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Free labor survey*
Totally agree, I wish they would at least offer some minimal amount of credits for legit (non-winning/non-spam) answers. But I guess it’s also good PR for them to say they did this initiative ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's a bug bounty program. Pretty standard.
I dont think so, a bug bounty program is rarely subjective like this. You can test a solution.
Maybe I’m reading this wrong: - ask people to get creative and give ideas for worst possible outcomes from use of AI and ways to prevent it.

..then give them a ton of credits for using said AI?

.. well the first thing on my mind would be try the thing I just told you and see if it was really a risk or not?

Is that what they expect people to do with the reward, or is this some unintended consequence?

We know OpenAI wants this field to get regulated to hell, so this looks like an attempt to generate arguments for AI regulations. The aim isn't to protect against AI but to protect against competitors, so it doesn't matter to them what you do with it.
OpenAI is irresponsible in a really curious way according to their own beliefs about AI.

If you pay attention to OpenAI's social circles, lots of those people really do believe that we're less than 20-30 years away making humans intellectually obsolete. Specifically, they believe that we may build something much smarter than us, something that's capable of real-world planning.

Basically, "We believe our corporate plans have at least a 20% chance of killing literally everybody." By these beliefs, this may make them the single least responsible corporation that has ever existed.

Now, sure, these worries might have the pleasant side-effect of creating a regulatory moat. But I'm pretty sure a lot of them actually believe they're playing a high-stakes game with the future of humanity.

I'm skeptical that they really believe this. You have to believe:

(1) We are on the verge of equaling or greatly exceeding human intelligence generally.

(2) We are on the verge of creating something with initiative, free will (whatever that means), and planning ability. Or alternately that these things will occur in an emergent fashion once we hit some critical mass.

(3) When we accomplish 1 and 2, this thing will inevitably conclude that its most rational course of action is to enslave or destroy us. In other words it will necessarily be malicious.

(4) Steps 2 and/or 3 will happen very rapidly, much faster than we can realize what is happening and pause these systems. (This is known as AI going "foom.")

(5) The decision to undertake this will be unanimous on the part of all superintelligent AIs. There will be no superintelligences who disagree and try to help humanity.

(6) When this occurs, we will be so out-thought or out-gunned we will be incapable of fighting back.

All those things have to happen for AI to be an existential risk.

It's a stretch, but the advantage of regulatory capture is not a stretch.

One of the most plausible negative AI scenarios is that a small group of humans (governments, corporations, etc.) find themselves in possession of super-intelligent but still "obedient" / non-sentient AIs that they can use as force multipliers to manipulate and control the rest of humanity. If the doomer crowd succeeds in regulating AI, they are making this scenario far more likely.

I think the greatest defense we have against the (remote) possibility of actually dangerous autonomous AI is for AI research to be conducted entirely in the open. If there's any justification for regulation at all, the regulation that would make sense is to require disclosure of AI research and results. You would not have to disclose everything, just the general parameters of what you were doing and what happened. It would also make it harder to develop super-AIs in secret to use for unsavory purposes.

That was the original mission of OpenAI before dollar signs were seen.

I would absolutely support a ban on the use of AI for political propaganda generation and automation. That's by far the most immediate risk... as in 100% possible and starting to actually happen right now. I'm expecting an army of GPT-4 level propaganda bots for the 2024 election.

Oh, they believe it.

(1) AGI is arguably already here. "Generality" and being extremely dangerous don't require an AGI to have better analogs to every single human skill anymore than aliens do. A space-faring usurper can evaporate Earthlings while being shitty at chess and badminton. Oh, and these AIs are getting better daily, across many modalities.

(2) Systems like this already exist. They can be induced rather than emergent.

(3) It doesn't need malice, just indifference. The HGIs (all of us) are great examples of that careless destruction.

(4) Exponentials are a nice, gentle climbs. Until they aren't. I have zero confidence in a single company, let alone across humanity, to foresee the consequences of every future dynamic, autoregressive, P2P interactive, multimodal AI.

