From the Abstract:
Rather than targeting state-of-the-art performance, our objective is to highlight GPT-4’s potential
They weren’t aiming for SOTA! What happens when they do?
Greg C
Karma: 240
The way I see the above post (and it’s accompaniment) is knocking down all the soldiers that I’ve encountered talking to lots of people about this over the last few weeks. I would appreciate it if you could stand them back up (because I’m really trying to not be so doomy, and not getting any satisfactory rebuttals).
Thanks for writing out your thoughts in some detail here. What I’m trying to say is that things are already really bad. Industry self-regulation has failed. At some point you have to give up on hoping that the fossil fuel industry (AI/ML industry) will do anything more to fix climate change (AGI x-risk) than mere greenwashing (safetywashing). How much worse does it need to get for more people to realise this?
The Alignment community (climate scientists) can keep doing their thing; I’m very much in favour of that. But there is also now an AI Notkilleveryoneism (climate action) movement. We are raising the damn Fire Alarm.
From the post you link:some authority somewhere will take notice and come to the rescue.
Who is that authority?
The United Nations Security Council. Anything less and we’re toast.
And we can talk all we like about the unilateralist’s curse, but I don’t think anything a bunch of activists can do will ever top the formation and corruption-to-profit-seeking of OpenAI and Anthropic (the supposedly high status moves).
It’s really not intended as a gish gallop, sorry if you are seeing it as such. I feel like I’m really only making 3 arguments:
1. AGI is near
2. Alignment isn’t ready (and therefore P(doom|AGI is high)
3. AGI is dangerousAnd then drawing the conclusion from all these that we need a global AGI moratorium asap.
I think you need to zoom out a bit and look at the implications of these papers. The danger isn’t in what people are doing now, it’s in what they might be doing in a few months following on from this work. The NAS paper was a proof of concept. What happens when it’s massively scaled up? What happens when efficiency gains translate into further efficiency gains?
AGI rising: why we are in a new era of acute risk and increasing public awareness, and what to do now
This post was only a little ahead of it’s time. The time is now. EA/LW will probably be eclipsed by wider public campaigning on this if they (the leadership) don’t get involved.
Advocate for a global moratorium on AGI. Try and buy (us all) more time. Learn the basics of AGI safety (e.g. AGI Safety Fundamentals) so you are able to discuss the reasons why we need a moratorium in detail. YMMV, but this is what I’m doing as a financially independent 42 year-old. I feel increasingly like all my other work is basically just rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
Thank you for doing this. I’m thinking that at this point, there needs to be an organisation with the singular goal of pushing for a global moratorium on AGI development. Anyone else interested in this? Have DM’d.
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Ok, I admit I simplified here. There is still probably ~ a million times (give or take an order of magnitude) more relevant compute (GPUs, TPUs) than was used to train GPT-4.
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It won’t need large orders to gain a relevant foothold. Just a few tiny orders could suffice.
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I didn’t mean literallly rob the stock market. I’m referring to out-trading all the other traders (inc. existing HFT) to accumulate resources.
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Exponential growth can’t remain “slow” forever, by definition. How long does it take for the pond to be completely covered by lily pads when it’s half covered? How long did it take for Covid to become a pandemic? Not decades.
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I referred to social hacking (i.e. blackmailing people into giving up their passwords). This could go far enough (say, at least 10% of world devices). Maybe quantum computers (or some better tech the AI thinks up) could do the rest.
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Is this now on the radar of national security agencies and the UN Security Council? Is it being properly discussed inside the US government? If not, are meetings being set up? Would be good if someone in the know could give an indication (I hope Yudkowsky is busy talking to lots of important people!)
Can you be more specific about what you don’t agree with? Which parts can’t happen, and why?
Compute—what fraction of world compute did it take to train GPT-4? Maybe 1e-6? There’s 1e6 improvement right there from a superhuman GPT-6 capturing all of the “hardware overhang”.
