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.
AGI isn’t real
You mean that physical objects cannot display human level intelligence? That’s obviously untrue, I have about seven billion counterexamples to show you.
Those are naturally conceived with some good ol’ fucking (or in vitro fertilization), not artificially created with thousands of GPU.
Unless you can actually point to special magic consciousness dust that’s in human brains that doesn’t really make any difference.
Why does consciousness have to be organic based, after all there’s plenty of life on this planet that’s organic and has no consciousness, so can the inverse not be true.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
-George Carlin
Maybe they’re just bad at math and don’t understand how averages work.
Ewwww. Super icky comment.
What? No. That’s clearly not what they meant. What???
It’s common business practice for the first big companies in a new market/industry to create “barriers to entry”. The calls for regulation are exactly that. They don’t care about safety–just money.
The greed never ends. You’d think companies as big as Microsoft would just be like “maybe we don’t actually need to own everything” but nah. Their sheer size and wealth is enough of a “barrier to entry” as it is.
I’ve only seen a bunch of rumors about the firing but nothing concrete since the board hasn’t given an explanation. So yeah it could be that money wins or it could be something else entirely.
I doubt that Microsoft would’ve hired him if he had strong allegations of wrongdoing.
You’re talking about a company that used to be run by Bill Gates, whose wife divorced him over his creepy connections with Epstein and his coming-on to women who worked for him while he was married and running Microsoft.
This was their CEO for a long-ass time and had big influence on the company after leaving.
But sure, Microsoft “cares” about such a thing. Companies only care about bad Public Relations. They literally will ignore it until the news media picks it up, and then, and only then they will “investigate.” As long as big media ignores it, they can safely ignore it.
trusting corporations is always a bad idea
“Safeguarding AGI” is as much of a concern as making sure the terrorists don’t get warp drives.
But then, armies of killer teenagers radicalized by playing Mortal Kombat was never going to be a thing, either, and we spent decades arguing with politicians about that one. Once the PR nightmare is out it’s really hard to put back in the box. Lamp. Bag. Whatever metaphor I’m going for here.
But then, armies of killer teenagers radicalized by playing Mortal Kombat was never going to be a thing, either,
I remember this being a big plot point in one of the worst movies starring Robin Williams ever made, Toys.
They had all these kids playing mindless video games where you got bonus points for war crimes.
It was meant to be a comedy movie, but it’s more hilarious for how fucking bad it is.
SAM’S LLM agrees with you.
-gpt4
Alright, let’s dive into this cesspool of corporate and AGI ethics:
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The whole rogue AGI apocalypse scenario is more Hollywood than Silicon Valley. AGIs like Skynet are great for popcorn flicks but in reality, they’re about as likely as a kangaroo becoming Prime Minister. The computing power needed for an AGI to go rogue is not something you can find in your average laptop.
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Sam Altman playing the AGI safety card could easily be seen as a crafty move to keep competitors at bay and wrap his profit-driven motives in a pretty ‘saving humanity’ bow. After all, in the corporate world, wearing a cape of altruism makes dodging taxes and scrutiny a bit easier.
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Altman’s criticisms of Elon Musk could be seen as the pot calling the kettle black. Both seem to be cut from the same cloth – big talk about saving the world, but at the end of the day, it’s all about who gets to be the hero in the billionaire’s club.
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The allegations against Sam Altman are part of a wider narrative that often surfaces around powerful figures. It’s like a classic play: as soon as someone climbs the ladder, out come the skeletons from the closet. Whether true or not, these stories get less attention than a new iPhone release, because, hey, who wants to take down a tech titan when there’s money to be made?
And on your last point, yep, moderating content to avoid racist rants isn’t exactly what they meant by “safeguarding AGI.” It’s more like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound – it looks like they’re doing something, but in reality, it’s just a cosmetic fix to keep the masses and the ad revenue rolling in.
