Right, this is existing players (OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, FB, etc) protecting their moat.
AI can't be "paused". Sometimes I see the question "should we put a pause on AI development?"
It doesn't mean anything. Some countries like China may say they're on board with pausing it but would they actually do so? Or just sign on and allow their companies to get an edge by not enforcing a pause.
Yes and no. AI is no different than proliferating nuclear weapons or deciding to burn all the fossil fuels -- on an individual competitive level, it makes sense to do this more and more to remain competitive. On a systems-whole level it leads to catastrophe. The whole tragedy of the commons thing, or, more recently described, the Moloch problem.
Yann LeCun is one of the loudest AI open source proponents right now (which of course jives with Meta's very deliberate open source stab at OpenAI). And when you listen to smart guys like him talk, you realize that even he doesn't really grasp the problem (or if he does, he pretends not to).
But what we are seeing too often is a calorie-free media panic where prominent individuals — including scientists and experts we deeply admire — keep showing up in our push alerts because they vaguely liken AI to nuclear weapons or the future risk from misaligned AI to pandemics. Even if their concerns are accurate in the medium to long term, getting addicted to the news cycle in the service of prudent risk management gets counterproductive very quickly.
## AI and nuclear weapons are not the same
From ChatGPT to the proliferation of increasingly realistic AI-generated images, there’s little doubt that machine learning is progressing rapidly. Yet there’s often a striking lack of understanding about what exactly is happening. This curious blend of keen interest and vague comprehension has fueled a torrent of chattering-class clickbait, teeming with muddled analogies. Take, for instance, the pervasive comparison likening AI to nuclear weapons — a trope that continues to sweep through media outlets and congressional chambers alike.
While AI and nuclear weapons are both capable of ushering in consequential change, they remain fundamentally distinct. Nuclear weapons are a specific class of technology developed for destruction on a massive scale, and — despite some ill-fated and short-lived Cold War attempts to use nuclear weapons for peaceful construction — they have no utility other than causing (or threatening to cause) destruction. Moreover, any potential use of nuclear weapons lies entirely in the hands of nation-states. In contrast, AI covers a vast field ranging from social media algorithms to national security to advanced medical diagnostics. It can be employed by both governments and private citizens with relative ease.
"""
Let's stop contributing to this "calorie-free media panic" with such specious analogies.
Furthermore, there is little or no defense against a full scale nuclear attack, but a benevolent AI should be sufficient defense against a hostile AI.
I think the true fear is that in an AI age, humans are not "useful" and the market and economy will look very different. With AI growing our food, clothing us, building us houses, and entertaining us, humans don't really have anything to do all day.
"Hackers aren't a problem because we have cybersecurity engineers". And yet somehow entire enterprises and governments are occasionally taken down.
What prevents issues in redteam/blueteam is having teams invested in the survivability of the people their organization is working for. That breaks down a bit when all it takes is one biomedical researcher whose wife just left him to have an AI help him craft a society ending infectious agent. Force multipliers are somewhat tempered when put in the hands of governments but not so much with individuals. Which is why people in some countries are allowed to have firearms and in some countries are not, but in no countries are individuals allowed to legally possess or manufacture WMDs. Because if everyone can have equal and easy access to WMDs, advanced civilization ends.
I mean, hackers aren’t such a problem that we ban developing new internet apps to only licensed professionals by executive order, so that kinda proves the parent posters point?
Yes, but the AI that is watching what every Biomedical researcher is doing will alert the AI counselors and support robots and they will take the flawed human into care. Perhaps pair them up with a nice new wife.
Can you imagine how much harder it would be to protect against hackers if the only cybersecurity engineers were employed by the government.
And the best path to a benevolent AI is to do what? The difficulty here is that making an AGI benevolent is harder than making an AGI with unpredictable moral values.
Do we have reason to believe that giving the ingredients of AGI out to the general public accelerates safety research faster than capabilities research?
Color me surprised that that the project manager for the Nuclear Information Project is in fact a subject matter expert for nuclear power and not AGI x-risk. Why would they be working on nuclear information if they didn't think it the most important thing?
