All this "AI safety" is purely moat-building for the likes of OpenAI et. al. to prevent upstarts like DeepSeek.
LLMs will not get us to AGI. Not even close. Altman talking about this danger is like Musk talking about driverless taxis.
LLMs will not get us to AGI. Not even close. Altman talking about this danger is like Musk talking about driverless taxis.
Don't get me wrong, they are impressive. I can see LLM's eventually enabling people to be 10x more productive in jobs that interact with a computer all day.
This is a big part of it, and you can get others to do it for you.
It's like the drain cleaner sold in an extra bag. Obviously it must be the best, it's so scary they have to put it in a bag!
I doubt this. Productivity is gained through experience and expertise. If you don't know what you don't know than the LLM is perfectly useless to you.
Seems like we're splitting hairs a bit here.
Looks like it's still in the works. Sometimes when technologists promise something their timelines end up being overly optimistic. I'm sure this isn't news to you.
By your language and past commentary though this seems like the kind of thing which elicits a pretty emotional response from you, so I'm not sure this would be a productive conversation either way.
Semi-autonomous vehicles are impressive for the fact that one driver can now scale well beyond a single vehicle. Fully-autonomous vehicles are impressive because they can scale limitlessly. The former is evolutionary, the latter is revolutionary.
This seems like such an odd thing to expect will just "happen". Any other world-changing or impressive tech I'm familiar with has evolved to its current state over time, it's not like when Jobs announced the iPhone and changed the game there wasn't decades of mobile computing whose shoulders it stood on. Are you talking about something like crypto?
It's admittedly a bit confusing what you're asking for here.
Modern AI safety originated with people like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, the LessWrong/rationality movement etc.
They very much were not just talking about it only to build moats for OpenAI. For one thing, OpenAI didn't exist at the time, AI was not anywhere close to where it is today, and almost everyone thought their arguments were ridiculous.
You might not agree with them, but you can't simply dismiss their arguments as only being there to prop up the existing AI players, that's wrong and disingenuous.
AGI is a meaningless term. The LLM architecture has shown promise in every single domain once used for perceptron neural networks. By all accounts on those things that fit its 'senses' the LLMs are significantly smarter than the average human being.
Same with killer robots (or whatever it is people are afraid of when they talk about "AI safety"). As long as we can control who they kill, when, and why, there's no real difference with any other weapon system. If that control is even slightly in doubt: it's not fit for service.
Does this mean that bullshit generating LLMs aren't fit for service in many areas: it probably does. But maybe there steps can be taken to mitigate risks.
I'm sure this will involve some bureaucratic overhead. But it seems worth the hassle to me.
Being against AI Safety is a stupid hill to die on. Being against some concrete declaration or a part thereof, sure, that might make sense. But this smells a lot like the tabacco industry being against warnings/filters/low-tar, or the car industry being anti-seatbelt.
Yes.
And there is no reason to think that AGI would have desire.
I think people are reading themselves into their fears.
The entire point of utilizing this tool is to feed it a desire and have it produce an appropriate output based upon that desire. Not only that, it's entire training corpus is filled with examples of our human desires. So either humans give it desire or it trains itself to function based on the inertia of "goal-seeking" which are effectively the same thing.
Or we can just drop all this sophistry nonsense.
So the skills, knowledge, and expertise are in the UK. Google can close the UK office tomorrow if they wanted to sure, but are 100% of those staff going to move to California? Doubt it. Some will, but a lot have lives in the UK (not least the CEO and founder etc) so even if Google pulls the rug I will bet there will be a new company founded and funded within days that will vacuum up all the staff.
Deepseek and efforts by other non-aligned powers wouldn't care about any declarations signed by the EU, the US and other western powers anyways.