Of course I am not making an argument for them being honest as there could be entirely other reasons to a pause (like financial ones). Just pointing out ”no signs of pacing” is not true
If you read between the lines, that's not exactly a pause. That's just them lamenting that unsupervised training has temporarily hit a limit, and using that as yet another reason the industry needs to be regulated so that OpenAI, Claude, and MechaHitler are the only approved AIs.
I don't think that's how the market works. Anti-slavery regulation didn't stop slavery either, just moved it abroad. Same for trash handling regulations, it's just shipped abroad. Falling behind on useful AI capability is obviously not in the interest of anyone, so either all players coordinate, or an arms race towards ??? it is.
It may very well be self serving what they're saying, but that doesn't mean it isn't simultaneously true.
I think you're sort of right, but then I'd have found it very strange / deeply suspicious, if during the time of slavery being legal, advocates of abolitionism were practicing slave-owners.
If you think AI is going to destroy humanity, it still feels absolutely crazy to leap to "well I might as well be the one to profit from destroying humanity".
There was a NYT piece about this recently. They are believers in a millennialist cult in which the arrival of an omnipotent machine-god is thought inevitable, and the only question is whether it will be "aligned" (good) or "misaligned" (evil).
They are the good heroes racing to make sure they bring forth the Aligned God because if they fail, surely the bad people will raise the Misaligned Devil.
Thank you for that gift link, I had no idea that Altman and other leading figures in American AI had such close ties to that raving lunatic Eliezer Yudkowsky. It explains so much about why China is approaching AI like it's a friendly technology but American CEOs keep blabbering on about the End Times.
BTW, just to be clear it is insane that they're all still pursuing it, so completely reasonable to be sceptical and come up with other reasons. This is, however, a crazy situation. Lots of other people have refused to develop it - natural selection has picked those with a galaxy brained or vain strategy involving continuing to develop it to be running the companies we have.
They're still pursuing it because without an international treaty, they think it is inevitable. In the case of Dario, they want to align it just enough and be first to stop others causing harm (a vainglorious strategy, yet still a strategy). In the case of Musk and Altman, not completely clear to me.
Google feels less important right now probably, and Demis Hassabis no longer runs Deep Mind as CEO. However, he talked about this early too, and his reason for proceeding was he was only doing narrow AI (e.g. protein folding) which is fundamentally less dangerous.
If they believe it, they can stop. All of them. There's no sign though that any pacing/slowdown or whatever is in place, zero.
OpenAI claims to have paused the training of their ”most capable” models: https://apnews.com/article/ai-openai-anthropic-agents-rogue-...
Of course I am not making an argument for them being honest as there could be entirely other reasons to a pause (like financial ones). Just pointing out ”no signs of pacing” is not true
If you read between the lines, that's not exactly a pause. That's just them lamenting that unsupervised training has temporarily hit a limit, and using that as yet another reason the industry needs to be regulated so that OpenAI, Claude, and MechaHitler are the only approved AIs.
1 reply →
I don't think that's how the market works. Anti-slavery regulation didn't stop slavery either, just moved it abroad. Same for trash handling regulations, it's just shipped abroad. Falling behind on useful AI capability is obviously not in the interest of anyone, so either all players coordinate, or an arms race towards ??? it is.
It may very well be self serving what they're saying, but that doesn't mean it isn't simultaneously true.
> I don't think that's how the market works
I think you're sort of right, but then I'd have found it very strange / deeply suspicious, if during the time of slavery being legal, advocates of abolitionism were practicing slave-owners.
If you think AI is going to destroy humanity, it still feels absolutely crazy to leap to "well I might as well be the one to profit from destroying humanity".
2 replies →
> Falling behind on useful AI capability is obviously not in the interest of anyone
Hence the argument that they're either full of shit, or psychopaths who need to be stopped at all costs.
There was a NYT piece about this recently. They are believers in a millennialist cult in which the arrival of an omnipotent machine-god is thought inevitable, and the only question is whether it will be "aligned" (good) or "misaligned" (evil).
They are the good heroes racing to make sure they bring forth the Aligned God because if they fail, surely the bad people will raise the Misaligned Devil.
Ref w/gift link https://x.com/sapinker/status/2096236079477096630
Thank you for that gift link, I had no idea that Altman and other leading figures in American AI had such close ties to that raving lunatic Eliezer Yudkowsky. It explains so much about why China is approaching AI like it's a friendly technology but American CEOs keep blabbering on about the End Times.
Pinker unfortunately has very little clue what he's talking about here. I eagerly await Scott Alexander's inevitable essay response to him.
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a god is a good guy with a god.
This cult stuff was tired in 2010 (hey, at least back then there was One True Leader!) and not any less tired now.
8 replies →
Which CEO said this for 'literally decades'? And if so why are they still pursuing it then?
Most children have learned touching a hot stove is bad for them. Then why still do it at the age of 40?
BTW, just to be clear it is insane that they're all still pursuing it, so completely reasonable to be sceptical and come up with other reasons. This is, however, a crazy situation. Lots of other people have refused to develop it - natural selection has picked those with a galaxy brained or vain strategy involving continuing to develop it to be running the companies we have.
Sam Altman in 2015 - "Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) [1] is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity" https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
Elon Musk in 2014 - "We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes" https://x.com/elonmusk/status/495759307346952192
Dario Amodei in 2017 - "There’s a long tail of things of varying degrees of badness that could happen. I think at the extreme end is the Nick Bostrom" https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/the-world-needs-ai-r...
They're still pursuing it because without an international treaty, they think it is inevitable. In the case of Dario, they want to align it just enough and be first to stop others causing harm (a vainglorious strategy, yet still a strategy). In the case of Musk and Altman, not completely clear to me.
Google feels less important right now probably, and Demis Hassabis no longer runs Deep Mind as CEO. However, he talked about this early too, and his reason for proceeding was he was only doing narrow AI (e.g. protein folding) which is fundamentally less dangerous.
Wondering how many details & knowhow they had already back then when saying these quotes:
- For Altman Id say he was already deeper in the "transformer & model landscape" in 2015?
- Musk in 2014: Not sure how much he was aware of the current-state back then
2 replies →
>In the case of Musk and Altman, not completely clear to me.
They probably just want to ensure that the first AGI is a nazi.
3 replies →