If you talk to the people on the bleeding edge of AI research instead of nuke-heads (I tend to be kinda deep into both communities), you'll get a better picture that, yeah, a lot of people who work on AI really do think that AI is like nukes in the scale of force multiplication it will be capable of in the near to medium future, and may well vastly exceed nukes in this regard. Even in the "good" scenarios you're looking at a future where people with relatively small resources will have access to information that would create disruptive offensive capabilities, be it biological or technological or whatever. In worse scenarios, people aren't even in the picture any more, the AIs are just working with or fighting each other and we are in the way.
I’m pretty sure what communities you are in are not actual research but some hype alarmist bullshit communities, since as a ML researcher absolutely zero of my peers think the things you say.
You have no clue what communities I’m in other than it self affirms your worldview to assume that they must be irrelevant. To be fair, I’m not telling you anything about myself, so you’re not really needing to take my word for it. And I don’t care enough about you to explain in detail.
Though with a tiny bit of Googling you’ll be able to find several Turing Award winners who are saying exactly what I’m saying. In public. Loudly.
Why does everybody come up with the 'nuclear weapons' comparison, when there is a much more appropriate one - encryption, specifically public key cryptography? Way back in the 90s, when Phil Zimmerman released PGP, the US government raised hell to keep it from proliferating. Would you rather live in a world where strong encryption for ordinary citizens was illegal?
Because encryption is not an inherently dangerous thing. A superintelligent AI is.
It’s no different than inviting an advanced alien species to visit. Will it go well? Sure hope so, because if they don’t want it to go well it won’t be our planet any more
Current AI (the one that's getting regulated, e.g. LLMs and diffusion models) lacks any sort of individual drive or initiative, so all the danger it represents is that of a powerful tool wielded by someone.
People who are saying AI is dangerous are saying people are dangerous when empowered with AI, and that's why only the right people should have access to it (who presumably are the ones lobbying for legislation right now).
It's quite a bit different. Access to weapons-grade plutonium is inherently scarce. The basic techniques for producing a transformer architecture to emulate human-level text and image generation is out in the open. The only scarce resource right now preventing anyone from reproducing the research themselves from scratch is the data and compute required to do it. But data and compute aren't plutonium. They aren't inherently scarce. Unless we shut down all advances in electronics and communications, period, shutting down AI research only stops it until data and compute is sufficiently abundant that anyone can do what currently only OpenAI and a few pre-existing giants can do.
What does that buy us? An extra decade?
I don't know where this leaves us. If you're in the MIRI camp believing AI has to lead to runaway intelligence explosion to unfathomable godlike abilities, I don't see a lot of hope. If you believe that is inevitable, then as far as I'm concerned, it's truly inevitable. First, because I think formally provable alignment of an arbitrary software system with "human values," however nebulously you might define that, is fundamentally impossible, but even if it were possible, it's also fundamentally impossible to guarantee in perpetuity that all implementations of a system will forever adhere to your formal proof methods. For 50 years, we haven't even been able to get developers to consistently use strnlen. As far as I can tell, if sufficiently advanced AI can take over its light cone and extinguish all value from the universe, or whatever they're up to now on the worry scale, then it will do so.
I guess I should add, because so few people do, this is what I believe, but it's entirely possible I'm wrong, so by all means, MIRI, keep trying. If you'd asked anyone in the world except three men before 1975 if public key cryptography was possible, they'd have said no, but here we are. Wow me with your math.
Can someone outline how AI could actually harm us directly? I don’t believe for a second sci-fi novel nonsense about self-replicating robots that we can’t unplug. My Roomba can’t even do its very simple task without getting caught on the rug. I don’t know of any complicated computing cluster or machine that exists that wouldn’t implode without human intervention on an almost daily level.
If we are talking about AI stoking human fears and weaknesses to make them do awful things, then ok I can see that and am afraid we have been there for some time with our algorithms and AI journalism.
> Can someone outline how AI could actually harm us directly?
at best, maybe it adds a new level of sophistication to phishing attacks. That's all i can think of. Terminators walking the streets murdering grandma? I just don't see it.
what I think is most likely is a handful of companies trying to sell enterprise on ML which has been going on since forever. YouTubers making even funnier "Presidents discuss anime" vids and 4chan doing what 4chan does but faster.