That’s funny. It’s definitely not a terrible LLM.
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Like someone else said “Open AI has been a farce ever since they disabled access to GPT3 for the sake of security”.
Somewhere between
A bunch of incapable, spoilt, completely insane men-children with too much money think they can save the world.and
A bunch of scam artists build an artificial human who they claim can talk and draw and reason just like a real human would.For the CEOs of this brave new AI world this probably changes depending on their level of hangover and/or midlife crisis.
The naive irony of all the Less Wrong people discussing letting the AI out of the box when we all know there won’t be a box at all.
It’s already out… People have been letting it out for months to do all sorts of things
Luckily it turns out empathy and lewdness are practically built in to these models
Money wins, every time.
And right there, you answered your own (presumably rhetorical) question.
The money people jumped on AI as soon as they scented the chance of profit, and that’s it. ALL other considerations are now secondary to a handful of psychopaths making as much money as possible.
This was always coming, and we’re going to do fuck all about it. But on the upside, the future is going to be absolutely rad for the .001%
“A handful of psychopaths making as much money as possible”
Capitalism in a nut shell
Unrelated but is your name a reference to Amy Likes Spiders? That was my favorite poem in DDLC.
Probably subconsciously. I came up with the name long after playing the game, but I wasn’t thinking of it when I made it. I actually am just a lady who likes spiders
I love spiders, and lots of bugs really. I have zero respect for people who look down on them when they’re just so damn cute.
Like how can anyone look at this and say anything other than “awww”
awww
Yeah you’re right. Look at that little cutie <3
I use the way people treat other animals, especially ones like bugs and stuff, the ones we barely give a second thought about, as a measure of character. Phobias are one thing, but at least have compassion for this other living thing
Very few will get a chance to feel what it’s like to pet a bug and have it go from fearing for its life to trusting you with its life. They genuinely have no framework for a world that treats them as disposable when you show them compassion, and it’s magical how they react.
I think it will be fine as long as we don’t give the AI thumbs.
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How do you know?
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Are you able to articulate at least one specific reason that we are nowhere close to developing AGI?
Without any specific reason being stated, I’m tempted to believe you are just confidently declaring this to protect yourself from fear.
I agree we’re far out, but not as far as you think. Advancements are insane and AGI could be here in 5-10 years. The way the industry have been attempting it the past decade is wrong though, training should be more indepth than images/videos, I think a few are starting to understand how to do more indepth training, so even more progress will start soon
We’ve been promised self driving cars for over 10 years and still aren’t close, I think we’re a long ways away from AGI.
Self driving cars as an area in which straight AI would probably work very well. I don’t think we need a full-on intelligence to drive around.
Anyway we already do have self-driving cars they’re just not very mainstream yet. Mostly because they’re prohibitively expensive and no one trusts them exactly but that’s more because there’s other idiot humans around than anything else.
Yeah if we were at the point with AGI that we’re at with self driving cars, then AGI would be fully implemented, just still with some safety issues and only in the hands of a few corporations.
That’s hardly “sci fi”. That’s currently existing behind closed doors.
To be fair, that promise came from someone who is clearly a conman of a swindler. If you ever took that promise seriously… I’m sorry.
Elon/Tesla is far from the only outfit working on self driving. Chevy Cruise is the one that recently dragged a person under the car for dozens of feet.
For sure, but the traditional motor vehicle companies that were dragged kicking and screaming into the EV game were not making the same predictions of how quickly we would get to self-driving. That was pretty much all Elon Musk setting the absurd timelines, and a handful of tech companies who also were pursuing driverless tech. I would say the “serious” car companies never promised that, but maybe I’m wrong and just never saw it.
No I absolutely agree with you, I’ve been skeptical of all the self driving news for years. However, I was using it as a parallel to other AI based discussions. While Elon may have been over hyping what was going to be possible in the near future, there is no evidence that other people aren’t doing the same now.
