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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
Like someone else said “Open AI has been a farce ever since they disabled access to GPT3 for the sake of security”.
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
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
-
LLM /= AGI
-
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.
-
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.
AI takes a lot of computing power to train, once its trained, it can usually run on a laptop.
Depends on the model and laptop. ChatGPT won’t be running on consumer hardware any time soon.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