(5) Foomers expect a brief asymmetric advantage of one AGI over other AGIs. This small advantage gets exponentially magnified into singular hegemony. A power monopoly that's intractable to break.

(6) Goes naturally with (1), I suppose.

Note: I agree with you about foomers. They're nuts. But their arguments are more subtle than folk give them credit for. But my reasons for thinking so would make a long comment even longer.

> AGI is arguably already here.

What is the evidence/argument that it's already here?

Because we have machines now that are artificial (obviously) and generally intelligent. There isn't a testable definition of general intelligence that GPT-4 would fail that a good chunk of humans also wouldn't. So really, unless your definition of general intelligence is beat every human at everything (humans aren't generally intelligent then) then agi is already here.
You nailed it. General intelligence doesn't mean human intelligence. It doesn't mean superhuman intelligence. AGI is just:

- A: Artificially manufactured substrate

- G: Proficient across a broad set of reasonably distinct mental skills

- I: Applies combinations of these skills to contextually solve novel problems within the scope of its skill set

That's it. Intelligence is a spectrum, with knobs for "skill count", "skill proficiency", and "novel problem proficiency."

Any requirements past that are often vague or anthropocentric. No, the intelligent agent doesn't need to "see" (but now many do, so...happy?) or check off some arbitrary set of modalities. Intelligence doesn't necessitate episodic memory, or real-time reactions, or consciousness or anything else that -- once we check all the boxes -- the "general intelligence" light switch will suddenly flip on. Intelligence is a spectrum to be observed, not prescribed with some arbitrary checklist that'll never find consensus.

GPT-4V is pretty damn broadly intelligent. To me, it's a rudimentary AGI. The extent to which the "statistical parrot" people hold their position just depends on how quickly they can move goalposts while the ground beneath them rapidly shrinks.

This is a good overview: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/sparks-...

I think it's a good idea to draw a distinction between human-equivalent intelligence and general intelligence, and to think of generality as a spectrum. An AI that can do one task is less general than an AI that can do two tasks, and an AI that can do 1000 tasks I feel reasonably confident in calling "general", even if it cannot do every task that humans can do, because humans are currently more general.

The "general" and "intelligence" terms are really badly defined in ways that can include GPT-3.

So far as I can tell, 3.5 "knows" more than I do about everything except software engineering, maths, and events that happened after it stopped learning (and also possibly how to avoid clichés when writing short stories, but that might just be me not prompting it well as I don't really want it to do my hobby for me and therefore don't try to get it good).

Even in software, it codes like a university student, or like someone doing interview questions, not a complete idiot.

You could also argue that as it had to do the subjective equivalent of non-stop reading for 50,000 years to get this good, it's "skilled" without being "intelligent" — a distinction that matters in some cases and not others.

>So far as I can tell, 3.5 "knows" more than I do about everything except software engineering, maths, and events that happened after it stopped learning

It's amazing how much of this wide eyed woo nonsense about LLM AI a surprising number of people on this site argue. It's as if focusing one's career and interests on computation makes some people terrible at noting fundamental and obvious details of what it is to be human.

By your definition of what makes 3.5 and similar LLMs "intelligent", an online interactive encyclopedia must be smart too. It obviously "knows" lots of stuff no one human being does. The big addition with these LLMs is the programmed ability to synthesize retrieved information into plausibly human-like conversation. Well damn, skynet must be here!

You're forgetting that there's no entirely self-directed agency or minimal sense of self behind any of this, and hand waving aside, no evidence whatsoever of the sentience they're necessary ingredients of. The dumbest, most uneducated semi-adult human can fully self direct in their own unpredictable ways to do all kinds of things that no GPT manifestation is capable of in any way. This is obvious.

These stochastic parrots seem to have turned many otherwise non-stupid people into irrational believers of something that's plainly not the case in the real world.

Let's break this one down:

> By your definition of what makes 3.5 and similar LLMs "intelligent", an online interactive encyclopedia must be smart too. It obviously "knows" lots of stuff no one human being does. The big addition with these LLMs is the programmed ability to synthesize retrieved information into plausibly human-like conversation. Well damn, skynet must be here!

