The cost of planning an assassination is not the same thing as the cost (and risk) of carrying out an assassination, what a stupid take.
As for cost and risk -- ask GPT-5 how to minimize it. As Nathan said in his thread, it's not about this generation, it's about the next generation of models.
A key question is whether the control problem gets more difficult as the model gets stronger. GPT-4 appears to be self-aware and passing the mirror test: https://nitter.net/AISafetyMemes/status/1729206394547581168#...
I really don't know how to interpret that link, but I think there is a lot we don't understand which is going on in those billions of parameters. Understanding it fully might be just as hard as understanding the human brain.
I'm concerned that at some point in the training process, we will stumble across a subset of parameters which are both self-aware and self-interested, too. There are a lot of self-interested people in the world. It wouldn't be surprising if the AI learns to do the sort of internal computation that a self-interested person's brain does -- perhaps just to make predictions about the actions of self-interested people, at first. From there it could be a small jump to computations which are able to manipulate the model's training process in order to achieve self-preservation. (Presumably, the data which the model is trained on includes explanations of "gradient descent" and related concepts.)
This might sound far-fetched by the standard of the current model generation. But we're talking about future generations of models here, which almost by definition will exhibit more powerful intelligence and manifest it in new unexpected ways. "The model will be much more powerful, but also unable to understand itself, self-interest, or gradient descent" doesn't quite compute.
And everything LLM can come up with will be exactly the same information you can find in any fiction detective book or TV series about crime. Yeah very very dumb criminal can certainly benefit from it, but he can as well go on 4chan and ask about assassination there. Or on some detective book discussion club or forum.
As Nathan states:
>And further, I argued that the Red Team project that I participated in did not suggest that they were on-track to achieve the level of control needed
>Without safety advances, I warned that the next generation of models might very well be too dangerous to release
Seems like each generation of models is getting more capable of thinking, beyond just regurgitating.
You don't have bunch of cold blood killers going around not just because police is so good and killers are dumb and need AI help. It's because you live in functioning state where society have enough resources so people happy enough to instead go and kill each other in Counter Strike or Fortnite.
I totally agree that AGI could be a dangerous tech, but it's will require autonomity where it can manipulate real world. So far GPT with API access is very far from that point.
The danger also doesn't need to be an AI generating code to hack the Gibson. It could also be things like "how do I manipulate someone to do something". Asking an AI for a marketing campaign isn't necessarily amoral. Asking it how to best harass someone into committing self-harm is.
Most of us don't want to.
Most of those who do, don't know enough to actually do it.
Sometimes such people get into power, and they use new inventions like the then-new-pesticide Zyklon B to industrialise killing.
Last year an AI found 40k novel chemical agents, and because they're novel, the agencies that would normally stop bad actors from getting dangerous substances, would generally not notice the problem.
LLMs can read research papers and write code. A sufficiently capable LLM can recreate that chemical discovery AI.
The only reasons I'm even willing to list this chain, is that the researchers behind that chemical AI have spent most of the intervening time making those agencies aware of the situation, and I expect the agencies to be ready before a future LLM reaches the threshold for reproducing that work.
Again difficulty of production of poisons and chemicals it's not what prevent mass murdering around the globe.
Three letter agencies knowing who's buying a suspicious quantity from the list of known precursors, that stops quite a lot of the others.
AI in general reduces cost and complexity, that's kind of the point of having it. (For example, a chemistry degree is expensive in both time and money). Right now using an LLM[0] to decide what to get and how to use it is almost certainly more dangerous for the user than anyone else — but this is a moving goal, and the question there has to be "how to we delay this capability for as long as possible, and at the same time how do we prepare to defend against the capability when it does arrive?"
[0] I really hope that includes even GPT-4 before the red-teaming efforts to make it not give detailed instructions for how to cause harm