OpenAI's Long-Term AI Risk Team Has Disbanded
wired.com
wired.com
But when you give them a larger remit, and structure teams with some owning "value" and and others essentially owning "risk", the risk teams tend to attract navel-gazers and/or coasters. They wield their authority like a whip without regard for business value.
The problem is the incentives tend to be totally misaligned. Instead the team that ships the "value" also needs to own their own risk management - metrics and counter metrics - with management holding them accountable for striking the balance.
Imagine if vehicle manufacturers[2] split their design and R&D teams into a "make the thing go" team and a "don't kill the passengers" team. Literally noone would think that arrangement made sense.
I can totally see when we are at a state of significant maturity of both AI and AI regulation that you have a special part of your legal team that are specialised in legal/regulatory compliance issues around AI just like companies tend to have specialised data privacy compliance experts. But we're not there yet.
[1] If you're serious about long-term AI risk and alignment research, sponsor some independent academic research that gets published. That way it's arms-length and genuinely credible.
[2] If you like you can maybe mentally exclude Boeing in this.
Rocket caskets. Can't kill someone who is already dead!
2. Boeing is a good and timely example of the consequences of said internal checks and balances collapsing under “value creation” pressure. That was a catastrophic failure which still can’t reasonably be compared to the downside of misaligned AI.
I think you definitely want people who have that responsibility to "wield their authority like a whip without regard for business value".
Now, whether you buy OpenAI's hype about the potential danger (and value) of their products, that's up to you, but when the company says, "We're getting rid of the team that makes sure we don't kill everyone", there is a message being sent. Whether it's "We don't really think our technology is that dangerous (and therefore valuable)" or "We don't really care if we accidentally kill everyone", it's not a good message.
Hard not to imagine a pattern if one considers what they did a few months ago:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/16/openai-quietly-removes-ban-o...
Yeah, the problem (in this outsider's opinion) is that that charter is so ill-defined that it's practically useless, which in turn means that any sufficiently loud voice can apply it to anything. It's practically begging to be used as a whip.
> I think you definitely want people who have that responsibility to "wield their authority like a whip without regard for business value".
No, because without thinking of value, there is no enterprise, and then your mission is impossible. Essentially, it creates an incentive where the best outcome is to destroy the company. And, hey hey, that's kinda what almost happened.
> Whether it's "We don't really think our technology is that dangerous (and therefore valuable)" or "We don't really care if we accidentally kill everyone", it's not a good message.
I don't think it has to be so black-and-white as this. Meta, Microsoft, and Google did the same thing. Instead, those functions have been integrated more closely into the value teams. And I can't imagine Amazon or Oracle ever having those teams in the first place. They likely all realized the same thing: those teams add huge drag without adding measurable business value.
And yes, there are ways to measure the business value of risk management, and weigh against upside value to decide the correct course of actions - it's just that most of those teams in big tech don't actually take a formal "risk management" approach. Instead they pontificate or copy and enforce.
Without them internally, it'll just fall to regulators, which of course is what shareholders want; to privatize upside and socialize downside.
As someone who has scaled orgs from tens to thousands of engineers, I can tell you: you need value teams to own their own risk.
A small, central R&D team may work with management to set the bar, but they can't be responsible for mitigating the risk on the ground - and they shouldn't be led to believe that that is their job. It never works, and creates bad team dynamics. Either the central team goes too far, or they feel ignored. (See: security, compliance.)
In this specific case, though, Sam Altman's narrative is that they created an existential risk to humanity and that the access to it needs to be restricted for others. So which is it?
Anyone who's used their AI and discovered how it ignores instructions and makes things up isn't going to honestly believe it poses an existential threat any time soon. Now they're big enough they can end that charade.
I hope others see that there are two extremely intelligent sides, but one has mega $$ to earn and the other is pleading that there are dangers ahead and not to follow the money and fame.
This is climate change and oil companies all over again, and just like then and now, oil companies are winning.
Fundamentally, many people are the first stage, denial. Staring down our current trajectory of AGI is one of the darkest realities to imagine and that is not pleasant to grapple with.