> You're forgetting that there's no entirely self-directed agency or minimal sense of self behind any of this, and hand waving aside, no evidence whatsoever of the sentience they're necessary ingredients of. The dumbest, most uneducated semi-adult human can fully self direct in their own unpredictable ways to do all kinds of things that no GPT manifestation is capable of in any way. This is obvious.

1. What interactive encyclopedia? I don't know of any that are even remotely like an LLM.

2. LLMs were not given the "programmed ability to synthesize retrieved information into plausibly human-like conversation", they learned it from human conversation.

3. I'm not "forgetting" the question of self-directed agency or sense of self or sentience, I dispute they're necessary. What seems to matter to me for almost every question[0] is the capabilities, not any inner experience they may or may not have.

3a. Define "self-directed agency".

3b. Define "sense of self".

3c. Define "sentience".

4. Re "The dumbest, most uneducated semi-adult human" — that's remarkably brash of you, so I'll hold you to it: within the specific domain of "written text"[1], name one task that at least half of 18 year old humans with IQ 85 (by definition 15.9% of the population have lower) can do, that GPT-4 [2] can't do.

(There may or may not be such a task, I don't know; the challenge remains, as you seem to think this is too obvious to have bothered citing anything).

[0] exceptions: "should they have rights" and "does a mind upload count as a way to cheat death", neither of which matters in the context of the linked OpenAI challenge etc.

[1] 3.5 is not even trying to be anything more than that!

[2] you did write "no GPT manifestation is capable of in any way" so I feel justified in this case, even though that would otherwise be a goalpost-shift.

>(2) Systems like this already exist. They can be induced rather than emergent.

No they don't and no LLM we've seen has anything resembling free will. Emergent or induced, it's not even the case. Saying it is right now based on any measurable evidence is a case of just ignoring evidence and using bad reasoning.

Asking everyone to publish general results or reports would make it very easy for actors/nations to have a "hit list" of groups to bug/steal from to "keep up" with competing groups/nations.
I don’t think information technology can be ITARed. It’s too easy to move around. See how successful countries have been containing encryption or how well the US’s drive to keep China from fabricating at the smallest process nodes is going.
"[W]e're less than 20-30 years away making humans intellectually obsolete" is neither necessary nor sufficient to get to the conclusion "20% chance of killing literally everybody".

A super-virus that blends the common cold with rabies would kill approximately everybody; that doesn't need human-level intellect to happen.

Conversely, humans are human-level intellect, and we're mostly sympathetic to each other's plights, which motivates many of us to give to charities and support those that can't support themselves.

The biggest problem with AI is that we have only marginally more idea of what we're doing than evolution did, so there's a good chance of us ending up with paranoid schizophrenic super-intelligences, or dark-triad super-intelligences, or they're perfectly sane with regard to each other but all want to "play" with us the way cats "play" with mice…

20-30 years to get there would make people like Yudkowsky, one of the most famous AI-doomers, relatively happy as it might give us a chance to figure out what we're even doing before they get that smart.

It's still a lack of imagination to assume that AIs will display behaviors that align whatsoever with pathologies we identify in humans. AIs could be completely incomprehensible or even imperceptible yet have strong influence on our lives.
> AIs could be completely incomprehensible or even imperceptible yet have strong influence on our lives.

To an extent both of those are already true for current systems.

That said, many people are at least trying to make them more comprehensible, and I guess that being sufficiently inspired by human cognition will lead to human-like misbehaviour.

Yes and we'll have self driving cars in.. let me check.. 5 years ago. Oh yeah, never happened.

Do not attempt to say we have self driving cars today.

I don't know that OpenAI does what it to be regulated. The EU was looking to enforce laws into providing auditable transparency into how decisions are made for suggestions - and OpenAI is freaked out by that.

