I'll give you one simple reason why slowing down AI dev is not wise.
You'll slow down. America will slow down. The rest of the world won't.
You think North Korea, or China, or Russia, is going to be like "oh yeah, USA has regulations, so I'm not spend millions or billions to develop my own custom AI for my own needs." because that kid in his basement with a good idea, is not going to do the development?
It takes a lot of effort just to keep existing industrial robots working. They require frequent preventative maintenance and still break down occasionally. The idea of self replicating "robots with guns" is just ludicrous. Where would they even get the necessary parts? You must be another programmer who watches too many sci-fi movies and has no clue about how the manufacturing and resource extraction industries operate in the real world.
The military-industrial complex has been building automated weapons systems for years. So what.
You haven't provided any scientific evidence that it's possible for robots to manufacture themselves outside of human control. Just a lot of hand waving nonsense. Go talk to engineers who actually work on manufacturing complex mechanical products and they'll laugh at your naivety.
> People who know what they’re talking about …listen
You really want to make that argument? And fear-mongering over death, of course.
You’re failing to see that what you’re asking for is one of many paths to speeding this up far worse than what you claim to fear. (Or you know it, and you want it, but I won’t speculate down that rabbit hole.)
You, like so many of “your scientists,” are trying to sweep a problem under a rug, rather than fix it. That includes those that think you can fight bias with bias.
The experts fucked up repeatedly, and want all those without the funding to not take any risks. Because corporations and overpaid “researchers” are bad at making decisions and promise to do the same.
Why shouldn’t we slow down? What’s the threat to America from slowing down? Things are getting pretty rough with the constant grind. Maybe it would be good for America to slow down a bit. AI isn’t going to help the average American, just those who want to replace the average American with a computer.
If the US gives other countries an ample head start to establish the major AI companies and doesn't compete, it is unlikely that it's GDP will support as good a standard of living in the future.
I mean, by this logic only the single leading AI country will have any decent standard of living.
But if you believe that many counties will have a decent standard of living/gdp growth, then it stands to reason that not being first or best shouldn’t matter too much.
The US wasn’t first with cell phones and that doesn’t seem to hav mattered too much no matter how u Iquitos they are.
A country like the USA can always catch up if they decide they want to
I don't buy that at all. But even if it's accurate, it feels a little like "we have to burn the village in order to save it".
If barreling forward full steam brings on serious problems, that would harm our standard of living as well. I'm not sure I'm OK with letting other people roll the dice on my future to that degree.
The advances that AI will give us will help cure diseases, make energy plentiful, make huge advances in stopping climate change, and plenty of other things that will help save millions of lives. People are literally dying until we make these advances.
Those things will still be there in 6 months. Millions more will be displaced and the economy in a shambles. The network can't take the upset. We should figure it out and not just rush headlong without thinking.
Pause, not stop. Think before we act. The consequences are real.
8.8 million people a year die from carbon emissions. 6 months of deaths is more than 4 million people. If we can transition to clean energy 6 months sooner we'll save millions of lives.
Exactly. The cat is out of the back. Right now, people and companies in China, India, North & South Korea, Japan, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, etc. are trying to replicate results (obviously with lots of variation in success rates) as fast as they can. And they are motivated by just one thing: they don't want to be outsmarted by some foreign AI. They want to get there first.
Especially China, South Korea, Japan, and India have some highly capable people. Same for Europe. Though as a European, I'm skeptical of this continent being able to pull together a coherent effort. The rest of the world is not going to be waiting for Silicon Valley to deliver them the next version of chat gpt and figure out the least offensive level of wokeness.
Companies across the world are doing the R&D and they'll be shipping whatever they have to get a piece of the market. And not all of those companies and countries are going to be very interested in ethics.
This technology is hugely relevant across essentially all industry sectors with a potential to help knowledge workers in R&D, technological sectors, law, medicine. And of course the defense industry. Just because people don't like it doesn't mean other people won't go there. They will.
This is technology with an obvious potential for weaponization. It's going to be a pretty bad time to be defenseless against that. I don't think it will take long for this stuff to start having some real world impact in conflicts across the world.
So, there's a sense of urgency here in not giving away a head start and trying to keep up. Spinning your wheels for a year or so is just not going to be helpful. Another argument here is that some AI researchers might be recruited away. A lot of them are foreigners and their home countries might come calling.
