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> What the fuck even is "AI" anyway?

Indeed.

For most lay people I've talked to -- family, friends, and acquiescence outside of tech -- the answer ultimately boils down to "automation that can do my job or can do the job of people I care about or can do the job of people who would then compete for my job". Sometimes also "algorithms" a la social media feeds and so on.

Ie, the lay answer to "what is AI?" has recently morphed into roughly "computer programs that I am worried about or don't like".

For most actual AI researchers I've talked to, you get the standard tounge-in-cheek response ("AI is whatever gets published at AI conferences and funded by AI investors") and then, when you press, it's roughly something like ML+CV+NLP+optimization and sometimes but not always other fields like automated reasoning or parts of robotics get added. Roughly, most of the parts of CS that aren't theory or systems or HCI or software engineering or already closed.

For most techno-babblers in the podosphere who have OPINIONS on super-intelligence but couldn't pass an internship phone screen to save their lives, it's superintelligence and other stupid hollywood bullshit.

For sure. AI is a marketing term.

But in some sense, so it "tech". The paperclip is a highly evolved technology, for example, [1], but working on those doesn't mean you work "in tech". Tech meant something like, "the new stuff that is impacting our lives but we don't know how to handle". So a CTO's job generally doesn't include the paperclips, the copiers, or the company cars, however technological they are.

And as with any shiny new marketing term, others will quickly rush in. There was the craze for radioactivity, which resulted in a bunch of radioactive patent medicines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery

But even more interesting to me is the extent to which it was used as a pure marketing term, with no radioactivity expected. E.g.: https://lucyjanesantos.com/a-batschari-radium-cigarettes/

So I'm sure we'll be seeing all sorts of things branded "AI" even when they don't use any of the technologies involved. With no trademark on the term or organization to defend it, it's open season for all the sketch marketers.

[1] For those who doubt, Petroski's "The Evolution of Useful Things" will set you straight: https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Useful-Things-Artifacts-Zip...

I think a good definition of AI might be things that can’t be done (or at least we don’t know how to do them) with traditional deterministic programming techniques (that is, humans write code that directly tells the computer what to do).

Things like traditional chess programs (i.e., those that don't use neural networks/ML) are maybe a borderline case, as while they are just tree search with a bunch of human-tuned evaluation heuristics, the search depth is so huge that it's difficult for humans to explain why they take certain actions.

I think that's a plausible start at a definition, but I think the ship has sailed on the term having a real definition at all.

Once marketers get hold of a term, it doesn't really matter what people who like definitions or precision think. As an example, I was active in the Agile movement before that term was coined. When I've talked recently with the early-days people I keep in touch with, we're all kinda horrified by what the term has come to mean. And it's not like we didn't fight along the way for clarity. But most people just don't care about the precise use of a term when there's a profitable (mis)use of the term.

If you look at actual quotes from people like Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Demis Hassabis, etc. the AI, that is to say really the AGI, that they want to build is a godlike super intelligent being. To many researchers in the field this is their end goal.

And Minsky before them.

And Elon Musk wants to die on Mars. It doesn't matter what their "goal" is.

Please read and study my comments in this thread carefully. Superintelligence is not Hollywood bullshit.

AI doesn't need to be alive or animal-like to be superintelligent. We have many examples getting more and more general purpose. Look at AlphaGo, AlphaStar. Both are superintelligent in a somewhat narrow way (but trending towards less narrow).

GPT-4 is superintelligent in some ways already such as it's breadth of knowledge. And we have to anticipate that it will continue to get smarter and better at reasoning and much, much faster. Over the last ten years AI performance has increased by 100000 to 1000000 depending on how you measure it. It will continue to accelerate.

BTW, as far as internships etc., I started programming 38 years ago when I was 7. I've built a ton of software with numerous technologies, including recently some things like: a multilayer perceptron (from scratch). And a data analysis tool that uses GPT to write complex SQL and create charts on the fly to answer user requests. Also software to automatically create custom websites (including imagery) based on short descriptions, or automatically write, test and debug scripts on servers. And all of that outputs at superhuman speed already. And before that I worked on dozens of other complex projects.

Point being, I understand technology and AI, and it is ludicrous to view superintelligence as "stupid bullshit".

