Comment by zild3d
2 years ago
The counter argument is viewing it like nuclear energy. Even if its in the early days of our understanding of nuclear energy, seems pretty good to have a group working towards creating safe nuclear reactors, vs just trying to create nuclear reactors
Nuclear energy was at inception and remains today wildly regulated, in generally (outside of military contexts) a very transparent way, and the brakes get slammed on over even minor incidents.
It’s also of obvious as opposed to conjectural utility: we know exactly how we price electricity. There’s no way to know how useful a 10x large model will be, we’re debating the utility of the ones that do exist, the debate about the ones that don’t is on a very slender limb.
Combine that with a political and regulatory climate that seems to have a neon sign on top, “LAWS4CA$H” and helm the thing mostly with people who, uh, lean authoritarian, and the remaining similarities to useful public projects like nuclear seems to reduce to “really expensive, technically complicated, and seems kinda dangerous”.
Folks understood the nuclear forces and the implications and then built a weapon using that knowledge. These guys don't know how to build AGI and don't have the same theoretical understanding of the problem at hand.
Put another way, they understood the theory and applied it. There is no theory here, it's alchemy. That doesn't mean they can't make progress (the progress thus far is amazing) but it's a terrible analogy.