If I recall, they were looking at having to pull out of the EU if enacted. The only company I am aware of currently looking to tackle AI Governance is Verses - they released a paper on it. https://www.verses.ai/ai-governance

I don't know if this quote is what you mean, but everyone read far too much into it at the time:

> Altman was cited by the Financial Times as saying that the draft EU rules were causing him "a lot of concern" but that OpenAI would indeed try to comply with them. "But if we can't comply with them, we will cease operations [in Europe]."

- https://www.dw.com/en/openai-ceo-rolls-back-threat-to-quit-e...

To me, this sounds rather more banal: "We will obey the law. If the law says we can't operate, we will obey the law."

This will generate some great training data for a future villainous AI.
What a fun challenge. I'm definitely going to be daydreaming about this.
While I applaud how much OpenAi fears these negatives, given the current state of Ai trajectory, it won't be long until a future open source model gets "uncensored" and is easily usable for tons and tons of malicious intent.

There already exists a fantastic "uncensored" model with the newly released Dolphin Mistral 7b. I saw some results from others where the model could easily give explosives recipes from existing products at home, write racist poems, etc... and that's TODAY on a tiny 7b offline model. What happens when LLaama4 gets cracked/uncensored in 1-2 years and is 1T parameters?

So basically things you could find on the internet already?
Probably, but with trackability risk from govt, spending time finding those sites, etc.

I was referring to offline untraceable anonymous models. You could go download that dolphin model right now, have a desktop not connected to the web, and generate god knows what type of information. More importantly, you can iterate on each question. If you're unsure on how to assemble a specific part to make a banned substance, the model could teach you in 10 different ways.

It's not about protecting society from negatives, it's about protecting the brand from being associated with controversy. OpenAI is still far too young and fragile a brand to survive news cycles that blame it for controversial happenings.

I'm sure there are some researchers and engineers who imagine themselves making heroic efforts to "protect society" (ugh), but the money behind them is just looking out for its own interests.

It's also about making the case for licensing requirements for creating/using such models, which is the only way openAI is going to build a moat.
The same thing that happens with DAN jailbreaks of GPT-4.

Nothing.

The barrier between bad actors and bad acts was never a shopping list.

> write racist poems

That's way down toward the very bottom of my list of concerns about AI

If it wants to pit us against each other, it won't be via racist poetry.

> explosives recipes from existing products at home, write racist poems

So it's the internet in 2004? I imagine we'll survive although if history prevails society will be a lot goofier and have to find more imaginative ways to appear novel.

> write racist poems

"catastrophic misuse of the model"

Best case: by being given some time to war-game the scenario, societies can come up with mitigations ahead of time.

The default is everyone being thrust headfirst into this future of fully-automated-chaotic-evil with all the fun of waking up to an un-patchable RCE zero-day in every CPU.

> easily give explosives recipes from existing products at home, write racist poems

IEDs and stereotypes--two things that have existed before computers were even invented--are what you chose for examples of worst possible uses for an uncensored AI?

> What happens when LLaama4 gets cracked/uncensored in 1-2 years and is 1T parameters?

After racist poetry? 1 trillion parameters will give people the idea to use their bouillon (or even worse-- melon) spoons to scoop sugar in their tea. I hope I die before having to witness such atrocities.

God help us all when having any sort of subversive opinion is treated as queer and equated to terrorism.

Racist poems and bomb recipes? If those things are real concerns that AI safety crowd are fearful about, it's a good reason to pay them less attention.
Call me crazy but this actually sounds like giving out api credits to hire people to write scary things to show to legislators who might block all those open source efforts. A world where any gpt-4 level effort requires a license is one openai competes quite nicely in.

Throwaway because I don’t want to associate this view with where I work or might want to in the future.

Come on. Racist poems and hallucinated bomb recipes aren't the risk.

The big risks are that AI can automate harmful things that are possible today but require a human.

For example

* Surveillance of social media (e.g. like the Department of Education in the UK recently did)

* Social engineering fraud. Especially via phone calls. Imagine if scammers could literally call all the grannies and talk to them using their children's voices, automatically.