Just like with autonomous vehicles, we’ve made impressive leaps in what ML can do, but I think there is still a long road ahead.
Entirely agreed, we have such a long path ahead.
I think you are being optimistic.
If you are old enough to remember AIM chatbots, this current generation is maybe multiple times more advanced, not exponentially so. From what I have seen, all the incredible advancements have been in image production.
This leads me to believe that AGI has never been the true commercial goal, but rather an advancement of propaganda media and its creation.
This leads me to believe that AGI has never been the true commercial goal, but rather an advancement of propaganda media and its creation.
Uh what? Why wouldn’t it be because text/image generation isn’t even on the same plane of difficulty as AGI?
I think 5-10 years is optimistic given how much hand tuning / manual training has to take place. Given how insanely long it’s taken to get where we are and how many times I’ve heard machine intelligence oversold, and based on what LLMs can do I think we are still many decades out.
That said, what ML and AI can do is still game changing and will still have an impact even if it isn’t some kind of scary skynet AGI thing.
Imagine if we had FTL, that would be so cool.
For your first point sure it couldn’t run itsself on consumer hardware, but it could design new zero day malware faster than any human and come up with new scams to get it onto people’s machines
It could also design a more efficient version of itsself to spread that will run on lower powered hardware
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.
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.
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.
I’m terrible at parsing genuine praise
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.
First part is feasible but not enough to “destroy humanity.” More like a long-term frustration.
Second point is extremely unlikely and in the realm of sci-fi. You can’t just magic up something that works the same on a hundreth of the hardware.
Last I checked you can just unplug these things and they go away, just like any other computing device.
So even if the first scenario happened, its a pretty easy fix.
You absolutely can magic up something that runs far more efficiently, just look at gpt 3 vs 3.5, or the many open source models that have found better training with a smaller number of parameters makes much more performant models
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LLM /= AGI
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Models made for specific purpose instead of general purpose are of course going to need less CPU cycles because you aren’t creating an AGI, you are creating a specialized tool.
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It still takes far longer to produce a result on smaller hardware. An AGI that takes days to do anything isn’t exactly that dangerous.
- Why are you even talking about AGI needing a certain amount of compute then? You’re using LLM numbers.
Go have a read of some doomsday scenarios. I’m not saying they’re right, but it feels plausible to me.
Go have a read of some doomsday scenarios. I’m not saying they’re right, but it feels plausible to me.
I have, and I have been working with computer hardware and networking my whole life. I have a degree in network administration. I think the fears are absolutely overblown by people who don’t understand hardware.
Most people don’t own fancy new computers. Most people are still running shit from 10 years ago and don’t want to have to upgrade. The idea that the world could be taken over by an AGI seems literally fancifully absurd to me.
I understand that LLMs are not agi, but as agis don’t currently exist I think it’s fair to assume the same concept that applies to literally all software of over time people discover more efficient ways to do things will also apply to it
Also we don’t know how slow or fast it will end up being, some deep learning models are incredibly fast, some are slow
Once you get down to individual bits, you can’t make code any smaller. You have a finite number of bits to work with. In networking, especially.
There is literally an upper (lower?) limit on how small you can make code.
Like others in the thread, I think you’re confusing the great pace at which we have increased the hardware speed of computers and the miniaturization of computer components with “code” somehow getting “smaller” which… isn’t really a thing when you’re dealing with something as complex as this. You can’t run an LLM on the same number of lines you can print up “Hello World!”
