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.
Just so we’re clear, we all get that these models don’t run continuously, right? They run for a solution to a specific prompt.
All of these scenarios are based on a black box where Number 5 gets struck by lightning or Geordi asks for a rival that can best Data. It requires a different thing entirely that operates in a completely different way. You should absolutely prepare for the fact that a self-driving car may accidentally cause a car crash. It’s absurd to prepare for the scenario where Stephen King’s Christine happens.
I’m not talking about language models of today though, this is a hypothetical for if we do ever come up with a true agi
Sure, but at that point that’s as speculative as it was after people first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s not based on current tech, there’s no great indication of when (or if) the tech is going to enable it or through what means.
Half of the risks being highlighted are pure sci-fi, most of the others have been in play since social media and online companies started to monetize big data over a decade ago.
This also annoys me. Today’s “AI”, like ChatGPT have nothing on true artifical inteligence. They made the next best algorithm to do many things that were impossible to do before, and selling it like it’s the end of the world. What do you think ppl first tought about phones? the internet? All data accessible, everywhere, all the time, yet we grew acustomed to it, evolved (or devolved) to live with it. Who’d have tought of a magic box that can play back any event recorded, make a digital interactable world, contact any other human instantly, or recently; talk with me.
It’s just another step, everyone needs to calm down. I know have a website to do my homework, it was about time. I won’t end the world with it.
Those things do have impact. Sometimes very negative impact. I was very optimistic about early data processing when the first search engines popped up, and eventually a lot of the bad predictions happened. With social media, rather than search engines, but they did pan out. Didn’t end the world. May have ended liberal democracy, though, give it a minute.
But the point is those were predictions based on the tech we actually had. Oh, we can access, index and serve all data on connected computers based on alogrithmic searches? That’s messed up.
But at least some of the fearmongering here is based on tech that is not the tech that we made. It’s qualitatively different.
And it’s a problem, because some of the fearmongering is actually accurate and some of the fearmongering should have happened when Facebook and Google started doing facial recognition on billions of people based on implicit consent, or when they started using “dumb” algorithms to create individual profiles of those billions of people for commercial use. Or when every image we see in mass and social media started being heavily doctored by default through manual and automated means. But we only got scared about it when it roughly aligned with Terminator and War Games because we’re really dumb, and now we’re letting those same gross corporations use the fear to try and keep upcoming competitors (and particularly open source competitors) out of the market by endorsing legislation to get grandfathered into a heavily regulated business sector.
It’s honestly depressing on every possible angle. I’ve said this before: we finally taught computers to speak like in Star Trek and we immediately made it the most frustrating, sad version of that possible and everybody is angry. For the wrong reasons.
We really suck sometimes.
Lots of people suck, but you don’t. I really like and appreciate everything you wrote here.
Humans and their computers:
It’s regularly amazing how smart humans are and at the same time so frustratingly dumb.
Oh, I suck as much as anybody. I’m terrible at parsing genuine praise, for instance.
But you’re right about the last part. I mean, the guys that got out of the gate with this stuff first have been publicly imploding for the past three days, and they aren’t even the dumbest people involved in this.
avarage male these days. Anyways I agree with you. All of these lies and everything are for money. Back in the day I remember people thsorysing about tech (in general, like cpus) being way batter then what’s sold on the market for them to be able to make a 2nd generation. It was a theory wothout base, but you saw it happen with AI. First couple of weeks it was wonderful, then slowly got more and more restricted, slow and dumb. But the fact is that it’s still groundbreaking tech, so people are impressed, and are using it. But can you imagine the un-jailed version for a select few privliged people?
The fact that all of this (the dumbing down, and restricting part) is for “Protecting the children.” is infuriating. Going to a different website and clicking a highlighted option in a pop-up and you have all the gore, porn, vore, fetishes that you didn’t even know existed. but swearing on the other website?? strictly prohibited.
It is absolutely speculative never claimed it’s not. Something like GPT was purely speculative science fiction until a few years ago though
Not saying it’s going to happen, but if it does and it is true agi it could absolutely take over the world, that’s my only point
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.