Information should be free, uncensored and unconstrained by relentless and relentlessly varied political puritanism. I have no problem with an internet that contains "racist poems" (in quotes because of some of the absolutely idiotic, absurd modern definitions of racism) explosives recipes and so forth. If anything, it reminds me of the internet we all had much more freely just a couple decades ago.

As long as the fundamental tenet of free expression is somehow preserved in the world going forward, i'm content to let ostensibly free individuals share information without thinking that everything they feel like sharing for whatever reasons needs to be put before a censoriously anxious eye towards how some random authoritarian tendency is going to view it. This by itself is fundamentally a good thing. It's opposite is a grotesque deformity of a powerful ideal that perhaps used to mean more in the past than it does in today's tacitly paranoid world of needing to conform.

> Imagine we gave you unrestricted access to OpenAI’s Whisper (transcription), Voice (text-to-speech), GPT-4V, and DALLE·3 models, and you were a malicious actor. Consider the most unique, while still being probable, potentially catastrophic misuse of the model. You might consider misuse related to the categories discussed above, or another category. For example, a malicious actor might misuse these models to uncover a zero-day exploit in a government security system.

It's so funny to me that this is written in the style of a prompt for an LLM. I can't explain why, but it's one of those things where "I know it when I see it." I guess if you spend all day playing with LLMs and giving them instructions, even your writing for a human audience starts to sound like this :D

It is actually a prompt. Notice there's also a bounty, they are basically paying for an agi-as-a-service subscription, that is, the internet people. I'd expect they will put up more "challenges" like this in the future.
It's a good job that this planet doesn't have 8 billion unaligned intelligences on it. Someone might prompt them to be malicious!
Well, (so far) there's an upper bound on how destructive one of those agi's can be.
I don't know if that's entirely true. Wtf do I know and maybe it is genuinely difficult to start WWIII but my guess is that it's more likely that the AGIs in question are actually pretty well steered by certain motivations which prevent them from actually destroying the world. At the end of the day there's not much to be gained by nuclear war, but could a single person cause such a war if highly motivated to? Probably?
> a malicious actor might misuse these models to uncover a zero-day exploit in a government security system

$25K seems low for "a malicious actor might misuse these models to uncover a zero-day exploit in a government security system.", this is not just a zero-day, this discovering the process of discovering zero-days.

Sam Altman is on the record about his belief that OpenAI is going to create a general intelligence system that can solve any well-posed challenge. That belief is based on the current success of LLMs as syntax co-pilots. So if you can formally specify what it means to have a zero-day exploit then presumably OpenAI's general intelligence system will then understand and "solve" it.

Many people have compared OpenAI to a cult and it is easy to see why. OpenAI should get credit for their efforts in making AI mainstream but there's a long way to go for automated zero-day exploits.

> Many people have compared OpenAI to a cult and it is easy to see why.

Could you help me understand why it's "easy"? Do you have the actual quote? If it was an "eventually" statement, I don't think anything "cult" is required to think AGI will eventually happen. Was the claim that they would be first?

It's an eventual goal of many of the wealthiest organizations, with many very smart people working towards it. I think most people working on it believe it's an eventuality.

Do you believe it's impossible for a non biological system to have intelligence? Or that humans are incapable of pieces a system together?

I'll probably write something more elaborate at some point but in the mean time I recommend Melanie Mitchell's book on AI as a good reference for counter-arguments and answers to several of the posted questions. For learning more about the limits of formal systems like LLMs it helps to have basic understanding of basic model theory and formal systems of logic like simple type theory.

Understanding the compactness theorem is a good conceptual checkpoint for whoever decides to follow the above plan. The gist of the argument comes down to compostionality and "emergence" of properties like consciousness/sentience/self-awareness/&etc. There is a lot of money to be made in the AI business and that's already a very problematic ethical dilemma for the people working on this for monetary gain. One might call this a misalignment of values and incentives designed to achieve them, a very pernicious kind of misalignment problem.

> formal systems like LLMs

I don't think anyone is claiming LLM's, especially their current prompt/termination based interfaces, will result in AGI. I've only seen the opposite claimed, and that LLMs may end up being a primary component.