> A small, central R&D team may work with management to set the bar, but they can't be responsible for mitigating the risk on the ground - and they shouldn't be led to believe that that is their job. It never works, and creates bad team dynamics. Either the central team goes too far, or they feel ignored. (See: security, compliance.)
Most folks who are part of the startup, don't care to stick around for the scale. Different phases of the company tend to attract different types of people.
Not supported by Ilya agreeing with board to fire Sam Altman.
I also think you'll struggle to find a majority of people thinking AI research's "ceiling is proving to be lower than originally hoped", what with 4o, SORA, GPT5 all coming and it's only been 1.5 years since ChatGPT.
The reason you can't "align" AI is because we, as humans on the planet, aren't universally aligned on what "aligned" means.
At best you can align to a particular group of people (a company, a town, a state, a country). But "global alignment" in almost any context just devolves into war or authoritarianism (virtual or actual).
Same thing happening now.
And you don't have to be a doomer screeching about skynet. The web is already piling up with pollutive, procedurally-generated smog.
I'm not catastrophizing; its just that history is the best predictor of the future.
1. Stay just a tiny bit ahead of rivals. It's clear that OpenAI have much much more in the bag than the stuff they're showing. I'm guessing that DARPA/Washington has got them on a pretty tight leash.
2. Drip feed advances to avoid freaking people out. Again while not allowing rivals to upstage them.
3. Try to build a business without hobbling it with ethical considerations (ethics generally don't work well alongside rampant profit goals)
4. Look for opportunities to dominate, before the moat is seriously threatened by open source options like Llama. Meta has already suggested that in 2 months they'll be close to an open source alternative to GPT4o.
5. Hope that whatever alignment structures they've installed hold in place under public stress.
Horrible place to be as a pioneer in a sector which is moving at the speed of light.
We're on a runaway Moloch train, just gotta hang on!
There are huge risks to AI today in terms of upheaval to economies and harms to individuals and minorities but they need to be tackled by carefully designed legislation, focused on real harms, like the EU AI legislation.
Then that imposes very specific obligations that every AI product must meet.
It's both better targeted, has wider impact across the industry, and probably allows moving faster in terms of tech.
Two years ago, you wouldn't have believed it if someone had promised results like we have now. AGI can appear suddenly, or even decades later. But if nobody pays attention to it, we will definitely notice it too late if it happens.
* Stealth ads in the model output
* Sale of user data to databrokers
* Injection into otherwise useful apps to juice the usage numbers.
"The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI..."
More nonsense.
"...that's safe and beneficial."
Go on...
"Two researchers on the team, Leopold Aschenbrenner and Pavel Izmailov, were dismissed for leaking company secrets..."
The firm is obviously out of control according to first principles, so any claim of responsibility in context is moot.
When management are openly this screwed up in their internal governance, there's no reason to believe anything else they say about their intentions. The disbanding of the "superalignment" team is a simple public admission the firm has no idea what they are doing.
As to the hype-mongering of the article, replace the string "AGI" everywhere it appears with "sentient-nuclear-bomb": how would you feel about this article?
You might want to see the bomb!
But all you'll find is a chatbot.
—
Bomb#20: You are false data.
Sgt. Pinback: Hmmm?
Bomb#20: Therefore I shall ignore you.
Sgt. Pinback: Hello... bomb?
Bomb#20: False data can act only as a distraction. Therefore, I shall refuse to perceive.
Sgt. Pinback: Hey, bomb?
Bomb#20: The only thing that exists is myself.
Sgt. Pinback: Snap out of it, bomb.
Bomb#20: In the beginning, there was darkness. And the darkness was without form, and void.
Boiler: What the hell is he talking about?
Bomb#20: And in addition to the darkness there was also me. And I moved upon the face of the darkness.
AFAIK no consensus on what it means to think has developed past Turing's above point, and the "Imitation Game," a.k.a "Turing Test," which was Turing's throwing up his hands at the idea of thinking machines, is today's de facto standard for machine intelligence.
IOW a machine thinks if you think it does.
And by this definition the Turing Test test was passed by Weizenbaum's "Eliza" chatbot in the mid 60s.
