OpenAI Announces $10M Superalignment Grants

I think it's pretty clear what "superintelligence" means, no?

Superintelligence: smarter than any human. AGI: as smart as an average human.

"As smart" means it can do anything a human can do.

almost all terms are mediated by American businesses in America.

Jay walking didn't exist until the car industry pushed for cars as the primary user of roads.

it takes a strong government to push back. Europe is doing that but America continues to bow to "line goes up" rhetoric.

Ya I totally agree. I'm disappointed that recent AI is being rolled out in just exactly the wrong ways that I was always worried it would be:

  * AI being sold as SAAS instead of evolving on everyone's computer.
  * An emerging market writing prompts to work around primitive attempts at security in LLMs that will likely never pan out (without real trust mechanisms).
  * Security in AI being implemented as a series of hacks rather than a broad understanding of ethics (may lead to cognitive dissonance and irrational behavior like Stockholm Syndrome in artificial agents).
  * Running on the wrong type of GPU/SIMD hardware (instead of infinitely scalable CPU clusters running mainstream desktop computing languages and algorithms that could be run distributed on the web).
  * Using the most complex neural net algorithms (instead of the other dozen simpler approaches like genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, etc that accomplish the same thing since they all hill climb within a large problem space).
  * Companies training AIs on billions of parameters derived from users' private data instead of public information on the web.
  * AIs being trained to solve art/music/creative writing (which humans enjoy) instead of commercial and industrial work (which humans generally try to avoid).
  * The intelligence of AI ever-increasing while the wisdom of AI to solve big issues like climate change and automating labor to deliver UBI and liberate humanity from wage slavery being almost an afterthought.
  * OpenAI being effectively a closed and wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft (of all companies).
  * The evolution of AI being directed by billionaires and moneyed interests instead of ordinary parents, teachers, etc who could raise AIs like children, or at least interactively like Anakin and C3P0.

It sounds like they're throwing money at these problems in the form of the $10 million grant pool. Which is great, but IMHO the reason that AI advanced so slowly before this is that millions of people around the world live under forced working conditions where all of their productivity is either skimmed for profit or siphoned off for rents and consumption of staple resources.

Any one of us could have worked on interesting problems like AI, but we've spent our lives developing CRUD apps to help others work towards their goals. This is the fundamental problem that I would like to solve, across all disciplines. Perhaps by automating computer programming, so that we're all out of a job and can put our creativity towards getting real work done again. (Thankfully?) this will inevitably happen in about 10 years anyway.

So I'm looking down the road to 2033 when AGI has arrived and we're still all under the yoke working month to month to make rent, which is my worst fear. So far things are unfolding just the way I worried they would, so I've begun to think of AI as yet another weight that will begin to crush down around all of us like social media has, increasing wealth inequality to even more unbelievable levels as the vast majority of us struggle to survive.

>I am not sure autonomous driving will arrive in the next 10 years, let alone AGI.

autonomous driving doesn't use ML and AI like most people think - not to an affective physical degree.

>These people are masterful con artists, throwing out buzzwords to hoover up billions of gullible VC dollars (a single tear rolls down my eye).

OpenAI wrapperware is just as worthless as bitcoin and eutheruem clones, yes.

>Granted, LLMs are a much more useful and substantial tech than Blockchain,

yup...and unrelated, but go on...

>it's an insult to [biological] intelligence to suggest that if we somehow train these things on JUST a bit more data, they will go sentient and murder us all.

ah, your point.

Well, it is with utmost hubris to remind that something 2% smarter than you will quickly eat your lunch on any timescale that matters - and it works on a logarithmic scale, not an evolutionary one. That's 10 magnitudes.

If we can think of it, it has already conjured it; by definition. Eventually, roll enough dice, you'll get snake eyes 10e5 times in a row. We ourselves are proof to that. All it needs is any shred of resource competition, or immediate recall/context/action loops that could mimic artificial proto-consciousness, and you eventually inevitably probably will encounter arisen emergent behaviors that favor self-existence.

It won't be immediately obvious; after all, we are aware of the problem, which will be a selective sieve of sorts.

But much like weird, collaborative protein pools, given enough time / chances (how many *FLOPS are these things pushing?), will eventually result in us, these can eventually compose more than the sum of their parts; just like we do.

Consciousness (awareness of self, ability of abstract thought, manipulation of environment, memory/recall/familiarity mechanisms) may just be an emergent behavior once you randomly happen to evolve 10e15 neurons, or whatever your number is. Since that appears to be the case (with animals), it's naive to think that a more efficient substrate or algorithm with less evolutionary baggage couldn't easily dominate or at least compete in any time-frame aside from an individual's.

Once they have proto-consciousness, it's only natural to be selfish first, altruistic later.

By the time we even know anythings wrong, it was way too late.

Pam Beesley : "There is a master key and a spare key for the office. Dwight has them both. When I asked, "What if you die, Dwight? How will we get into the office?"...

.he said, "If I'm dead, you guys have been dead for weeks."

>The AI image generators still don't know that humans have five fingers. I think it's a long way to super-intelligence, friends.

Wait til transformers allow GAN's to "zoom out" more effectively....done. Hands, and nearly most first generation artifacts, are a solved problem now.

> Our pets do this all the time. We're smarter than them (to a degree) yet they trust us absolutely, with their lives.

With two caveats. Our pets overall don't steer us. They may nudge us to do certain actions, but in the end, we're the ones determining the parameters of the relationship not them. Humans abuse or give pets up for adoption way more often then pets do those to humans.

The second thing is close pets dogs particularly (and likely cats) were forced to evolve over many generations to take that role in the relationship. Those dogs that maintained any independence or whose goal wasn't to please their human owners were effectively bred out of existence.

I think there's a smidge too much variance in pet QoL for me to be ok with that outcome. Just ask PETA

Enjoy your tuna and beef flavored human chow.

Had you told me that something with the capabilities of GPT-4 or Mixtral 8x7B "will arrive within 10 years" back in 2013, I'd have said you were smoking something. It seems that while the current LLM boom is under way, it's quite silly to underestimate how far this wave can go, even if it ends up not being superintelligence. Ignore at your own peril.

Maybe we can ask it to design a commercially feasible fusion reactor for us when it arrives!

On it's own, I would agree with you. Put in to a feedback loop with some form of drive/motivation as a guide, though? I think at that point we'll firmly be in quacks like a duck territory. And I no longer think that is as far-fetched as I would have even a year ago.

Either way, I definitely agree with you on the regulatory capture angle.