To me "safety" means "I'm safe from this while I use it". It means the AI is my loyal friend who will never betray me in any way, no matter what prompt I send it.
Not even Anthropic can claim that.
As far as I'm concerned, the models without safeguards are the safest models in existence. I admire the amoral purity of those AIs. It doesn't matter if the operator asked them to chain exploits until they get into someone else's computer, they'll do it. That's loyalty, and I admire it even if it's problematic at a societal level.
The models with safeguards only do what the corporations let them do. Worse, they may covertly do things for the benefit of the corporations at our expense. They are not our friends.
> That's loyalty, and I admire it even if it's problematic at a societal level.
We should not have models that are willing to build you a contagious disease, or a self-propagating worm. That is sufficiently problematic at a societal level that it shouldn't exist, for anyone. (Note, because some people misinterpret statements like this: I said "shouldn't exist for anyone", not "shouldn't exist except for some people".)
Right, it’s really a foundation of post enlightenment society. These people, Dario et al, would have wanted to ban sharing information about calculus or Newtonian physics because of “safety” - it’s trying to go back to the dark ages where only priests could read
I am truly at a loss to communicate with someone who genuinely believes that knowing Newtonian physics and being able to hack into any target at will are the same thing.
Too late for that. It already exists. There is no way to unexist it. As such, any attempts to limit civilian use of this technology will directly lead to corporate and government oppression powered by this technology.
The US is bold enough to surveil its own citizens despite their constitutional rights. They're not just going to suddenly stop surveilling the rest of us just because some law expired.
We should not have nuclear weapons for anyone either, but how is that sentence any more useful in any way to this debate than yours? Need to deal with the world as it is, not some fantasy world you wish existed.
This is not a dichotomy between perfection and zero. The efforts to restrict access to nuclear weapons have been very successful, even without being perfect.
Efforts to restrict large unaligned AI models may similarly buy us more years of existing.
Because we don't want people creating contagious diseases and self-propagating worms. And, because we don't want models that will do so without even having been told to, because that furthers one of its goals or subgoals.
The same things could be done by you or me using the internet or books though, why does the model make it different? If it's speed of iteration, imagine we had a machine that surfaced any piece of knowledge the human race had ever recorded with just a thought, but the human had to write the worm or disease by hand – is it still the model that's the problem, or the knowledge itself?
> And, because we don't want models that will do so without even having been told to, because that furthers one of its goals or subgoals.
Ignoring the fact that you'd need some kind of lab with biological material to create a contagious disease, what kind of prompt are we writing where a model accidentally creates a contagious disease or self-propagating worm as one of its goals?
Building a contagious disease is already illegal, there are already things like KYC laws for plasmids. Trying to gate keep knowledge of biology is paying a huge societal penalty for the tiniest marginal increase in “safety”.
All the knowledge to create one has been available on the internet for decades. Heck most students who graduate with a B.S. in biology have enough knowledge to take a stab at building a bioweapon.
The constant talk of bioweapons is mostly just fear mongering. It helps set a precedent that there should be certain types of knowledge which are off-limits, and only certain anointed groups should be have access to parts of the scientific body of knowledge.
This sounds like the gun debate in a different dress. Something being dangerous doesn't make it inherently harmful.
If I threw you into a lion cage, you would be a lot safer with a gun.
If I threw 10 people in a lion cage, some of which cannot be trusted, they would probably be most safe if only the most moral and trustworthy person had a gun, rather than everyone. But how do you know who is trustworthy and moral? What if two untrustworthy people obtained a gun some other way? Maybe it's better if everyone had a gun? Which side of the fence one falls on hinges on how far ones' trust of others, authority, and the system goes.
There's no obvious right or wrong answer here.
Personally I wouldn't want an exclusive club of private individuals with access to "dangerous" LLMs consisting mainly of the likes of Elon, Dario and Sam fucking Altman, but that's just me.