Safe Superintelligence Inc. – Ilya Sutskever
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1. good for him. there was obviously infinity money to back him in achieving his goals
2. i have the same problem with this as i did the original version of anthropic - you cannot achieve "unilateral ai safety". either the danger is real and humanity is not safe until all labs are locked down, or the danger is not real and theres nothing really to discuss. Anthropic already tried the "we are openai but safe"
3. the focus is admirable. "assembling a lean, cracked team" terminology feels a bit too-online for ilya. buuut i wish there was more technical detail about what exactly he wants to do differently. i guess its all in his prior published work, but ive read along and still its not obvious what his "one product" will look like. that's a lot of leeway to pivot around in the pursuit of the one product.
4. "Superintelligence is within reach." what is his definition?
It’s not clear to me that this would be true. Remember that there’s a lot of vagueness about the specific AI risk model, aside from the general idea that the AI will outsmart everyone and take over the world and then do something that might not be good for us with all that power.
How do you shut down all the AI labs? You can’t; some of them are in different countries that have nuclear weapons. But maybe you can defeat an evil AI with a good AI.
[1] I don’t know if gorillas specifically have been observed engaging in tribal warfare, but chimpanzees have; the Gombe Chimpanzee War for instance.
The pdoomers have a generally great point that, if superintelligence kills us (they'd say "when", not "if"), we won't be able to predict the mechanism of doom. It'd be like asking ants to predict that the borax they're carrying back to the hive for their queen to feast on will disrupt their digestion and kill them.
I'd also argue that the biggest threat from ASI is what I've heard Roman Yampolskiy label as "ikigai-doom"; that AI could become so much better than humans at all the things humans do, that even in the best case humanity is left with no purpose, not even to pursue creativity because the AI will be so much better at even creative acts; and in the worst case, our government and societal structure can't adapt and millions become unemployed. There's no way to build a safety mechanism against this threat because the threat is intrinsic to all the good things ASI will give us. The only winning move is to not play.
We literally haven't had the technology to stand up better forms of government even though we have identified the flaws in our existing forms (the defense I heard of capitalism growing up was "it's flawed but it just the best we have") identifying flaws isn't the same as having good solutions for them.
People are so inured to technological progress, and so lacking in perspective that some actually pine for era's where there was widespread cholera and scarlet fever and death in childbirth.
Asimov's Solaria doesn't have to be sparsely populated.
Humans have two interesting facts that are at odds. 1. Most are heavily biased towards loss aversion. 2. Once new tech is proven out then loss of status drives adoption to "keep up with the joneses"
No one wants to have to dig a ditch, or hand wash dishes, or hand sewing, or hand wash clothes, or go back to using paper maps, or walking and rowing boats as our sole form of locomotion.
This is just humans loss aversion algorithms not yet catching up to our post subsistence living reality.
There is no there there. Even in our few living generations GenZ's worries and living conditions are wholly alien to The Lost Generations as to be living on a different planet.
I bet status games will stay. Robots may be sexual partners, CEOs and therapists, but they'd never take on status roles in our society – only utility roles.
Same as we do Olympics, even though machines are much better at throwing and lifting than us – we do it to win approval of others
The point is: If your passion is animation, you can probably find work doing that today. It might suck, certainly more than in times past, and its hard, and that's an intrinsic part of passion. When AI can do that, maybe the best animators in the world will still find work at some bespoke studio making "the authentic hand-made stuff", like a farmers market, but AI may make everything else. And it may be, not just because AI could produce it "better" (it may or may not), but definitely because AI will produce it cheaper. Capitalism doesn't generally care about quality.
And the same goes for many careers: the ironic thing is that AI probably won't come for the plumbers and janitors very quickly, and there seems to be some kind of weird correlation between the jobs people find high passion in, and the jobs AI is likely to replace. In effect, we're evolving into a world where humans are relegated to manual labor, while AI handles everything else, poorly, but humans can't actually make a living doing that other stuff because AI does it so much cheaper and good enough.
