera in my house to make sure I don't watch Khan Academy videos on neural nets?
half this list just reads of people who have been toiling away in AI for years only to watch OpenAI walk off with the hype award. Sorry Mr. Bengio you will get an honorable mention, we promise
and Woz...seriously dude you have spent the last decade making yourself look like a lovable fool. go play with your grandkids
(and even in the twitter thread, someone makes the obvious call that many of the signatories probably just feel left behind, totally blindsided at the progress OpenAI has made while they just plod along)
Well, if (for example) US government tomorrow via treasury or commerce or secret service sends a stern letter to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft forbidding say mining bitcoin, or whatever, it will not immediately halt things but you can be certain those companies will comply.
> does Kamala Harris get to put a camera in my house to make sure I don't watch Khan Academy videos on neural nets?
This is not even worthy of strawman designation.
> "[the envious and the foolish]"
This is possible for some of the signatories. It is also possible to read this as "make them wait while we catch up".
It is also possible that many genuinely believe the pace is outstripping reasonable foresight in assessing consequences.
I would re-frame the proposal this way (as a motivation to consider the open letter):
If we could turn back the clock to 2000, would we change various aspects of the integration of 'social networks' into society, and if yes what would those be?
not all AI is LLMs
take a deep breath folks, GPT does not have the launch codes