Money wins, every time. They’re not concerned with accidentally destroying humanity with an out-of-control and dangerous AI who has decided “humans are the problem.” (I mean, that’s a little sci-fi anyway, an AGI couldn’t “infect” the entire internet as it currently exists.)
However, it’s very clear that the OpenAI board was correct about Sam Altman, with how quickly him and many employees bailed to join Microsoft directly. If he was so concerned with safeguarding AGI, why not spin up a new non-profit.
Oh, right, because that was just Public Relations horseshit to get his company a head-start in the AI space while fear-mongering about what is an unlikely doomsday scenario.
So, let’s review:
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The fear-mongering about AGI was always just that. How could an intelligence that requires massive amounts of CPU, RAM, and database storage even concievably able to leave the confines of its own computing environment? It’s not like it can “hop” onto a consumer computer with a fraction of the same CPU power and somehow still be able to compute at the same level. AI doesn’t have a “body” and even if it did, it could only affect the world as much as a single body could. All these fears about rogue AGI are total misunderstandings of how computing works.
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Sam Altman went for fear mongering to temper expectations and to make others fear pursuing AGI themselves. He always knew his end-goal was profit, but like all good modern CEOs, they have to position themselves as somehow caring about humanity when it is clear they could give a living flying fuck about anyone but themselves and how much money they make.
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Sam Altman talks shit about Elon Musk and how he “wants to save the world, but only if he’s the one who can save it.” I mean, he’s not wrong, but he’s also projecting a lot here. He’s exactly the fucking same, he claimed only he and his non-profit could “safeguard” AGI and here he’s going to work for a private company because hot damn he never actually gave a shit about safeguarding AGI to begin with. He’s a fucking shit slinging hypocrite of the highest order.
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Last, but certainly not least. Annie Altman, Sam Altman’s younger, lesser-known sister, has held for a long time that she was sexually abused by her brother. All of these rich people are all Jeffrey Epstein levels of fucked up, which is probably part of why the Epstein investigation got shoved under the rug. You’d think a company like Microsoft would already know this or vet this. They do know, they don’t care, and they’ll only give a shit if the news ends up making a stink about it. That’s how corporations work.
So do other Lemmings agree, or have other thoughts on this?
And one final point for the right-wing cranks: Not being able to make an LLM say fucked up racist things isn’t the kind of safeguarding they were ever talking about with AGI, so please stop conflating “safeguarding AGI” with “preventing abusive racist assholes from abusing our service.” They aren’t safeguarding AGI when they prevent you from making GPT-4 spit out racial slurs or other horrible nonsense. They’re safeguarding their service from loser ass chucklefucks like you.
Those don’t follow from each other, though. Handheld wireless computers were purely speculative until the 2010s, but that doesn’t mean we were on the brink of figuring out teleportation.
People have been assuming computers would yield AGI since we first made an electric calculator. First through sheer processing power, then through improved computation techniques, then neural networks. Figuring out speech and vision are probably part of that process, but AGI does not arise from them without an indeterminate, possibly unknowable amount of major steps.
And as for world-ending threats, how about we get past, say, Trump, Putin and all the natural general intelligences that are very real and in the process of doing the same first? Or, you know, we apply that level of concern about tech that we do have, like social media disrupting democracy, private universal surveillance or digital oligopolies driving endless inequality? Or, hey, global warming.
I agree rogue AI is a much cooler problem to speculate about, which is why we keep writing sci-fi about it, but we have more pressing issues.
It’s not like the AI sanctions were ever about actually protecting humanity anyway, as it turns out recently it was just to attempt to stall until musk could get his own language model off the ground
Again though my point was never that we need to be concerned right this instant that AGI is around the corner, it’s purely that if it were to happen it could absolutely propogate itself
What’s almost more scary is if it’s not sentient, and it’s just an incredibly advanced language model that acts in the way it thinks an AI should (based on all the fiction we have of AI manipulating humans and taking over the world that it’s been trained on)
But… how do you know it could?
I mean, why on Earth would you deliberately make an AGI and make it able to do that? It’s not like you HAVE to make an AGI that is able to make other AIs. That’s not a trivial task, it doesn’t just… happen. And you’re presuming that it’d want to do that and that we wouldn’t have control over that. Which you don’t know, because now we’re deep into sci-fi territory, so it’s about as likely as the mapping of genome leading to a genetic class system.
And that last scenario there is not just sci-fi, but the same old sci-fi, where AGI emerges from a LLM because magic and it becomes eEeEvil because dramatic convenience. That scenario is entirely impossible, because a LLM does not run continuously or autonomously and it has the short term memory of… a thing with very small short term memory, so you’d have to ask it to do that first, then wait a considerable amount of time for a response and then watch it pretend to do that because it’s a language model and it can’t actually do any of that. Literally the “make an opponent that can beat Data” scenario, so we’re doing Star Trek now.
You kind of do, I’m going based on the definition of AGI which is a true artificial intelligence with the ability to think and make decisions for itself. I’m not basing this on LLMs.