Modern chatbots have been refined a lot since, and can accommodate far more sophisticated forms of interrogation, but their limits are still overwhelming if not obvious to the uninitiated.
A crucial next measure of an AGI must be attended by the realization that it's unethical to delete it, or maybe even reset it, or turn it off. We are completely unprepared for such an eventuality, so recourse to pragmatism will demand that no transformer technology can be defined as intelligent in any human sense. It will always regarded as a simulation or robot.
For me the interesting test of computer intelligence would be if it can replace us in the sense that at the moment if all humans disappeared ChatGPT and the like would stop because there would be no electricity but at some point maybe intelligent robots will be able to do that stuff and go on without us. That's kind of what I think of as AGI rather than the Turing stuff. I guess you could call it the computers don't need us point. I'm not sure how far in the future it is. A decade or two?
You have just echoed Turing from his seminal paper without adding any further observation.
> ...you are overestimating the ethics of a species that exploits or eats most other species...
Life would not exist without consumption of other life. Ethicists are untroubled by this. But they are troubled by conduct towards people and animals.
If the conventional measure of an artificial intelligence is in terms of a general inability to tell computers and humans apart, then ethics enters the field at such point: Once you can't tell, ethically you are required to extend the same protections to the AI construct as offered to a person.
To clarify my previous point: pragmatic orientation towards AI technology will enforce a distinction through definition: the Turing test will become re-interpreted as the measure by which machines are reliably distinguished from people, not a measure of whence they surpass people.
To rephrase the central point of Turing's thought experiment: the question of whether machines think is meaningless so as to not merit further discussion because we lack sufficient formal definition of "machine" and "thought."
> ...the computers don't need us point...
I see no reason to expect this at any point, ever. Whatever you are implying as "computers" and "us" with your conjecture of "need" is so detached from today's notions of life is also meaningless. Putting a timeframe on the meaningless is pointless.
> ...go on without us...
This is a loopy conjecture about a new form of life which emerges-from-and-transcends humanity, presumably to the ultimate point of obviating humanity. Ok, so "imagine a world without humanity." Sure, who's doing the imagining? It's absurd.
Turing's point was we lack the vocabulary to discuss these matters, so he offered an approximation with a overtly stated expectation that by about this time (50 or so years from the time of his paper) technology for simulating thought would be sufficiently advanced as to demand a new vocabulary. And here we are.
If you contribution is merely recapitulation of Turing's precept's from decades ago, you're a bit late to the imitation game.
Omar, portrayed by Michael K. Williams written by Ed Burns and David Chase.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158403/openai...
I believe you mean David Simon, not David Chase.
But for a product-focused LLM shop trying to infuse into everything, it makes sense to tone down the hype.
Do you think this is a coherent world view? Compared to the other one staring you in the face? I'll leave it to the reader whether they want to believe this conspiratorial take in line with profit-motive instead of the scientists saying:
“Currently, we don't have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue.”
[0] https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=beiWcokAAAAJ&hl=...
The flaw is in your quote: there is no "super-intelligent AI". We don't have AGI, and given they were coming out with this a few years ago (GPT2?) it's laughable.
They're getting way ahead of themselves.
We don't have 2 degrees Celsius warming either. Should we do nothing to change course or prepare? Any thinker worth their salt knows you need to plan ahead not react to things as they come and leave to chance that you then may not be able to.
That is the simplest explanation, it's a tale as old as time. And is fundamentally explained by a very plausible pivot from "World changing general purpose AI - believe me it's real" to "world changing LLM integration and innovation shop".
We could always stop paying for the servers, or their electricity.
I think we'll have AGI soon but it won't be that much threat to the world.
This is satire, right? No one saying this or "off button" has thought this difficult problem through longer than 30 minutes.
https://youtu.be/_8q9bjNHeSo?si=a7PAHtiuDIAL2uQD&t=4817
"Can we just turn it off?"
"It has thought of that. It will not give you a sign that makes you want to turn it off before it is too late to do that."
Jan Leike's OpenAI departure statement
Perhaps the mental model I should use is academic security researchers. Did they publish?