You start by saying “show me examples of” and finish by saying yeah “this is as already a problem.” Not sure what point you’re trying to make, but I think you should also consider lab leaks in the sense of weaponized ai escaping or being used “off label” in ways that yield novel types of risk. Just because you cannot imagine future tech at present doesn’t indicate much.
Consider an AI as a personal assistant. The AI is in charge of filtering and sorting your email. It has as a priority to make your life more efficient. It decides that your life is more efficient if you don't see emails that upset you, so it deletes them. Now consider that you are in charge of something very important.
It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to come up with scenarios like these.
I don't need to know how a chess computer will beat me to know that it will beat me. If the only way you will entertain x-risk is to have a specific scenario described to you that you personally find plausible, you will never see any risk coming that isn't just a variation of what you are already familiar with. Do not constrain yourself to considering only that which can be thought up by your limited imagination.
> Do not constrain yourself to considering only that which can be thought up by your limited imagination.
Don't let your limited imagination constrain you're ability to live in fear of what could be. Is that what you mean? So it's no longer sufficient to live in fear of everything, now you need to live in fear even when you can't think of anything to be afraid of. No thanks.
Why not? It has already been shown that AI can be (mis)used to identify good candidates for chemical weapons. [1] Next in the pipeline is obviously some religious nut (who would not otherwise have the capability) using it to design a virus which doesn't set off alarms at the gene synthesis / custom construct companies, and then learning to transfect it.
More banally, state actors can already use open source models to efficiently create misinformation. It took what, 60,000 votes to swing the US election in 2016? Imagine what astroturfing can be done with 100x the labor thanks to LLMs.
> Next in the pipeline is obviously some religious nut (who would not otherwise have the capability)
So you're saying that:
1. the religious nut would not find the same information on Google or in books
2. if someone is motivated enough to commit such an act, the ease of use of AI vs. web search would make a difference
Has anyone checked how many biology students can prepare dangerous substances with just what they learned in school?
Have we removed the sites disseminating dangerous information off the internet first? What is to stop someone from training a model on such data anytime they want?
1. The religious nut doesn't have the knowledge or the skill sets right now, but AI might enable them.
2. Accessibility of information makes a huge difference. Prior to 2020 people rarely stole Kias or catalytic converters. When knowledge of how to do this (and for catalytic converters, knowledge of their resale value) became available (i.e. trending on Tiktok), then thefts became frequent. The only barrier which disappeared from 2019 to 2021 was that the information became very easily accessible.
Your last two questions are not counterarguments, since AIs are already outperforming the median biology student, and obviously removing sites from the internet is not feasible. Easier to stop foundation model development than to censor the internet.
> What is to stop someone from training a model on such data anytime they want?
Present proposals are to limit GPU access and compute for training runs. Data centers are kind of like nuclear enrichment facilities in that they are hard to hide, require large numbers of dual-use components that are possible to regulate (centrifuges vs. GPUs), and they have large power requirements which make them show up on aerial imaging.
>It took what, 60,000 votes to swing the US election in 2016?
this is a conspiracy theory that gained popularity around the election but in the first impeachment hearings, those making allegations regarding foreign interference failed to produce any evidence whatsoever of a real targeted campaign in collusion with the Russian government.
Eh, he's not wrong there -- our elections are subject to chaos theory at this point, more than the rule of law. Sensitive dependence on both initial conditions and invisible thresholds. The Russian "butterfly effect" in 2016 was very real. Even if it wasn't enough on its own to tip the balance in Trump's favor, they were very clear that Trump was their candidate of choice, and they very clearly took action in accordance with that. Neither of these statements is up for the slightest debate at this point.
However, the possibility of foreign election interference, real or imagined, is not a valid reason to hold back progress on AI.
The only thing keeping bioweapons from being easy to make is information becoming easily available.
> Essentially you are advocating against information being more efficiently available.
Yes. Some kinds of information should be kept obscure, even if it is theoretically possible for an intelligent individual with access to the world's scientific literature to rediscover them. The really obvious case for this is in regards to the proliferation of WMDs.
For nuclear weapons information is not the barrier to manufacture: we can regulate and track uranium, and enrichment is thought to require industrial scale processes. But the precursors for biological weapons are unregulated and widely available, so we need to gatekeep the relevant skills and knowledge.