> to take ownership of the pace of technological change.
I'm trying to think of a time humanity has tried to do this with an emerging technology and I'm drawing a complete blank.
Imagine pausing during the industrial revolution. Your country would be completely left behind. Internet era? Even worst.
It also occurs to me that in each of these technological changes, there is an educational leap that your populace has to make in order to be competent with the new technology. Schools were standardized and reformed to produce good factory workers. The curriculums were adjusted to make students at least functionally competent with computers.
It seems reasonable to believe that a pause will not just leave you behind economically, but to recover it will take a generation of students to be properly educated before you can actually harness the technological change.
Agreed. You simply cannot pause an emerging technology as powerful as AI. We all know the US Government will not stop especially within defense circles much less other countries. This same dilemma has appeared multiple times and just has to evolve through learning and development.
To directly address one of your examples (but offer no further comment): Bill Clinton once said "We know how much the Internet has changed America, and we are already an open society. Imagine how much it could change China. Now there's no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet. Good luck! That's sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall."
Which ones do you mean? From my coarse understanding, seems like most places that didn't industrialise got colonised by ones that did. Maybe that's not the case with the development of the internet, but still it's the case that the main center of innovation during the early phases (Silicon Valley) is still way ahead of everywhere else (example: OpenAI is based in SF)
The biggest corollary to AI is the printing press, whose invention was followed by decades of religious wars because its “early adopters” used it as to mass distribute the violently anti-Semitic ravings of Martin Luther.
Eventually, we arrived at widespread literacy and the greater distribution of knowledge and skills we see today, but it was a quite bumpy and deadly ride to get there. The greatest threat facing us is state, corporations, or rogue cells doing a repeat of the above with LLMs. Arguably this has already happened to a lesser extent with things like QAnon and social media.
I don’t think you can put the genie back in the bottle, but also we must acknowledge that “progress” has often come at a quite steep cost.
Everybody wants fast. End of story. I have GitHub copilot filling in partially working chunks of boilerplate that I would otherwise have to write. Saves me brain power and keeps me in the flow when working with various janky technology like JavaScript UI frameworks or mongoose schemas (shudder), and testing. Testing is so much easier...switching contexts is much easier with it.
You can’t enforce global slowing. Yes, I said it. Can’t.
Explain how a globally enforced slowing could be done in such a way to not invoke echoes of Teddy K. Or worse. If you wanted that sort of route, talking about it is a waste. Or you lack the power to do more than talk. (Yud is running his mouth as much as anyone.)
Progress on machine learning at Google has been extremely slow relative to their potential capability. I wonder how much of that lethargy can be attributed Google employees who feel the same way as the author.
There is lots of machine learning baked in behind the scenes in nearly all their projects but there’s a gaping void when it comes to projects where emerging machine learning techniques take front and center. The kind of capabilities we are starting to see from ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion. And in areas like image recognition, they’ve nerfed their offerings so badly companies like Yandex have pulled ahead.
It's funny that people think that saying "I worked at Google" actually means something. So you are good at writing software for spying on people? Or are you good at abandoning the products you start?
Depends. Google aren't perfect but see how they (and big tech in general) do stuff almost at their worst and compare it to (say) Finance (not fintech) programmers.
Slowing AI development seems unwise, we'll need it to develop the next vaccines and antibiotics. Better if the World would agree on slowing the development of weapons and nefarious stuff.
They could be used for nefarious purposes, but so is the case for many stuff we take for granted today. I'd prefer to have powerful AIs as soon as possible to help us create medicine for humans.
I worked at Google too when they bought the company I was working for and turned themselves into an ad company. Then shortly afterwards I was fired with hundreds of other engineers. Then I went on to work at threadless, and a fin tech company, and as vp of engineering for a start up and more and now I'm building apps for ai so I guess I'm also an ai researcher.
Published today by Reuters, sparse judgements from Bill Gates:
> “I don’t think asking one particular group to pause solves the challenges” ... “I don’t really understand who they’re saying could stop, and would every country in the world agree to stop, and why to stop ... But there are a lot of different opinions in this area.”
Can anyone really stop AI development right now? Even if you somehow can force OpenAI to pause, you think the Pentagon or the CCP will not run their own program in secret? Tencent already has a working LLM specifically for the Chinese. Many AI researchers are Chinese or Indian.
