Comment by frabcus
3 hours ago
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
Musk was told by Demis Hassabis in 2012, see https://time.com/6310076/elon-musk-ai-walter-isaacson-biogra...
Altman read Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence, he mentions it in this post https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
I also read that book in 2014, and it is how I came to understand this problem early.
2012 - 2015 seems to have been around the time a lot of people first started taking ASI and ASI existential risk very seriously as things that will be relevant in our lifetime, and when they decided to try to build and/or prevent it.
>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.
While Musk is now far-right (albeit seemingly not a Hitlerist - yet), Altman is pretty much a liberal.
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There exists a wide range of ideological beliefs in between National Socialism and Maoism.