It’s way more that we have more CPU speed, more RAM, and faster storage with more space for data to live.
print(1) print(2) print(3) print(4) print(5)
for I=1,5: print(I)
There you go I made code smaller
I also never said anything about making code smaller I said making it more efficient. It’s not about compressing it it’s about finding better, less CPU expensive ways to do things, which we absolutely do
Another AI based example, video chats currently work streaming video, but there’s a technology in development that takes one screenshot, sends that, then sends expression data to be reconstructed on the other side
Far more efficient network wise
Hardware speed has increased, sure but that applies to both consumer hardware and servers, all a theoretical AGI would have to do is improve on its own training/code enough that it will run at all on consumer level hardware (which language models currently will do
(For reference, llama 40B runs just fine on my ThinkPad from 2016, pre-trained models are not that difficult to run, training is the expensive part)
You’re misunderstanding what I mean by “making code smaller.” Because… that’s not that much smaller. Each Unicode character is 2 bytes, with some being as many as 4 bytes. This code snippet is 64 bytes. Can you magically make Unicode characters smaller than 2 bytes? You can’t. There’s a literal physical limit on how small you can make code.
Sure, you can come up with clever ways to use less code. But my point is there is a limit on how much less code you can use, and that always is based on physical hardware limitations. Just because modern hardware makes it feel limitless doesn’t mean it is.
EDIT: Got my data sizes mixed up.
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The first computer that could beat the best humans at chess was Deep Blue, which took a whole supercomputer. Now we wave Stockfish, which can beat any human 99 times out of 100 and runs on your average phone.
While I’m skeptical of the feasibility and threat of SAI, as computers and AI methods improve we can run what previously took a supercomputer with far less hardware.
Actually, that’s more of a misconception. We’ve literally had four decades of electronics miniaturization since then.
Are you really going to argue that since ENIAC took up a whole room, it must have had boatloads of computing power? By modern standards, it’s way less powerful than a Raspberry Pi.
Also, we haven’t just increased miniaturization, but all 30 of the CPUs for the original Deep Blue ran at 233mhz.
That phone is likely a quad-core CPU (which means technically four CPUs) all running at 1.5+ gigahertz.
So is it really that surprising it can now do stuff Deep Blue did with a fraction of the CPU cycles?
AI takes a lot of computing power to train, once its trained, it can usually run on a laptop.
It can technically run it just can’t do it well enough to be usable, it’d probably only pump out a couple of words a day
My biggest issue with this whole debacle is that the non-profit board hasn’t clearly explained itself to the pubic or its employees. There’s an ethics discussion that absolutely positively needs to happen and there needs to be some sort of governance in place around a myriad legal and moral issues from copyright to displacing human jobs and that can’t happen right now because we still don’t know what the fuck the board was trying to accomplish.
I’m all for responsible stewards of AI, but I don’t think this board is it. They’ve cut themselves out of any future governance ability in any event.
40+ years on this planet have made me 100% certain that no one with the power to safeguard AGI will make any legitimate effort to do so. Just like we have companies spending millions greenwashing while they pollute more than ever, we’ll have plenty of lip-service about it but never anything useful.
All this noise just to serve up ads
My biggest concern with generative AI is all of the CEOs that will eagerly seize the opportunity (and some already have) to fire staff and offload their work onto their remaining employees so they can use ChatGPT to make up for lost productivity. Easy way for them to further line their pockets without increasing pay for anyone else, further dividing the worker/CEO wage disparity and class divide.
Anyone who thinks America or your local government is going to regulate AI are delusional, especially in the face of companies planning to build AI Data Centers on ships and float them into International waters where the law does not apply to them. If not there,they will put it in space. Unregulated AI is coming where you like it or not, unless we destroy the entire planet which I would not rule out. Sure this commenter would agree on that.
An AI data center acting as a rogue state will just be sunk the moment they actually become a legitimate problem.
Depends on how much money and power they’re entangled with, and who they threaten
And billionaires will pay their fair share of taxes.
I don’t disagree that the people with money who are funding this kind of development don’t care about regulations or safety.
That said, the idea that they’ll do it out on the open sea or in space are absolutely laughable. Those ideas pitched so far completely ignore all the obvious engineering problems. Not to mention that going to international waters to avoid regulations means that the navy of that country you’re thumbing your nose at now has free reign on you.
Who is?