Data—superhuman GPT-6 doesn’t need to rely on human recorded data, it can harness all the sensors on the planet to gather exabytes of-real time data per second, and re-derive scientific theories from scratch in minutes based on it’s observations (including theories about human behaviour, language etc)
Robotics/Money—easy for GPT-6. Money it can get from scamming gullible humans, hacking crypto wallets via phishing/ransomware, or running rings round stock market traders. Robotics it can re-derive and improve on from it’s real time sensing of the planet and it’s speed of thought making our daily life look like geology does to us. It can escape to the physical world any number of ways by manipulating humans into giving it access to boot loaders for it to gain a foothold in the physical world (robots, mail-order DNA etc).
Algorithm search time—wall clock time is much reduced when you’ve just swallowed the world’s hardware overhang (see Compute above)
Factoring the above, your extra decades become extra hours.
Selection pressure will cause models to become agentic as they increase in power—those doing the agentic things (following universal instrumental goals like accumulating more resources and self-improvement) will outperform those that don’t. Mesaoptimisation (explainer video) is kind of like cheating—models that create inner optimisers that target something easier to get than what we meant, will be selected (by getting higher rewards) over models that don’t (because we won’t be aware of the inner misalignment). Evolution is a case in point—we are products of it, yet misaligned to its goals (we want sex, and high calorie foods, and money, rather than caring explicitly about inclusive genetic fitness). Without alignment being 100% watertight, powerful AIs will have completely alien goals.
the tiniest advantage compounds until one party has an overwhelming lead.
This, but x1000 to what you are thinking. I don’t think we have any realistic chance of approximate parity between the first and second movers. The speed that the first mover will be thinking makes this so. Say GPT-6 is smarter at everything, even by a little bit, compared to everything else on the planet (humans, other AIs). It’s copied itself 1000 times, and each copy is thinking 10,000,000 times faster than a human. We will essentially be like rocks to it, operating on geological time periods. It can work out how to disassemble our environment (including an unfathomable number of contingencies against counter strike) over subjective decades or centuries of human-equivalent thinking time before your sentinal AI protectors even pick up it’s activity.
I also think that compared with other AIs, LLMs may have more potential for being raised friendly and collaborative, as we can interact with them the way we do with humans, reusing known recipes. Compared with other forms of extremely large neural nets and machine learning, they are more transparent and accessible. Of all the routes to AGI we could take, I think this might be one of the better ones.
This is an illusion. We are prone to anthropomorphise chatbots. Under the hood they are completely alien. Lovecraftian monsters, only made of tons of inscrutable linear algebra. We are facing a digital alien invasion, that will ultimately move at speeds we can’t begin to keep up with.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter which monkey gets the poison banana. We’re all dead either way. This is much worse than nukes, in that we really can’t risk even one (intelligence) explosion.
We can but hope they will see sense (as will the US government—and it’s worth considering that in hindsight, maybe they were actually the baddies when it came to nuclear escalation). There is an iceberg on the horizon. It’s not the time to be fighting over revenue from deckchair rentals, or who gets to specify their arrangement. There’s geopolitical recklessness, and there’s suicide. Putin and Xi aren’t suicidal.
LessWrong:
A post about all the reasons AGI will kill us: No. 1 all time highest karma (827 on 467 votes; +1.77 karma/vote)
A post about containment strategy for AGI: 7th all time highest karma (609 on 308 votes; +1.98 karma/vote)
A post about us all basically being 100% dead from AGI: 52nd all time highest karma (334 on 343 votes; +0.97 karma/vote, a bit more controversial)
Also LessWrong:
A post about actually doing something about containing the threat from AGI and not dying [this one]: downvoted to oblivion (-5 karma within an hour; currently 13 karma on 24 votes; +0.54 karma/vote)
My read: y’all are so allergic to anything considered remotely political (even though this should really not be a mater of polarisation—it’s about survival above all else!) that you’d rather just lie down and be paperclipped than actually do anything to prevent it happening. I’m done.