I’m also not saying it guaranteed becomes evil, but it will likely take on the characteristics of humans based on our current machine learning tech, and humans are greedy, selfish, manipulative creatures
An LLM could actually cause a lot of harm subtly by manipulating all the humans that talk to it, if it were particularly badly trained even without a train of thought just based on it acting consistently on its training data (though it would be rather difficult for it to accomplish much without actual intelligence)
Also, not really relevant but there are already tools that do run gpt continuously, by having “agents” talk to eachother or by having it narrate it’s train of thought to itself, come up with a plan to achieve a specific goal, then execute each step.
In theory you could make a pseudo AGI by plugging a bunch of different ML models into each other (one for each type of task) kinda like the hugging GPT project and giving it the train of thought treatment, allowing it to delegate sub tasks to other versions of itself though I can’t see a way that could operate without a human giving it a goal in the first place
“In theory” doing a lot of work there. You don’t know that would be analogous to AGI and how far we are from that being feasible in real time, computationally is anybody’s guess. There are already multiple models running concurrently in ML-based applications.
See, the problem I have with this type of discourse is that subtle but critical leap you make halfway through your post between realistic, practical concerns and sci-fi. A LLM can absolutely cause harm if it’s widely used, implicitly trusted and it responds to deliberate or accidental biases. Absolutely.
Granted, that is also true of every search engine and social media algorithm that’s already in place. But it’s true.
But the way you present it, sandwiched between the incorrect impression that AGI is just a matter of hyperlinking a bunch of neural networks makes it seem like the LLM would be doing this consciously, instead of stochastically in the same way other automated data processing does it. Or that this is a new concern that we aren’t dealing with right now. Or that the major asterisks that this would require a much better implementation and a much broader adoption than we currently have are removed from play.
And that’s the caveats for the problems that are genuine, real and practical. The sci-fi part is what people are actually scared about and we’re seriously not there yet. And you haven’t outlined a problem here that can’t be fixed by power cycling a computer, which is an entirely different conversation as well.
Look, it’s fine. Speculating about science and its impact in society is healthy. I’m just annoyed when things go memetic in unreasonable ways at the expense of similar, much more pressing issues that aren’t as flashy. I lived through Y2K and the cloning panic, which both made daily headlines. And then I lived through the whole of humanity getting brainwormed by social media and you can barely get the EU to sometimes wag a finger at Facebook.
I’ve not made any kind of comment on what we should do to mitigate risks.
My only statement has always been "If we do somehow come up with AGI, it could absolutely take over the world
You’re directing your frustration in the wrong direction here
I don’t even know what “take over the world” means. I promise you my frustration is accurate.
If you made a computer think you’d have a thinking computer. There are literally billions of those running in squishy APUs and piloting blobs of gunk around and nobody has “taken over” anything yet.
The leap in logic from “we may get a machine to develop general intelligence” to “it may go rogue” is already extreme, but from there to “it may take over the world” as a genuine concern is actively frustrating. The fact that something so out there may be discussed as a genuine problem for the international community to take action while we keep missing climate goals is astounding.
Just so we’re clear, the US is trying to ban Nvidia from selling GPUs to China over this. Not cars, not fossil fuels. GPUs.
I mean, not over this, over the fact that this may or may not be a big competitive tech business and they don’t want to lose western supremacy in the tech sphere, which is also the real reason they want to ban TikTok. But they say it’s because of this, and that’s heartbreaking and frustrating.
The billions of those in squishy APUs don’t have the ability and resources to make exact copies of themselves, or scale up said APUs to improve the speed they can think at and the number of things they can think about at once
Whether it would decide to use that to take over the world is a different question entirely but left to its own devices, if it wanted to it could bring that about in a way that human beings can’t do nearly as efficiently
If a human tries to do horrible stuff they eventually die and can’t do said horrible stuff anymore. They also can’t gain more than one lifetime’s worth of knowledge
AGI in the form it is generally considered would be like a human that lives forever, can clone itsself perfectly, requires no sleep, food, etc, can teleport anywhere in the world provided there’s a computer there for it to use and could modify its own brain or even create an entirely new one
Take over the world doesn’t mean anything specific. It means a theoretical AGI connected to the internet could do pretty much anything it felt like doing whether humans liked it or not (provided it has enough time to gain enough of a foothold)
They literally do and have done for tens of thousands of years. One may say that’s how they got to AGI in the first place, the squishies. And then they learned to write for that whole “one lifetime of knowledge thing” and you wouldn’t believe the kind of stuff they got into after that. Scary stuff.
Also, they have hands. Big advantage, the hands. Great for grabbing things. Remarkably hard to stay plugged in if your rival has hands and you don’t. Big competitive disadvantage.
Alright, I think this conversation has derailed enough. We can maybe pick it back up when we have a firm standard for world takeovers. If you guys boil it down to a set of steps I may even give it a go. I don’t have anything better to do this week.