Consider this: There are people much much smarter than you RIGHT NOW that you do not listen to or refuse to agree with. There are clear statistics RIGHT NOW about things that you choose to disbelieve. If you don't think this is true, then it is even more the reality. The idea that a very smart "AI" can magically convince anyone of anything is completely unsubstantiated and made entirely up, by people basically inventing a new god and religion. Everything about the human brain is built around rationalizing what you already want into whatever system you pretend to believe in and use, and an AI could tell you something completely true, completely accurate, completely right from a magical objective morality and you STILL would not choose to believe it.

Given that we already have AI convincing people to kill themselves or that they are aware, I'd say the chance that a more advanced ai is capable of convincing humans to do certain actions that the human may not fully understand the totality of the consequences is pretty high.

And plenty of people are convinced of god by an "image" on toast. The existence of very gullible people does not imply that ANYONE is always convincible by a sufficiently "magical super-intelligent" "AI". People bring up "oh but think of it like your mental superiority to ants" and well, go ahead and convince a colony of ants to nuke russia, I'll wait.

There are already millions of people that are stupidly easy to convince of anything, so why aren't these magical end of the world scenarios already happening? Where's the evil maniac convincing Kelly the soccer mom who is into MLMs to end the world? Where is the supervillain raising an army of a million gullible idiots to invade Canada and have their own kingdom?

AGI "Superintelligence" even as a concept is just completely unsupported. It's people looking at an extremely cropped graph and saying "Line goes up, must go up forever" and wouldn't you know it that group has massive overlap with those MLM people from before.

And I think it's important to note that hype about "existential risk" is coming from people who stand to profit from "AI": https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/31/ai-poses-human-extinction-ri...

So it seems like the playbook is something like: 1) play up non-problems that, thanks to 50+ years of sci-fi killer AI, will seem real to the rubes; 2) breeze on past the numerous actual problems; 3) solve as few actual problems as possible as they race to capture billions of dollars.

But happily, the contents of this press release focus mostly on actual problems, so I have some hope that the Skynet gambit won't work.

"the AI is going to kill us all, dear Senators! Nothing to see in this disgustingly immoral little corner of the world where I'm building a measly $100 million personal fortune!"

> people who stand to profit from "AI"

Some of them, sure, but that doesn't seem to be true of plenty of signatures to the open letter.

> the contents of this press release focus mostly on actual problems

Given that this is a set of entirely voluntary commitments made by the companies who you had thought were hyping x-risk in order to distract from actual problems... maybe it's worth updating your assessment of what the x-risk thing is about?

> maybe it's worth updating your assessment

Nope. Because I think the White House's press release is expressing the White House's view of what's important. That the White House didn't get distracted by the chaff says nothing about the chaff or those firing it off.

There's nothing in this release that companies didn't agree to as well. Which doesn't prove that they're fundamentally motivated by what's best for humanity but does maybe indicate that it wouldn't be hard for them to just stick to PR about shorter term safety concerns if no one working there (or externally) was genuinely concerned about longer term "x-risk" etc.

I see no reason to think this isn't them sticking to short-term PR concerns. For a while, the tech playbook with regulators is to say vague, positive things, grudgingly agree to some bare minimum, and then mostly ignore or sandbag on their commitments while lobbying aggressively behind the scenes.

Pretending to play along with "requests" to "keep AI safe" while ignoring the harms it will cause in other ways as the companies that own it try and gobble up literally all the money is 100% in line with the Sam Altman style of "I deserve to be the richest motherfucker on the planet" thinking

Do you think AI is capable of gobbling up "literally all the money" for its owners? If so, doesn't that suggest it's kinda dangerous?

FWIW I don't think these voluntary commitments are sufficient or address all of the important harms. But that's different than saying any government action is just "regulatory capture" and an attempt to keep open source models down. I'm only attempting to argue against the latter here, which I'm not sure is where you're coming from.

> Do you think AI is capable of gobbling up "literally all the money" for its owners?

Not particularly without barriers to competition in the space being artificially erected so as to enable that, which is the whole point of the industry-government game of footsie.

