Comment by skybrian
11 hours ago
They consider themselves to be in an arms race with all the other AI firms (including Chinese) that are not that far behind.
And... are they wrong?
This is why there's talk about negotiated "pacing."
11 hours ago
They consider themselves to be in an arms race with all the other AI firms (including Chinese) that are not that far behind.
And... are they wrong?
This is why there's talk about negotiated "pacing."
This was the exact argument for developing nuclear bombs.
In hindsight it turned out everyone else was MILES behind.
But as soon as USA developed one, they just stole the research and got one too.
> And... are they wrong?
They might be! Here's one extraordinarily simplistic argument for that case:
1) "Everybody knows" that if you build Skynet (misaligned ASI) everybody dies.
2) Therefore, no rational actor will build something that might be ASI until the alignment problem is solved.
3) OpenAI publicly stated the belief that they cannot develop a theory of the "core problem" of alignment (generalization) "soon" (much less solve it!) "without the help of more powerful AI."
4) Accepting as a premise that OpenAI is THE most advanced AI organization: if they can't do it without "the help of a more powerful AI", then nobody else can either.
And so a dilemma:
- If an AI can be made that can develop the asserted-as-necessary-by-OpenAI theoretical framework, without actually being an ASI - then the alignment problem can be considered solved, and since no rational actor would make an unaligned ASI, we're fine no matter what happens, ergo there's no need to worry about an arms race.
- If an AI that would be able to develop this theory would itself be an ASI, then no rational actor would build it, because it would have to exist BEFORE alignment was "solved" - and would therefore be an unaligned ASI i.e. Skynet, which per 1) would kill everybody. Therefore nobody would build it, therefore no arms race here either.
I think the easiest critique to make of my extraordinarily simplistic argument is the unstated assumption "there are no irrational actors capable of developing frontier AI models" on which it rests.
But, there you go. They might be wrong if either the arms race doesn't matter because whoever wins it will build an aligned superintelligence and everything is gravy, or the arms race doesn't matter because everybody who's in it is smart enough to know they need to stop because they'll kill everybody by continuing.
The existence of even one irrational actor turns it into a prisoner's dilemma. The payoff matrix in a prisoner's dilemma is defined by the value expected by each specific player. If a single player falsely evaluates the expected value of building ASI as positive, every other player is forced to race for ASI even if they correctly evaluate it as negative.
Business as usual beats probable extinction, but probable extinction with a small chance of becoming a living god beats probable extinction with a small chance of becoming a slave.
> is smart enough to know they need to stop because they'll kill everybody by continuing.
Yeah like when Tobacco companies learned that smoking... well, hmm, well the fossil fuel companies when they learned about climate change they...
Well, I'm sure this time executives will prioritize the common good.
If we're following that logic I really don't want to see what the misaligned internal research models look like
The, ahem, good thing here is that the ASI disaster scenario "everyone dies" includes AI executives.
1 reply →
If you believe that the people who will profit from new, better, more hyped models are the same ones who will act against their own immediate and tangible self interest to try and avert what seems to them to be a far away removed possibility of total disaster, then I believe you are naive
> 1) "Everybody knows" that if you build Skynet (misaligned ASI) everybody dies.
Lol nobody knows that. Everyone thinks they know that because for some reason this is the one field people still cite straight up fiction and say "this is a clear prediction of the future".
It's like describing the consequences of faster then light travel by referring to Star Trek.