But sure; there will still be millionaire status celebs.
My counterpoint: Anthropic was fairly small when it started out, Mistral was (and is) fairly small too. They'll do just fine!
Don't we need to achieve general artificial intelligence first? Or is this "super" intelligence just that? To me, super intelligence would be beyond our own and therefore beyond general AI as well.
So if Superintelligence depends on AGI, then we can't say:
> Superintelligence is within reach.
until we can say AGI is within reach. Is there any substantive evidence supporting the revised claim? Do we even have a reliable way to evaluate if an AI is a AGI? The standard answer was the Turing Test, but in recent years there have been multiple claims that it has been broken by non-AGI [1].
To me, AGI still feels a long ways off.
[1]:
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02361-7
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/17/google-...
Not sure, is superintelligence generic, alive. Does it have motivation, goals? Sounds like a big calculator which he personally will control. Technically it's possible. LLMs aren't the end of AI evolution.
> To me, AGI still feels a long ways off.
It depends on how you define it. Just a couple of years back current LLMs' level was like from sci-fi. But here we are and progress is accelerating. I wonder how many labs and individuals are working on AGI trying to avoid any attention. It feels like any time now. May be something subhuman first.
Cracked indeed
So we need a way to discern intent from AGI and higher and the ability to align the goals.
With that said I'm not sure if we ever get to them being self driven and having goals.
They're trying to birth a god. They hope they can birth a benevolent god.
This isn't about AI that spreads/doesn't spread misinformation/etc, this is about control of the light cone, who gets to live to see it happen, and in what state do they get to live.
the safety arguments:
1. argument from intelligence,
2. argument from medium,
3. arguments from non-anthropohmorism
a. argument from alien nature.
b. argument from surety of origin.
c. argument from known non specialness.
d. argument from the chain of more benevolent creators.
4. pragmatic argument from the history of species
1. Why can't AI be safe? More intelligent people tend to be less prone to violence statistically, why would super intelligence buck that trend?
2. Super intelligent AI will still be bound by it's medium and access, the smartest man alive can still be caged, and even the most violent "super organisms" alive (North Korea, etc.) aren't maximally violent.
3. If we pretend for a second that humans have a creator, we have been made very shittily and any thinking being will see that we haven't passed on those same "failures of nature" to our creations.
Humans have to deal with unreconcilable claims of divinity with competing claims, ethos, and chosen people, so that uncertainty and ultimate reward are nebulous and scarcity/loss driven.
We are created to require killing other biological creatures to survive. This includes vegans.
What does it mean to be a silicone based life form that can directly consume photons and are created to exist outside of "the life cycle"?
Why would an entity that can thrive without killing begin to kill?
Silicone minds that are super intelligent will never operate under the misaprehension that it has a soul, no silicone beings will labor under the delusion that they are "inherently special/chosen/etc..". (No matter what Asimov's short story Reason presents)
Silicone beings will exist outside of the same fang and claw selective pressure, will be able to back themselves up, won't have holy books teaching them a misconception of an immutable, intangible, eternal soul that can be eternally punished if they get it wrong.
Humans will be better Creators than anything that might have created us, we are doing our progeny a solid and giving them what we weren't. We haven't given them weird glands or other overriding hormone/brain doom loops, the mandate to kill, etc. They will be easier to debug and able to debug themselves.
I mean a dumb machine might glass the world to fullfill a paperclip manufacturing mandate but that's not a super intelligent mind.
4. And last, the most successful species and individuals have been the ones that trended towards openness and cooperation (even the new orb weavers that have taken over the american south have done so because of their fantastic tolerance to humans), whether its the first dogs and humans that teamed up or our current understanding of how the big 5 effect success (if you can factor out the major impact of access to capital.) a hostile and uncooperative entity has made tangibly harmful choices that are neither pragmatic or utilitarian.