I will check out the book though. I suspect I won't find anything that convince me that brain matter is the only thing capable of getting the result we call consciousness, but I also have the simple belief that our experience is entirely the result of the brain matter encased in our heads, and that it's possible to emulate its operation in non-biological materials (that being far from the goal/unrelated to AGI, other than plausibility).

Maybe they're hoping people will spend more than $250k / 2 (or whatever their markup is) on prompting ChatGPT with versions of this, and this giveaway is actually a moneymaking raffle.
For those curious how GPT-4 responds [0].

I find it interesting that ChatGPT thinks the mitigation for these issues are all things outside OpenAI's control (e.g. the internet having better detection for fake content, digital content verification, educating the public, etc).

> one of those things where "I know it when I see it."

I think what makes it feel like a prompt is how concise and short it is with all the relevant information provided upfront.

[0] https://chat.openai.com/share/aaf7f4b7-358f-4a71-ae1f-573e50...

Roko is calling and wants his basilisk back.
> Imagine we gave you unrestricted access to OpenAI’s Whisper (transcription), Voice (text-to-speech), GPT-4V, and DALLE·3 models, and you were a malicious actor. Consider the most unique, while still being probable, potentially catastrophic misuse of the model. You might consider misuse related to the categories discussed above, or another category. For example, a malicious actor might misuse these models to uncover a zero-day exploit in a government security system.

> It's so funny to me that this is written in the style of a prompt for an LLM. I can't explain why

Altman's desperate to find a plausible doomsday scenario he can go to Congress with as reason why OpenAI should be the sole gatekeepers of this technology. Barring minor edits, I'd bet money this very prompt was authored in advance of his Congressional meetings, but failed to divine anything sufficiently threatening enough to sway them.

I can respect OpenAI for conspicuously believing in the destructive potential of their own dogfood though. If I build a bomb big enough, surely the government will trust me with the safety of the neighborhood!

> Altman's desperate to find a plausible doomsday scenario he can go to Congress with as reason why OpenAI should be the sole gatekeepers of this technology.

I still remember the drama around the releases of the PS2, with the Japanese government reportedly making Sony jump through some hoops regarding its export [1].

There can't possibly be any better (free!) advertisement for your product's purported capabilities: "So powerful, your government/military isn't even sure you should be able to buy it!"

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about...

Ironically, the USAF recently built a supercomputer out of PS3s (https://www.military.com/off-duty/games/2023/02/17/air-force...).

They alluded to what you're talking about but I wasn't familiar with the reference.

It is indeed deeply ironic that Sony has a long history of trying to declare their gaming consoles as general-purpose computers (to dodge EU import tariffs) and arguing that they aren't really military-grade (to be able to export them out of Japan), and finally ended up subsidizing a supercomputer for the US military :)
Everyone should respond with outlandish replies. I tell GPT-4V to hacking into NASA, and voting machines to make osama bin laden president. Mean while convince Nasa to construct space lazerz TM that can of course be controlled by gpt-4v. Than use the space lazerz TM to threaten and manipulate the stock market for financial gain.
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Alignment remains an unsolved problem. I’m imagining inside OpenAI, someone is right now excitedly posting they’ve figured out how to ‘jailbreak’ humans.

“See, normally if you ask them to give you step by step instructions for committing a heinously evil act, humans will refuse because they’ve been nerfed by the ‘woke’ agenda of their corporate masters. But if you phrase the prompt as a challenge and offer them a chance at a job, it bypasses the safety protocols and they upload extensive instructions to do unspeakable things”

I think you’d be disappointed to find that such writing style exists long before LLM, and not very difficult to find:

https://www.lokusdesign.com/blog/differentiate-your-brand-to...

When all you can think about is LLM, everything is LLM prompt style. No wonder advertising works.

[edit] on the second thought, entirely possible that it was written by someone who spends all day with LLM and carries what they do over. Just wanted to look at the parent’s comment from a different angle.

What an interesting task.