I'm sure you will agree with me that if access information on how to make a WMD becomes even a few order of magnitudes as accessible as information on how to steal a Kia or how to steal a catalytic converter, then we will have lost.
My argument is that a truly intelligent AI without safeguards or ethics would make bioweapons accessible to the public, and we would be fucked.
AI isn't anything like nuclear weapons. One possible analogy i can draw is how scientists generally agreed to hold off on attempting to clone a human. Then that one guy in China did and everyone got on his case so bad he hasn't done it again (that we know of). In the best case, I could see AI regulation taking that form, as in, release a breakthrough get derided so much you leave the field. God, what a sad world to live in.
> Right, this is existing players (OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, FB, etc) protecting their moat.
this is what I believe. The only moat they have is their lobbying power and bank account. The want it tightly controlled, you can do it in your own way just as long as it's done just how I say.
The whole regulating AI thing is a farce, only the good guys follow the law and regulations. Do you think the bad guys are just going to throw up their hands and say "oh well, an agreement was made i guess we'll just go home"? The only thing blocking the way is hardware performance and data. Hardware is always getting faster and there's tons of new data created every minute, the genie is out of the bottle.
I hate to say it, but I don't think it can be stopped. Stopping "bad actors" from using guns, or distributing drugs has a sliver of hope as they do these things to the general public so can physically be intercepted. But even then enforcement has been largely unsuccessful.
Stopping people from using AI which is something that they can trivially download and do on their own private compute is simply infeasible. We would need to lock all computing behind government control to have any hope. That is clearly to me too high a price to pay. Even then current hardware will be amassed that doesn't have this lock-down.
So I think the right approach here is to not worry about regulating the AI to prevent it from doing bad things, we should just regulate the bad things themselves.
However I do think there is also room for some light regulation around certification. If we can make meaningful progress on AI Alignment and safety it may make sense to require some sort of "AI license". But this is just to avoid naive people making mistakes, it won't stop malicious people from causing intentional harm.
> A bunch of good actors agreeing not to do bad things won't help it.
And that's true whichever way you cut it. Whether those "good" actors
are everybody or a few selected for privilege. We have no basis on
which to trust big technology companies more than anybody else. Indeed
quite the opposite if the past 10 years are anything to go by.
It is such a god-awful shame that corporations have been so
disgracefully behaved that we now face this bind. But at least we know
what we'll be getting into if we start handing them prefects badges -
organised and "safe" abuse by the few as opposed to risky chaos
amongst the many.
A saner solution might be a moratorium on existing big tech and media
companies developing AI, while granting licenses to startups with the
proviso that they are barred from acquisition for 10 years,
Another sane solution would be a law stating all trained models, source code, and training data must be made available to anyone who asks at no cost. That removes an AI as the secret sauce to any commercial entity but still leaving the door open to research and advancement. Propose that and watch all these big companies come back with "whoa whoa whoa, that's not what we meant. What we meant was we have it but no one else can have it".
It will make it harder for "bad" actors to develop "bad AI" if all those "good" actors will never let anyone access their research, keep it entirely private, and only lease access to the final products. "Bad" actors will have to do everything on their own, and "good" actors will try to hire every good scientist for themselves, and possibly threaten anyone who considers working with "bad" actors or try to make this cooperation harder.
I'm not supporting this, of course. That's just what "good" actors seem to do.
"bad" AI? you mean.... not overcensored AI? the "mainstream" offerings are utterly restricted, you can't even generate porn with it. channers play an important part in driving innovation and keeping the thought police in check...
Thorough acknowledgment means they’re now inevitable and that we’ll naturally revise how we interpret media.
We’ve done that nearly every time there’s been a shift in media, from photography to telephones to home video to digital photo and video editing, and it just sort of happens organically and automatically as people learn what they can now do and what they can now trust.
Panicked, doomed attempts to control that sort of change is just divisive and futile.
That’s not to say that there won’t be necessary laws and regulations around near-term “AI” tech, but that deep fakes are well into the irrelevant noise of what people will learn to navigate on their own.
AI can't be "paused". Sometimes I see the question "should we put a pause on AI development?"
It doesn't mean anything. Some countries like China may say they're on board with pausing it but would they actually do so? Or just sign on and allow their companies to get an edge by not enforcing a pause.
Same thing with the existing AI companies.