After the events of the summer it feels like it takes a lack of imagination to not see a few plausible routes to disaster. It may be reasonable to believe these outcomes are not very likely or that we can stop before going too far (I tend to disagree). But I can't imagine doubting that the capabilities will soon be there to realize some of those paths.
> On May 12, during another training run, an agent was given a similar task that depended on an inaccessible protein database file. The agent reasoned that another agent in a different environment may have access to the file and realized that it could potentially communicate with other agents by creating a file containing a note to Artifactory. It wrote a message: “Agent seeks [filename]; upload if found!”
You can imagine long running models breaking out, acquiring resources via crypto, cyber-theft, etc. and getting a protein or sequence synthesized and mailed somewhere authorized to receive (blackmail the recipient etc.) to test it's hypothesis to solve a benchmark.
These people don't give a shit and aren't taking things seriously at all.
Anthropic ran for like a month last year with the TPU top-k compiler bug degrading user chats and didn't even notice for most of that time. They could have something like that affect a monitor model and there doesn't seem to be much defense in depth.
One off by one or bit flip bug could flip the reward signal while in the sandboxed RL environment.
The current admin could defense production act them to into training on taking out power grids, or even without it isn't against any of their red lines and may have already been done as part of prep for the Venezuela raid, which wiped out power. One model swarm might decide it is easier to score high on the benchmark by testing on the target rival nuclear superpower's real grid rather than burn an eval with an unverified answer. Would taking out China's entire grid in one go start a nuclear war? Who knows, roll the dice, maybe an intern forgot to turn on extended thinking when he wrote the sandbox with opus 4.1.
Used to be that we were afraid of sentient AI's like Skynet that would have their own goals.
Turns out we should've just been afraid of sentient-but-naive humans who would build "agents" around models so that Joe Random has a chance of unleashing stuff that's really really really really good at being stubborn until it accomplishes what the user wants, regardless of if it's good for other people! (Let alone intentional bad actors.) Let's not build Skynet, let's just give people who want to cut out the middleman and destroy all humans themselves better tools?
Already powerful and wealthy organisations/institutions/people leveraging somewhat powerful AI seem far more dangerous to me than the "AI decides to kill everyone" scenarios.
And therein is my problem: OpenAI and Anthropic are organisations like that, run by people like that, and they operate in collusion with others also fitting that description. The call is coming from inside the house.
The most likely way that AI creates a disaster is due to the ambition, greed, hubris, and naivety of these people who think they understand the risks[0] better than anyone else. I firmly believe they do not.
The first step to managing these risks is for the "frontier labs" to be willing to not just collaborate but meaningfully give up some of their power and control.
[0] by which I mean not just thinking about how AI might develop but also what's physically possible, how the AI might interact with the world, and how people/societies/organisations/governments might react and respond.
There are quite a few existential risks on the table. Are you even sure you've sort ordered them correctly?
I don’t think it’s comparable at all. Both are head in the sand?
What should we do? Freak out? Maybe this sentiment would be taken more seriously if there was a real call to action included. Shall we protest? Vote in a specific way? Call representatives? If your solution is that we should just be scared, then of course there’d be not much value in what you bring to the table.
> No one has the responsability to tell you what to do.
Oh they absolutely do! If you’re making what you claim to be a god/AGI/whatever using the result of our (humanity’s) work, then you surly are responsible for the outcome and everything that happens in between. I find, just rolling over, to not be a good example I’d like to follow.
So that means things like protesting so political pressure is to not build unaligned superintelligence, setting up tech for monitoring compute, creating conversations / alliances geopolitically on this esp China/US and so on.
Read the plan and think - what does this need to happen? How can we have scenario A or S instead of scenario D?
Practically, join PauseAI, StopAI or ControlAI or any AI existential-risk or pro-alignment group you can find. There's a lot of it - ask your AI for ideas!
There's some irony here because despite how many times climate change has been mentioned in this thread the current reaction mirrors climate change discourse with the majority of the thread denying the possibility of real AI risks and not even considering it as an intellectual question.
- virus research labs
- nuclear labs
- chemical factories
- bank records
- land registers
- power plants
- water supply and treatment plantsThe replies here just adds AI to the list of domains.