This tech is out of control already. Nothing can stop it. Instead of wasting breath on that, focus the effort on something more important, like the alignment problem. At least that would bring more benefit.
A pause is likely impossible for a number of reasons such as competition but now is probably a good time to start thinking about safety and ai alignment. Perhaps new models above a certain power could be studied in air gapped environments first.
It's way too late, pandoras box is open, and it's entirely the wrong approach to try to halt or slow research in any case IMHO.
With GPT-2 etc, while impressive and even useful, it wasn't entirely clear what the returns on further investment/scaling were going to be.
I think GPT-3, and especially GPT-4 has shown that as you scale beyond certain points, you get vastly better results.
So the race is now on toward full AGI, and as with all competitions, the winner takes all or nearly all.
If the most ethical companies halt or slow research, then progress will be dictated by less ethical companies. And IMHO 'less knowledge' is rarely the answer to anything.
It may be a game that's better not played, and maybe we'll get a 'CND' movement some time in the future, but for now there's no stopping development, and I think it's important that the more ethical institutions triumph or at least stay in the race.
It's clear that lot of big tech investors are pissed that FAANG doesn't have the ads oligopoly anymore. This is a campagin coming from lots of media right now.
The new service of millions of (soon hundreds of millions) people who just want real answers and ready to pay for it (and were clicking on the most expensive ads before) is a biggest conflict of interest for many competitors that were built upon the ad model.
I have an idea for the big companies: if they want GPT-4 to slow down, just try not catching up to it, so that it becomes the next monopoly that doesn't have to improve to be worth trillions of dollars (of course non of the FAANG companies want to let OpenAI to get all the eyeballs).
It doesn't matter if seems abstractly wise; its not going to happen. AI isn’t containable the way nuclear weapons technology is (and non-proliferation has been far from a total success there, even though it is vastly easier than it would be for AI.)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadYou'll slow down. America will slow down. The rest of the world won't.
You think North Korea, or China, or Russia, is going to be like "oh yeah, USA has regulations, so I'm not spend millions or billions to develop my own custom AI for my own needs." because that kid in his basement with a good idea, is not going to do the development?
citation needed
America would launch back but that would be suicidal.
That hasn’t happened so that should be all the proof you need.
It might not be tomorrow, but this aggression and hate will get us there.
You haven't provided any scientific evidence that it's possible for robots to manufacture themselves outside of human control. Just a lot of hand waving nonsense. Go talk to engineers who actually work on manufacturing complex mechanical products and they'll laugh at your naivety.
You really want to make that argument? And fear-mongering over death, of course.
You’re failing to see that what you’re asking for is one of many paths to speeding this up far worse than what you claim to fear. (Or you know it, and you want it, but I won’t speculate down that rabbit hole.)
You, like so many of “your scientists,” are trying to sweep a problem under a rug, rather than fix it. That includes those that think you can fight bias with bias.
The experts fucked up repeatedly, and want all those without the funding to not take any risks. Because corporations and overpaid “researchers” are bad at making decisions and promise to do the same.
Nah.
But if you believe that many counties will have a decent standard of living/gdp growth, then it stands to reason that not being first or best shouldn’t matter too much.
The US wasn’t first with cell phones and that doesn’t seem to hav mattered too much no matter how u Iquitos they are.
A country like the USA can always catch up if they decide they want to
If barreling forward full steam brings on serious problems, that would harm our standard of living as well. I'm not sure I'm OK with letting other people roll the dice on my future to that degree.
Pause, not stop. Think before we act. The consequences are real.
Especially China, South Korea, Japan, and India have some highly capable people. Same for Europe. Though as a European, I'm skeptical of this continent being able to pull together a coherent effort. The rest of the world is not going to be waiting for Silicon Valley to deliver them the next version of chat gpt and figure out the least offensive level of wokeness.
Companies across the world are doing the R&D and they'll be shipping whatever they have to get a piece of the market. And not all of those companies and countries are going to be very interested in ethics.
This technology is hugely relevant across essentially all industry sectors with a potential to help knowledge workers in R&D, technological sectors, law, medicine. And of course the defense industry. Just because people don't like it doesn't mean other people won't go there. They will. This is technology with an obvious potential for weaponization. It's going to be a pretty bad time to be defenseless against that. I don't think it will take long for this stuff to start having some real world impact in conflicts across the world.
