From the perspective of risk management, compared to normal computer security problems, AI deployments involve vastly fewer moving parts that you have vastly less understanding of.
I don’t get why this is “vastly fewer moving parts you have vastly less undestanding of” as opposed to “vastly more (or, about the same?) number of moving parts that you have vastly less understanding of.”
I’d naively model each parameter in a model as a “part”. I agree that, unlike most complex engineering or computer security, we don’t understand what each part does. But seems weird to abtract it as “fewer parts.”
(I asked about this at a recent talk you gave that included this bit. I don’t remember your response at the time very well)
I mostly just mean that when you’re modeling the problem, it doesn’t really help to think about the AIs as being made of parts, so you end up reasoning mostly at the level of abstraction of “model” rather than “parameter”, and at that level of abstraction, there aren’t that many pieces.
Like, in some sense all practical problems are about particular consequences of laws of physics. But the extent to which you end up making use of that type of reductionist model varies greatly by domain.
I don’t get why this is “vastly fewer moving parts you have vastly less undestanding of” as opposed to “vastly more (or, about the same?) number of moving parts that you have vastly less understanding of.”
I’d naively model each parameter in a model as a “part”. I agree that, unlike most complex engineering or computer security, we don’t understand what each part does. But seems weird to abtract it as “fewer parts.”
(I asked about this at a recent talk you gave that included this bit. I don’t remember your response at the time very well)
I mostly just mean that when you’re modeling the problem, it doesn’t really help to think about the AIs as being made of parts, so you end up reasoning mostly at the level of abstraction of “model” rather than “parameter”, and at that level of abstraction, there aren’t that many pieces.
Like, in some sense all practical problems are about particular consequences of laws of physics. But the extent to which you end up making use of that type of reductionist model varies greatly by domain.
Thanks, that’s clarifying. I had a similar confusion to Raemon.