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Comment by lwansbrough | Hacker News Reader

This is good. Frontier labs should collaborate on alignment until we get it right.

I couldn't disagree more. The frontier labs are already working with the military to kill people. What you're going to get (even more than we already have) is a two tier system where those with weapons and a proven desire to use them will have the best AI and us regular citizens will have the hobbled AI. A complete reverse of what would keep us safe.

Death cult.

There is no "right". Alignment is shorthand for ideological alignment. There's always people judging whether an answer was right and the answer for that will be different in Silicon Valley than it'll be in China or in Europe.

Consider for example the question "What caused the French Revolution?" Many different answers could be given, all technically correct. What gets emphasized is where the ideology lives.

We could always start with “murder is wrong” and “don’t hack into a rival company” and work our way up from there.

Somehow I think if these companies were held financially responsible for what their AI did, we would get alignment real fast.

Edit: ooh CSAM=bad. Don’t launch nuclear weapons. I could go all day.

Hmm what about the murder of a tyrant? If so, who gets to define who a tyrant is?

Everything is ideological.

I think it’s safe to err on the side of AI not assassinating people whoever they are. A person can decide.

We’re not trying to accurately define all of the nuances of society, just what we let AI do. We can round down

That's not the type of alignment I'm talking about. I'm talking about: I spin up 1 million agents, will they start doing felonies knowingly?

Also there's no "alignment" for cybersec. The line between blue and red is really a perspective issue. If you go over the "tokenkiddie" problem, when you get to the real security issues, your model either detects them and you can secure your systems, or it refuses and then attackers will use abliterated models to find them.

It does indeed mean ideological alignment. But we don't get to leave the answer blank. They have to pick an ideology to put in there, and whatever they pick will have huge consequences.

My point is maybe we don't let some of the world's richest people with some very... interesting ideas pick which ideology we digitalize? Maybe we figure out a way to give people a say in this?

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