So, there's a sense of urgency here in not giving away a head start and trying to keep up. Spinning your wheels for a year or so is just not going to be helpful. Another argument here is that some AI researchers might be recruited away. A lot of them are foreigners and their home countries might come calling.
I'm trying to think of a time humanity has tried to do this with an emerging technology and I'm drawing a complete blank.
Imagine pausing during the industrial revolution. Your country would be completely left behind. Internet era? Even worst.
It also occurs to me that in each of these technological changes, there is an educational leap that your populace has to make in order to be competent with the new technology. Schools were standardized and reformed to produce good factory workers. The curriculums were adjusted to make students at least functionally competent with computers.
It seems reasonable to believe that a pause will not just leave you behind economically, but to recover it will take a generation of students to be properly educated before you can actually harness the technological change.
The nuclear test ban treaty is close but by then nukes were an established technology.
Just looking at the industrial revolution and the internet as examples, many of the "left behind" nations did just fine.
Since the colonization started prior to the industrial revolution, it's not clear that the two are connected.
Examples I would include are Canada, Mexico, and several European nations.
> is still way ahead of everywhere else
Sure. I'm not questioning that. I'm questioning the proposition that whoever isn't ahead of everyone else will have a terrible standard of living.
Eventually, we arrived at widespread literacy and the greater distribution of knowledge and skills we see today, but it was a quite bumpy and deadly ride to get there. The greatest threat facing us is state, corporations, or rogue cells doing a repeat of the above with LLMs. Arguably this has already happened to a lesser extent with things like QAnon and social media.
I don’t think you can put the genie back in the bottle, but also we must acknowledge that “progress” has often come at a quite steep cost.
Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asilomar_Conference_on_Recombi...
https://www.history.com/news/who-were-the-luddites
You can’t enforce global slowing. Yes, I said it. Can’t.
Explain how a globally enforced slowing could be done in such a way to not invoke echoes of Teddy K. Or worse. If you wanted that sort of route, talking about it is a waste. Or you lack the power to do more than talk. (Yud is running his mouth as much as anyone.)
Therefore this is all rather silly.
When you say this, do you mean ML research, the use of ML in products, or something else?
Google's definitely behind on the LLM front, but that's just a tiny sliver of the ML landscape (if all the rage at the moment).
Google’s backwardness in terms of product development is very obvious in regards to LLMs but I think it’s pretty much true across the entire ML board.
Or are you thinking ML itself as a product (e.g. through Cloud APIs, that sort of thing)?
Since none of us can know what the potential capability is, how can we know that progress has been slow relative to it?
"I worked at OpenAI; now I'm a liberated being of general super-intelligence. Here's why slowing down AI dev is not wise."
No one is saying you owe the goog better but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Anyway, I disagree with you.
> “I don’t think asking one particular group to pause solves the challenges” ... “I don’t really understand who they’re saying could stop, and would every country in the world agree to stop, and why to stop ... But there are a lot of different opinions in this area.”
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business/bill-gates-says-cal...
Microsoft: "We take ethical AI seriously" Also Microsoft: "We're pushing out changes daily, we're moving at a rapid pace, learning on-the-fly"
But let's try a rehearsal: Everybody stop posting comments here for a day, lets do it now
This tech is out of control already. Nothing can stop it. Instead of wasting breath on that, focus the effort on something more important, like the alignment problem. At least that would bring more benefit.
With GPT-2 etc, while impressive and even useful, it wasn't entirely clear what the returns on further investment/scaling were going to be.
I think GPT-3, and especially GPT-4 has shown that as you scale beyond certain points, you get vastly better results.
So the race is now on toward full AGI, and as with all competitions, the winner takes all or nearly all.
If the most ethical companies halt or slow research, then progress will be dictated by less ethical companies. And IMHO 'less knowledge' is rarely the answer to anything.
It may be a game that's better not played, and maybe we'll get a 'CND' movement some time in the future, but for now there's no stopping development, and I think it's important that the more ethical institutions triumph or at least stay in the race.
The new service of millions of (soon hundreds of millions) people who just want real answers and ready to pay for it (and were clicking on the most expensive ads before) is a biggest conflict of interest for many competitors that were built upon the ad model.
I have an idea for the big companies: if they want GPT-4 to slow down, just try not catching up to it, so that it becomes the next monopoly that doesn't have to improve to be worth trillions of dollars (of course non of the FAANG companies want to let OpenAI to get all the eyeballs).