Researchers say AI models like GPT4 are prone to “sudden” escalations as the U.S. military explores their use for warfare.
- Researchers ran international conflict simulations with five different AIs and found that they tended to escalate war, sometimes out of nowhere, and even use nuclear weapons.
- The AIs were large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, GPT 3.5, Claude 2.0, Llama-2-Chat, and GPT-4-Base, which are being explored by the U.S. military and defense contractors for decision-making.
- The researchers invented fake countries with different military levels, concerns, and histories and asked the AIs to act as their leaders.
- The AIs showed signs of sudden and hard-to-predict escalations, arms-race dynamics, and worrying justifications for violent actions.
- The study casts doubt on the rush to deploy LLMs in the military and diplomatic domains, and calls for more research on their risks and limitations.
Chess? Take your pick. But these neural networks, can run generations much faster than we can, and they get better at rates we cannot. And if alignment isn’t taken seriously this is going to be an issue. People keep diminishing the ability, by saying things like just glorified autocomplete, which is in the strictest sense true of LLM’s but the transformers and recurrent networks they’re built upon are really very much facsimile to brains but with generations in the blink of an eye.
And the first go programs, champions could beat repeatedly without interruption, like the earliest chess engines. Now the concept of a human winning a match is comical.
