Hugging Face Releases Agents

Questioning the premise tho - what do you define as intelligence? Machines can outperform humans at specific tasks, yet those same machines don't have a greater degree of ethics, even if constrained to their domain (i.e., a vision network may be able to draw bounding boxes more accurately than a human, but that doesn't say anything about its ability to align with more ethical values). Which makes me believe that your definition of intelligence has nothing to do with superseding humans on cognitive metrics.

For example the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta:

> “His acquaintances from . . . [Technische Universität Hamburg–Harburg] still cannot reconcile him as a killer, but in hindsight the raw ingredients of his personality suggest some clues. He was meticulous, disciplined and highly intelligent” (Yardley, 2001).

I'm guessing you're a very nice person. There have been a lot of smart people in history who gained power and did very, very nasty things. If you're nice, being smarter means being better at being nice. If you're not, it means being better at doing whatever not-nice things you want to do.

And we're just talking about humans vs humans here. From the point of view of, say, chickens, I don't think they'd rate the smarter people who invented factory farming as nicer than the simple farmers who used to raise 10 birds in a coop.

I mean, if you exclude AGI, there are some ways that humans can wipe ourselves out, but I feel like we're identifying the big existential risks early enough to handle them. Intelligence that isn't human is the real danger.

An NGI started WW2, so why wouldn't an AGI start WW3?

"Demonstrably unfriendly natural intelligence seeks to build provably friendly artificial intelligence"

Or you could take that as evidence (and there's a lot more like it) that AGI is a phenomenon so complex that not even the experts have a clue what's actually going to happen. And yet they are barrelling towards it. There's no reason to expect that anyone will be able to be in control of a situation that nobody on earth even understands.

We've only begun to build multimodal systems; GPT-4 already exhibits improved ability when trained with images vs without.

It isn't "crank science" at all. Despite their mockery and personal insults and dismissive handwaving, no AI capability-pusher has yet made a convincing argument why an entity with extremely strong cognitive powers would not be capable of transforming its surrounding environment on unprecedented scale. The closest one we've heard is "we just won't be able to make AI very smart." Which wishfully will be true, but we're about to spin up multiple Apollo-programs trying to prove that it isn't.

In their defense, LLMs did come a bit out of the blue. In retrospect, Yudkowsky and his disciples were focusing too much on rationality as science/mathematics, bending Bayes to the point of breaking to try and gleam how perfect intelligence works, and how to somehow formalize the aggregate mess of our fuzzy morality.

They failed to predict that shoving gigabytes of random Internet text at a NN, and having it place parts of words as points in a hundred thousand dimension vector space, will suddenly reduce most of what we consider "thinking" into proximity search in said vector space. They were so focused on the theory, they failed to predict the brute-force, messy practice. But so did everyone else.

If anything, Yudkowsky & co. were the only people consistently taking the problem seriously, and got the outline right.

There simple explanation for this. Getting the models which small startup cannot afford to develop and train is the only way to move forward. To get some investments, or before spending their own money, they need a proof of concept at least. Besides, working models are a good learning resource.

It literally is, though. AI is just the dark horse overtaking our other existential threats in the race to end civilization, but "total ecological collapse" and "nuclear war" are still very strong contenders. Both are driven at least in part (or, almost entirely) by corporate interests. There's also "water shortages" to look out for - make sure to thank Nestle.

We also call them governments. They can get pretty powerful.

>"What will we do with all the people when we're optional?"

Judging by the COVID-19 pandemic response, having large aggregates of disempowered individuals from a highly irrational and political species that have become unhappy with the "new normal", it tends to garner some form of reaction. If they are reacting to things that observe and learn from those reactions, and then formulate new goals or sub-goals in response to what they learn, then what is it they might learn and how might they react?

The arguments go both ways. The only thing that's clear is that absolutely nobody on earth is going to be able to predict it with any degree of accuracy. You'd have to know too much.

An AI can (and is likely to) have goals that are fundamentally incompatible with the existence of humanity.

And, an AI can be way more intelligent and powerful than corporations, so corporations are limited in what they can accomplish when pursuing their interests, but AI might not be.

There is no superhuman-level corporation yet.

That symbiotic relationship and constraints aren't really present in an AI the way they are described.

For most "doom" scenarios require only weaker assumption: AIs need to be goal seeking. If they can make decisions and take actions to achieve goals it is possible those goals will be malaligned.

The line between "the ability to make good decisions" and a "goal" seems pretty thin to me.

Now, I think you need more than goal, you also need some creativity and maybe even deviousness to become a real threat (in the sense that we would probably detect naive malalignment). But I'm not sure about this, there are other ways that we could have complex-system failures that go unobserved.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oM9pEezyCb4dCsuKq/pausing-ai...

Basically, the idea is that countries sign the agreement to stop the large training runs, and, if necessary, be willing to use conventional strikes on AI-training datacenters in the countries that refuse. Hopefully it doesn't come to that, hopefully it just becomes the fact of international politics that you can't build large AI-training datacenters anymore. If some country decides to start a war over this - the argument is that wars at least have some survivors, and an unaligned AI won't have any.

Maybe next to the Kusari Gama... but I've only known one master of each.

I have often thought that we need an empirical-ish library of human movement/positions... we have a beginning small version with Ballet's positions and movements, but we dont have a necessarily precise dialogue for human positions common to every body, as opposed to just the athletic dancers.

aside from maybe "Do the Robot!"

I wanted to do this in 1998 with POSER 3D

The bit that's missing is on-line learning. There's only so much you can keep bouncing around in working memory (context window of all the component models) - eventually you want to "fix" some of the context by altering the weights of the models (a kind of gradual fine-tuning?).