You're not the commenter I was addressing, but it sounds like your position is: AI will eat the entire economy but that's going to go fine as long as it's entirely unregulated so that the magic of the free market can fix any problems. Is that right? Or maybe you're not endorsing "literally all" in the literally-literally sense, in which case it would be helpful to spell out what value you think AI will capture (for monopolists or otherwise).

>AI is capable of gobbling up "literally all the money" for its owners?

No, I think wealthy and capital rich companies can leverage AI to extract value from places that already extract value simply by underpaying people and use stupid rhetoric and other methods that they are very familiar with to continue buying up basically everything as most normal people struggle to survive.

I explicitly do not think "AI" or even AGI has any inherent danger in itself, and only has danger in the same way any automation has in a capitalist system that also gives richer people more power in the justice system and the political system: Rich will get richer by squeezing the non-rich even harder, while politicians don't care because most of them genuinely believe in capitalism as an unabashed and incorruptible good and the misinformation and discourse control that passable bullshit generated with a single keystroke grants them way more power

Personally I don't think AI is very likely to destroy humanity in the next couple of decades. I also don't think that the Ukraine war is very likely to end in a global thermonuclear exchange. But I don't think worrying about nuclear war is insanity. What strikes me as insane in the Ukraine case, or at the very least dangerously irrational, is calling for a no-fly zone without thinking about the consequences. And I feel similarly about attitudes towards AI...

At the same time, I think it's pretty clear that a no fly zone could have been done with few American casualties, and Putin would still have no ability to respond because they physically cannot. Putin, and more importantly all the rich assholes under him who like being rich assholes, don't like the idea of being rich assholes in a post nuclear exchange Russia, will likely not hit the button. Add to that the likelihood that most of the Nukes would not go off, or blow up on the launch pad even (Most of Russia's nukes are liquid fueled ICBMs, which are terrible in terms of staying reliable for cheap, and Russia spends less on it's entire military than the US spends on just it's solid fueled missiles). Russia has had at least one nuclear test fail since the war started.

We have been holding back equipment because "what if we need it" (to fight who?), or "but they'll retaliate!" (with the one tank they could afford to spare for the parade?) or "but it costs so much money" (only when you calculate it with the price we paid in 1980 instead of the negative value these old machines that need to be sold or decommissioned currently have) or "We can't send cluster munitions because the UXO risk!" while every day Russia is still in Ukrainian territory is actual Russians purposely shooting at Ukrainians and RUSSIANS HAVE LITERALLY USED CLUSTER MUNITIONS ON CIVILIAN POPULATIONS!

The actual insanity is sending Ukraine 100 Bradleys instead of 500 and then bitching when their offensive is mediocre.

I don't want to argue about Ukraine in this thread but I guess I do respect the consistency of anyone who says both "eh risking nuclear war is no biggie if the first mechanism for it that occurs to me seems unlikely" and "eh risking losing control of the planet to AI shoggoths is no biggie if..."

AI safety is corporation safety, or government safety, or software safety

AI has the same powers and risks of organizations -- meta/mega human actors.

Corporations are arguably a form of AI, executing on top of human agents and the code of law: https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre...

The difference is that machine learning technology can potentially operates at orders of magnitude of higher speeds, and potentially without humans in the loop. (The threat model is less "flip the on switch and everybody immediately dies"; but "flip the on switch, it works so well it gets woven into our infrastructure", until a critical threshold is met, and some seemingly-innocuous Make Number Go Up algo leads to humanity having a Very Very Bad Day.)

So all the same perverse incentives (orthogonality) of human-org AIs, but iterating thousands or millions of times faster.

Strict regulations comes after lots of people die, not before.

Look at the regulations on nuclear bombs.

People don't even seem to understand that AI is inside of a computer. It's not real.

The whole argument with AI safety seems to be about how AI can say some "harmful misinformation". Ok. I can say harmful misinformation too, and I'm a real person with feelings that can be expressed to other people.

"AI safety" takes a view that people are inherently stupid, that people have no ability for complex thought and critical thinking.

To me this seems like AI companies such as OpenAI want to stop open-source and monopolize AI where you have to have a government certification to create AI models. Plus a bit of paranoia from the totalitarian liberals who only want consensus rather than debate.

At least there are valid concerns for training models on copyrighted works. Maybe we should focus much more on that rather than on "the AI said something that I don't like".