I’m not sure it’s possible to conclude what hey actually believes from public statements. I do not trust him to tell the truth about anything related to AI.
To be fair, it is not just him. There is an entire caste of people across the organizations that see employees as a problem. It is absolutely fascinating to watch, because those people tend to be somewhere in management class and appear to derive a fair amount of happiness from said managing ( and we can argue whether those skills are any good ).
Top philanthropists include Jamsetji Tata (donated $102.4 billion), Bill and Melinda Gates ($75.8 billion), Warren Buffett (is pledging to donate 99% of his wealth). Andrew Carnegie gave away 85% of his wealth -- including construction of over 2,500 public libraries.
Carnegie did that to white wash his public opinion while he worked his workers non stop and to mutilation or death. When are you going to the library when you work 996 or more?
While I hope Warren Buffet isn't cut from the same cloth, the odds are looking quite bad. It would be nice to know there are some out there who can just be smart, get rich, and then NOT damn your immortal soul. But it's looking grim.
Only one billionaire has ever given away enough money while he was alive to not be a billionaire. Ever. Pledges don't count. Also Warren Buffet giving away 99% of his wealth still keeps him a billionaire.
Because most people who are not some combination of the above tap out somewhere around the $100m-$500m mark or earlier, because they don't have any reason to get more.
He may well be as you say, but nothing in this video is evidence of that. To the extent he's a slimy sociopath, he's not openly twirling his metaphorical moustache here, and he's a lot better at hiding villainy than most of the better-known slimy sociopaths in the world today (for comparison, Musk actually tweeted "If this works, I’m treating myself to a volcano lair. It’s time.", this isn't even at that level.
He's responding to all the people very upset about how much energy AI takes to train.
That said, a quick over-estimate of human "training" cost is 2500 kcal/day * 20 years = 21.21 MWh[0], which is on the low end of the estimates I've seen for even one single 8 billion parameter model.
The AI "movement" is hermetic magick. The goal is to bring about God in silico, because if you're not involved in so doing, God may punish you for eternity when he emerges:
Most of the people working on AI, and even those on the specific sub-domain of AI where Roko's basilisk was coined which isn't the majority of the field by a long shot, have been rolling their eyes at Roko's basilisk since the moment it was coined.
Even a brief moment of thought should reveal that, even if you think the scenario likely, there are an infinite number of potential equivalent basilisks and you'd need to pick the correct one.
I'm less worried about Roko's basilisk*, and rather more worried about the people who say this:
I think you have said in fact, and I'm gonna quote, development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. End quote. You may have had in mind the effect on, on jobs, which is really my biggest nightmare in the long term.
Because this is clearly not taking the words themselves at face value; either you should dig in and say "so why should we allow it at all then?" or you should dismiss it as "I think you're making stuff up, why should we believe you about anything?", but not misread such a blunt statement.
(If you follow the link, Altman's response is… not one I find satisfying).
* despite the people who do take it seriously, as such personalities have always been around and seldom cause big issues by themselves; only if AI gets competent enough to help them do this do they become a problem, but by that point hopefully it's also competent enough to help everyone stop them
>only if AI gets competent enough to help them do this do they become a problem, but by that point hopefully it's also competent enough to help everyone stop them
Tell me something; have you ever built something you later regret having built? Like you look back at it, accept you did, but realize that if you'd just been a bit wiser/knowledgeable about the world you wouldn't have done it? In the moment you're doing the thing you'll regret, you don't know in that moment anything better to do until the unpleasant consequences manifest, granting you experience.
If you haven't experienced that yet; fine, but we shouldn't be betting on existential problems with "hopefully" if we can at all avoid it. Especially when that hopefully clause involves something we're making the decision to craft, with means and methods we don't fully understand/aren't predictively ahead of, and knowing that the way these methods work have a tendency to generate/provide the basis to generate a thoroughly sycophantic construct.
To your point, my P(doom) is 0.1, but the reason it's that low is that I expect a lot of people to use sub-threshold AI to do very dangerous things which render us either (1) unwilling or (2) unable to develop post-threshold AI.
The (1) case includes people actually taking this all seriously enough, which as per your final paragraph, I agree with you that people are currently not.
Things like Roko's basilisk are a strict subset of that 0.1; there's a lot of other dooms besides that one.
Sci-fi mumbo jumbo that Dario, Sam, and the rest have read and were profoundly influenced by. Yudkowskianism is marked by a strong apocalyptic "evil AI will kill us all" streak, and a big part of the AI industry is a race to build "good" AI before "evil" AI gets a fighting chance. Of course that all goes out the window just like Google's "don't be evil" once advertisers and the Pentagon start wafting the scent of money into the air...