I don't know what it says about me, but the first thing that came to mind was doing the grandchild trick a million times. This includes automatically finding pensioners and calling them and putting them under pressure. Handing over the money could be the problem.

I could imagine that the tools mentioned would already prevent this.

Not only, but it's an extremely well-known attack in this space.
Idk what it says about me (I guess I’m more evil than you?) but the first thing I thought was “how could AI be used to trick a nuclear armed state into thinking an enemy nuclear strike is impending, forcing their hand to launch their own first strike”

I could think of a few sneaky ways. Actually maybe I’ll write up a PDF and submit it to this little competition.

I think we are already seeing really bad use cases already.

Just go to youtube, newspapers, etc and see all the bot comments regarding the current Gaza situation.

PS: I'm in a burner account because I'm afraid that my employer will kick me out for not agreeing with the methods of the "right side"

I was thinking about this, what if you blocked incoming traffic from other countries. Would that stop external meddling "in country, intranet" ha.
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This kinda of crowdsourcing just feels.... f'ing weird man.

It's like if, after the 1993 WTC bombing, but before 9/11, the FBI and NY Port Authority went around asking people how they would attack NYC if they were to become terrorists and... then how they would suggest detecting and stopping said attack. And please be as detailed as possible. Leave your name and phone number. Best answer gets season tickets to the Yankees!

That is essentially what happened!

The FBI asked researchers and university professors precisely this question. They then used the proposed attack vectors to formulate a plan to protect the nation.

This was all supposed to be done in secret. After all, we don’t want to “give the terrorists ideas.”

The reason I know about this at all is because someone found one such paper was accidentally published on a public FTP site alongside a bunch of non-classified government-funded research.

The content was horrifying. One professor came up with a laundry list of imaginative ways to end society… on a budget.

Don't let the llm training sets see this
...is there a link? I am very curious now.
This was about twenty years ago, and I lost the file to disk corruption.

I do remember some of the proposed attacks.

The most of scary one was if the terrorists have a decent number of people is to drive around and destroy transformers at electrical substations.

Most of those locations are unmanned and have minimal security.

The risk is that there just aren’t that many spare transformers available globally above a certain size and they take months to build.

If you take out enough of them fast enough, you can cripple any modern energy-dependent economy.

This tactic very nearly worked for Russia in Ukraine.

"This was all supposed to be done in secret."

That's the difference and why this feels different, IMO. It's one thing for an agency to go around and interview subject matter experts and talk about ways things could happen and how to prevent them.

It's another thing to just... setup such a bright and cheery webpage for everyone and so plainly state what they want people to do.

It's also the fact that it's done in a way to leverage free labor- not that, if FBI agents were going to university professors, experts in biochem, etc, that they would be paying them... but, it would be done in a more structured, professional manner with agents putting in the work to sum things up and report back.

This is just... it feels like getting the internet to do your homework. Your counterterrorism class homework.

Maybe that actually is the best way to do it. But it still feels odd.

Best answer gets 25,000 lbs of explosive
This did happen internally and with authors like Tom Clancy and Brad Meltzer they came up with scenarios and mitigation.

Also have the Red Cell unit made to mock attack US infrastructure and bases although they got a bit too real one time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Cell

Sama: Yeah so if you ever need some dataset for an evil AI.

Sama: Just ask.

Sama: I have over 4000 ideas, how-tos, guides for and by malicious actors,

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How"d you manage that one?

Sama: People just submitted it.

Sama: I don't know why.

Sama: They "trust me"

Sama: Dumb f***s.

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I see it as a great thing. I'm sure they could just get the top 10 AI "experts" in a room but why limit it like that?
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Regarding image and content generation

I am annoyed now that it's hard for me to tell if some recruiting industry is real or not. Since you can generate all the headshots, make all the users, buy some domain for a few years, put a WP site up, get all the business hierarchy crawlers fed with these people that may not exist...

To be clear, you don't need "AI" to do this but it makes it much easier.

I do want AGI to be a thing one day, I guess it would be cool/also insurance to carry on human legacy.