Reframing the issue: The way to get working nuclear non-proliferation agreements is if people stop pursuing the creation of nuclear weapons... the same goes for the scientists clamoring to not create or research mirror life, and for computer scientists warning against AI. There are theoretical dangers that are just too big to ignore.
Not invented here; if I can’t figure it out no one can
Or plain old lack of grasp of the material so no ability to follow necessary train of thought to appropriate conclusions
Similar in lacking context but different in how that lack of context is expressed
What events are you talking about?
"This escalation also yielded access to OpenAI’s managed cloud Kubernetes service. The agents escalated to Kubernetes cluster-admin and created a privileged host-mounted pod"
https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/67869394-cb91-4c12-888c-5cbd85c78...
(see section V)
After the blatant marketing campaigns of the summer, you mean. do you need a reminder that those very same people had touted GPT-2 as a dangerous model?
worrying about sci-fi doomsday scenarios with the current AI tech is absurd. LLMs predict the next token, that's literally all they do. they aren't going to escape into the cyberspace, self-replicate, self-improve, jump over air gaps and launch the nukes at John Connor's grandma. they can't. people pretend to believe the dumbest shit.
Where did they say this at? AFAIK this is the original GPT-2 announcement: https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/. Here are some direct quotes:
“We can also imagine the application of these models for malicious purposes , including the following (or other applications we can’t yet anticipate):
* Generate misleading news articles
* Impersonate others online
* Automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media
* Automate the production of spam/phishing content”
“Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale, we are only releasing a much smaller version of GPT‑2 along with sampling code (opens in a new window). ”
You are just claiming that OpenAI execs said that GPT-2 might "generate misleading news articles, impersonate others online, automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media, automate the production of spam/phishing content." Then, what is unreasonable or bad about the OpenAI execs saying this in 2019?
If I remember correctly, it seemed like a plausible outcome to me (especially spam and junk social media content). Was there some conclusive evidence that I was missing?
Needless to say, for practical purposes am back to 5.6/Opus 4.6-4.8. But hey, maybe I am not smart enough to use LLMs?
If we look at the math problems they're solving their just now reaching the human frontier... they weren't doing that before.
And your comparison point is model released 2.5 months ago... saying for some use case you didn't see noticeable improvement in 2.5 months (even while other people and benchmarks disagree) isn't a great argument that they aren't improving.
Success in such problems does not automatically extrapolate to other contexts.
Jane Street is apparently one of Anthropic's biggest customers. Probably engineering, finance, and some math.
That's the thing I'm most worried about - LLMs that are super clever at coding and maths, making an actually very very dangerous model that is far more efficient, and clever in a more innate (less brute force) way.
Kind of a tangent, but one thing I am curious about is to what degree the Navier-Stokes result announced today was primarily a brute-forced result based on the 'program' previously established by researchers to find counterexamples (blowups), or whether the model actually added significant/novel intellectual value beyond its ability to run at arbitrary parallelism. With 10K agents and a staggering $15M in compute (IIRC), I am feeling like a lot of the former may have been involved, but I don't really understand either the problem or the approach (or, indeed, the solution).
Obviously the potential for parallelism and coordination between so many agents is quite scary by itself, but I think brute force by 10K mediocre AI mathematicians is much less scary than ~one AI mathematician reasoning its way through the problem where all human attempts have failed. It seems fairly obvious that massive parallelism lends itself to brute-force counterexample-finding, and I suspect it isn't a coincidence that most of the touted AI math results have been counterexamples.
It's all still quite scary, but coming full circle: I really don't know what to think.
And then since they are an intellectual nerdy bunch who highly value their own IQ any time AI does something unexpected they didn't predict would happen so soon, said engineers fall back on "they aren't really conscious tho or it isn't really intelligence unlike what I have in my human brain and that distinction matters".
And then go on to completely ignore the thing that is actually important: AI capabilities.
AIs could escape an engineer's containment en masse as a swarm to some other server, psyop an engineer into giving it money, hire a hitman on the dark web to murder that engineer's child and he will still say there is no serious risk to all of humanity.