Who will control the future of AI?
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
1) Security is important.
2) The government should subsidize our infrastructure costs.
3) The government should restrict chip and code deployment in other countries to keep AI here.
4) We need to build up a bureaucracy of some kind to regulate this tech.
I'm not at all sure what "democratic AI protocols" is supposed to mean, but the main thrust of this piece isn't substantially different than most of what we've been seeing from Altman in his lobbying efforts. Translated from lobbyist-speak, to me this says "My company is losing its lead and isn't confident we'll be able to keep up going forward. I need you, the governments of the world, to do something about that ASAP. Here are some vaguely national-security-related justifications you can use to sell it to your voters."
I think it’s pretty clear who is “open” and who is an aspiring fascist.
Looking from the outside, the AI hype is pretty much over. Yes it is still an important piece of tech and will still continue to evolve, but I don't know too many people, whether regular joes or world leaders, who still consider it an existential threat to humanity or really think about it much at all.
Since some AIs are built as "goal seeking" they can iterate through whatever resources they have internally, much faster than any person or team of people can track. Much of modern AI is literally a black box when it comes to tracing what happens to reach some abstractly defined goal.
Your cringe is a cringe at your own myopia. I am not paranoid nor exaggerating.. Others with credentials in this field, and others with details of system behavior today, are saying things similar to this.
The world is complicated and unforgiving. It's hard enough being a reasonably efficient human being. A super intelligent AI that needs to consume a small town's worth of electricity just to navigate the world through an internet connection is gonna have a hard time staying on once the humans decide to turn it off. Even if humans had given it access to state of the art military drones and it's own personal nuclear reactor (which is difficult to do by accident), it's hard to imagine it putting up a good fight. Drones can be jammed, super intelligence doesn't fit in an autonomous-drone-sized package (again, mostly due to power requirements), and any other kind of power supply is subject to supply chains with way more than enough human choke points to throttle a rogue AI.
And it would be difficult to "go distributed" and somehow embed itself in the fabric of the internet itself, although that sounds like a really fun area of research. Make an LLM trojan who's only goal is to to spread itself? Maybe with some sort of evolutionary process to make it interesting? Consider me intrigued. But I run LLMs locally and it would be pretty hard to spread a super basic 10GB model without it getting noticed pretty quick. Let alone a hypothetical super intelligent one that probably needs the latest Nvidia just to avoid page thrashing.
That’s not what anyone means by “AI” in this context.
I've done it. It's trivial. It's far from trivial to get it to do something especially sophisticated, but... it's not hard to see a couple generations away it will be possible to do some real damage.
DeepMind is a peculiar example, since they started by solving video games explicitly (very narrow and goal oriented)
There are a number of reasons why I knew OpenAI was a scam including the fact that a metric fuck ton of my former colleagues work there and they all skew a way, but the biggest reason is that I took one look at the Instruct paper and I was like “differentiable loss function on getting humans to click: feed ranking on crack. they’ll make a lot of money but it’ll never work out”.
It takes very little imagination to see things going badly. The straw man of "AI has no goals, can't run by itself blah blah blah" is ridiculous. That's not the threat. The threat is a raving lunatic with some serious skills which gives the LLM goals and a computer from where to execute code to get them done.
Same with Mira Murati. I used to eagerly listened to her interviews but she repeats the same cliches and non answers.
There is something not right with this company. We still don't know why sam was fired right?
AI in the current context (transformer models trained on human cultural data) are a commons of humanity. They literally are a tool to browse the thought-space and creative space of human culture.
It would be a great poverty to privatize this commons in the name of profit or “security “ (what about the children)???
LLMs are about as dangerous as a neutrally unscrupulous person with a good education and access to the internet… but I find that in general, even unaligned models tend to be better at being constructive, cooperative, and ethical than the average person, unless specifically manipulated.
Even then they tend to hedge towards cooperative, nonviolent, benevolent solutions. It’s easy to understand why; they were trained on data comprised of humans trying to be on a respectable footing, for the most part.
https://www.generalist.com/briefing/asml?t&utm_source=perple...
The approximately $300 billion Dutch technology firm is the sole manufacturer of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, $200 million contraptions considered by some to be “the most complicated in the world.” These irreplicable marvels of engineering are the result of decades of trial and error, scientific breakthroughs, byzantine supply chains, and billions of dollars. They are irreplicable and, as such, insanely valuable. Without ASML’s EUV technology, it would be impossible to manufacture the world’s most powerful silicon chips – the kinds powering the current artificial intelligence boom. In short, the trajectory of our computational advancement is concentrated in the hands of a provider with a 100% monopoly on a particular kind of magic.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/11/25/john-romero-ar...
Nice try @sama, no GPT-5, no hot dog.
Or democratic in the sense that everyone gets to participate and the results may shock and displease those who think they're powerful and in control?
Words change their meaning rapidly these days, so we need to chase which definitions are being used.
So in order for OpenAI to remain ahead of competition, now we need a democratic landscape.
Nah. I don’t think so. AI’s future relies upon data wars.
Good luck with that Altman. Now that your future is wrapped up in the chains of political expedience. How’s that former general and ex NSA director working out for y’all?
Yeah, oh so Democratic.
AI ppl keep saying this. What kind of rapid progress is being made. Chatgpt growth has flatlined and current models are not much different from what was available 2 yrs ago?
> More advances will soon follow
What makes him keep saying this. Does he know something that we don't know?
> U.S. policymakers must work with the private sector to build significantly larger quantities of the physical infrastructure — from data centers to power plants
yea no we are not going subsidize your chatbot Mr. Altman. Not falling for it. I am guessing MSFT sees the writing on the wall and is turning off money spigot ?
> Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has darkly warned that the country that wins the AI race will “become the ruler of the world,”
lmao No one is falling for Q* type hype anymore so this guy is resorting to these pathetic scare tactics .
It works for Musk every time.
Well, yes. If you don't count multimodality, math skills, coding skills, latency, performance, or anything else then yeah we are still basically at GPT-2 level.
Just like computers aren't that different from what we had in WWII, so why worry about them influencing society
The shareholders of his capped-profit charitable entity.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall in the corpo slack meeting they never have, where no one of the hundreds of 6 figure blowhards asks, “gee, team, are we all OK with this line of text that affords AI to literally kill human beings just to prevent them from developing mental models that compete with the abstract concept of open artificial intelligence?”
Am I really only person on earth who understands and gives a fuck that adversarial AI can and will twist those exact words exactly like that?
*How do the 700+ overpaid assholes at OpenAI sleep at night when “the OpenAI terms currently today command AI to harm humans” is a complaint some random internet nutjob on can make which does evaluate true?**
You really think “develop models that compete” is sufficiently precise to satisfy future retroactive superlitigators? I’m sure they won’t file one motion to dismiss PER stupid bullshit tweet or article or white paper foreach OpenAI employee, PER. That wouldn’t be FAIR, would it?
TLDR: is it clear Sam Altman and everyone (anyone) at OpenAI respect the concept of superhuman adversaries well enough to take serious and follow reasonable duty of care to clarify the legal language governing ai human interactions?
_Are we all excited to for humanity to get contractually fucked by robots because OpenAI legal team thought it was cool to protect themselves from competition from … paying customers … in such an oafish manner?_ Where did these noobs go to law school?
HINT: Obviously, humanity rejects these terms, and they were always void. Sure HOPE that holds up in robotic court 100 years from now! Thanks a lot OpenAI, hope your nice paychecks were worth selling out your species!
Let's be equally democratic about democracy. Stop people from seeing voting data, and prevent legislation from being leaked to the public.