"how someone so smart can be so naive"
Do you really think Ilya has not thought deeply about each and every one of your points here? There's plenty of answers to your criticisms if you look around instead of attacking.
Do you really think Ilya has not thought deeply about each and every one of your points here? There's plenty of answers to your criticisms if you look around instead of attacking.
Ilya has an exceptional ability extrapolate into the future from current technology. Their assessment of the eventual significance of AI is likely very correct. They should then understand that there will not be universal governance of AI. It’s not a nuclear bomb. It doesn’t rely on controlled access to difficult to acquire materials. It is information. It cannot be controlled forever. It will not be limited to nation states, but deployed - easily - by corporations, political action groups, governments, and terrorist groups alike.
If Ilya wants to make something that is guaranteed to avoid say curse words and be incapable of generating porn, then sure. They can probably achieve that. But there is this naive, and in all honesty, deceptive, framing that any amount of research, effort, or regulation will establish an airtight seal to prevent AI for being used in incredibly malicious ways.
Most of all because the most likely and fundamentally disruptive near term weaponization of AI is going to be amplification of disinformation campaigns - and it will be incredibly effective. You don’t need to build a bomb to dismantle democracy. You can simply convince its populace to install an autocrat favorable to your cause.
It is as naive as it gets. Ilya is an academic and sees a very real and very challenging academic problem, but all conversations in this space ignore the reality that knowledge of how to build AI safely will be very intentionally disregarded by those with an incentive to build AI unsafely.
If their assessment of the eventual significance of AI is correct like you say, then what would be your suggested course of action to minimize risk of harm?
And then what would true success look like? Do we dream of a global governance, where Ilya’s recommendations are adopted by utopian global convention? Where Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping agree this is for the best interest of humanity, and follow through without surreptitious intent? Where in countries that do agree this means that certain aspects of AI research are now illegal?
In my honest opinion, the only answer I see here is to assume that malicious AI will be ubiquitous in the very near future, to society-dismantling levels. The cat is already out of the bag, and the way forward is not figuring out how to make all the other AIs safe, but figuring out how to combat the dangerous ones. That is truly the hard, important problem we could use top minds like Ilya’s to tackle.
It wouldn't prevent war between nation-states, but that's a separate problem to solve - the solutions to war are orthogonal to the solutions to individual gun violence, and both are worthy of being addressed.
This is clearly the end state of this race, observable in nature, and very likely understood by Ilya. Just like OpenAI's origins, they will aim to create good-to-extinguish-bad ASI, but whatever unipolar outcome is achieved, the creators will fail to harness and enslave something that is far beyond our cognition. We will be ants in the dirt in the way of Google's next data center.
But it's also a worst-case interpretation of motives and intent.
If you take that webpage for what it is - a marketing pitch - then it's fine.
Companies use superlatives all the time when they're looking to generate buzz and attract talent.