Different Levels of “AI Safety”

I think the term "AI Safety" is so overloaded right now that large amounts of conversation on the topic are essentially meaningless. The reason for this is that what AI Safety means is highly dependent on the level of intelligence your AI has. This point and the rest of this post may be obvious to most of the readers, but even then, someone still has to say it.

I would like to present a loose definition of 5 levels of AI models and the corresponding important concepts in AI safety/ethics. This is not meant to be complete or definite in any way. Since I believe in example over explanation, I will not try to give an exact definition but instead just keywords and examples.

Level 1: Everything before ~2021ish

Keywords: non-agentic models, image classification, low quality generative models, clustering, "big data" usage, autonomous driving, ...

New safety concerns: mostly bias and racism, misunderstanding and misuse of the model leading to bad performance, "black box", ...

Level 2: Current era ~2021-now

Keywords: High quality generative AI, realistic image/audio/video generation, video generation, text models like GPT, multimodal generatibe models, agentic models

New safety concerns: Fake content on a large scale, fake videos of politicians and events, fake posts online, bots spamming everything, massive scam or misinformation operations, generation of harmful contemt, some possible harm by misaligned agentic models (you tell an auto-gpt to book a plane flight but it somehow ends up making a bomb threat at the airport)

Level 3: near AGI and AGI

Keywords: Imagine a multi-modal model with human level intelligence, or very close. Immediate improvements you might get are the intelligence of many humans in a group (parallel execution) and that of a human being sped up (run program faster). But that is not necessarily superintelligence! Perhaps embodiment in androids is available.

New Safety concerns: Classic stuff from sci-fi novels (without superintelligence), "Laws of Robotics", murdering androids, anything evil a human might do on a possibly much larger scale. Furthermore: AI ethics, is this thing conscious? is this slavery? Should we create AI rights?

Level 4: Slow takeoff superintelligence

Keywords: Superintelligence that arises from self-improvement over the course of at least several months, it can not magically escape any constraints

New safety concerns: Monitor for such self improvement takeoff processes, global AI regulation, bombing data centers, development on isolated islands bla bla

Level 5: Fast take-off superintelligence

Keywords: Extinction

New safety concerns: Back to monke or don't bother

I have never seen any mathematical or eyperimental evidence that Level 4 and 5 are possible, yet it often dominates the discussion. Similarly people bringing up Level 1 are living in the 2010s. I think discussion should focus on Level 2 and some aspects of Level 3.