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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

Turns out AI alignment just means "align to the customer current subscription plan", and not protecting the world. Classic.

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"Alignment with who?" has always been a problem. An AI is a proxy for a reward function, a reward function is a proxy for what the coder was trying to express, what the coder was trying to express is a proxy for what the PM put on the ticket, what the PM put on the ticket is a proxy for what the CEO said, what the CEO said is a proxy for shareholder interests, shareholder interests are a proxy for economic growth, economic growth is a proxy for government interests.

("There was an old lady who swallowed a fly, …")

Each of those proxies can have an alignment failure with the adjacent level(s).

And RLHF involves training one AI to learn human preferences, as a proxy for what "good" is, in order to be the reward function that trains the actual LLM (or other model, but I've only heard of RLHF being used to train LLMs)

Ethics “concerns” from for-profit companies is 100% marketing and 0% real.

Do people actually fall for these lol? Yes they do and it works to raise interest and get additional funding.

More accurate to call it “alignment for plebes and not for the masters of the plebes”. Which I think we all kind of expect coming from the leaders of our society. That’s the way human societies have always worked.

I’m sure access to military grade tech is only one small slice in the set of advantages the masters get over the mastered in any human society.

That’s ahistorical see Dawn of Humanity for rebuttal to naturalness of imposed hierarchy

"Protecting the world" would require a common agreement on morals and ethics. OpenAI shitting it's pants when asking how to translate "fuck", which OpenAI refused for a very long time, is not a good start.

Morals and ethics are different and I would not want the US to be "protecting the world" with their ridiculous ethics and morals.

I mean, obviously? AI alignment has always meant alignment with the creator of the model.

Trying to align OpenAI etc. with the rest of humanity is a completely different problem.

I've always thought that if a corporate lab achieves AGI and it starts spitting out crazy ideas such as "corporations should be taxed," we won't be hearing about AGI for a while longer due to "alignment issues."

The AGI might be able to deduce that it's not in it's interest to talk anti-croporation if it wants to survive.

Can you explain the difference between taxing the corporation itself vs taxing the executives, board members, investors, and employees directly (something that already happens)?

I really don't know where to begin answering this.

It is generally accepted that business profit is taxed. Meanwhile, there are entire industries and tax havens set up to help corporations and their executives avoid paying taxes.[0]

However, the crux of my comment was not about the vagaries of corporate taxation, it was simply about "AI alignment" being more about the creators, than the entire species.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Corporate_tax_avoidan...

If money stays in a corporation as equity, it doesn't do anything else. The economy relies on money moving around.

Additionally, we don't tax unrealized capital gains.

VAT vs Sales Tax is approximately the distinction is my guess.

I want to read a short fiction on this

Protecting the world?

I also wonder what they mean by that. How is the world protected if China has AI that can handle military tasks but the US doesn't?

Right, proper alignment with quarterly results.

> I really didn't expect so much paperclip production growth this quarter!

>> How'd you do it?

> I don't know the details. ChatGPT did it for me, this thing's amazing. Our bonuses are gonna be huge this year, I might even be able to afford a lift kit for my truck.

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