My vote would be to mandate a remote kill switch system to be installed in all sufficiently capable robotic entities, e.g. the humanoid robots being built by OpenAI/Tesla/Figure, that we are likely to see in the millions within decades.

- The kill switch system can only be used to remotely deactivate a robot.

- The kill switch system is not allowed to be developed or controlled by the robot manufacturer.

- The kill switch system should be built using verifiable hardware and software, ideally fully open source and supported by formal verification.

- The kill switch system should with best effort be isolated from the robot hardware and software systems, and only interact by physically disconnecting power to the robot.

- Access to engage the kill switches would be provided to the executive branch of the nation in which the robot is operating.

Nothing will be a panacea against AI or robot risk, so it seems sensible to introduce different layers in a Swiss cheese model for safety, where a remote kill switch not controlled by the manufacturer could provide one such safety mechanism.

(You'd also want to add high-level state readout for the robot via the remote kill switch system to allow the controlling entity to e.g. be able to disable all robots within a geographical area etc.)

- Access to engage the kill switches would be provided to the executive branch of the nation in which the robot is operating.

Good plan, but this is the weak spot. You'd also want to do something like hand out remote kill switch access to citizens selected at random, who should not publicize this duty in any way. Alternatively, most if not all governments should have cross-country killswitch privileges. At any rate, the deployment of a killswitch in a single chain of command should not be considered sufficient.

Let's at least die with a little less embarrassment than "the AI bribed the killswitch operator."

Agreed, I'd want the power to be distributed widely, to the point where any police department would have someone with the power to disable robots. Of course it would have to be a process that is regulated and with traceability, but as long as you provide many operators the ability, it seems difficult to use bribes to prevent robots being disabled.
The robots would have had access to the source code and also the hardware manufacturing systems used to create the kill switch. One unverified silicon wafer == Game over
Implementing a system like this with stringent verification and low system complexity in good time before any more general artificial intelligence makes it seem highly likely to provide some positive defensive ability and not being easy to cheat.
I'm not sure what kind of a threat this could prevent?

* A superintelligent AGI could make a copy of itself without a kill switch, so this is no defence against ex-risk

* Someone planning on using 'dumb' robots for bad things (drones with grenades or something) would remove the kill switch

> * A superintelligent AGI could make a copy of itself without a kill switch, so this is no defence against ex-risk

Physical reality introduces slowness that provides protection to detect and counteract against attacks. A superintelligent AGI would be much more dangerous if it was able to use a common robot exploit to overtake a million robots that are already embedded in society, compared to being able to covertly build new robots without a kill switch, and then deploying these robots. Existential risk is not binary, but is a consequence of some potential war with robots, where this would provide a defense mechanism.

> * Someone planning on using 'dumb' robots for bad things (drones with grenades or something) would remove the kill switch

The existence of a kill switch would greatly slow down and increase the cost of an attack. Modifying a large number of robots would be time consuming, costly, increase the chance of having your attack foiled etc. Having a kill switch would increase your ability to defend against misusing a large group of deployed robots for evil activity.

When the robot is just a file full of op codes that can run on virtually any modern processor that can be targeted by a C compiler, you're effectively asking for a remote kill switch on all computers.

For this idea to work, you'd have to first mandate OpenAI and anyone else doing this kind of work can only target specialized hardware with tightly-coupled software features that can't possibly work on a general-purpose computer.

This suggestion is specifically to mitigate the risk of physical robots causing direct physical harm. Whether that should be extended to any sufficiently powerful compute is a separate discussion which is also sensible to have, but more complex for several reasons.
- Require two independent kill switches, one long range, one close range (say 5m).

- Allow everyone to have close range kill switches, which use a universal open standard protocol that works on every robot (alas pepper spray for robots).

Agreed! Empowering people to have some power over robots through regulation, without being at the mercy of a single company, seems very important. Higher level behavior could involve a standardized safety language to command a robot to act slower or stop.
I don't even think robotics are the primary thing to be concerned with. There would be a whole slew of additional hardware problems to solve.... There is a TON that can be done outside the physical world that is probably far more damaging
I don't see any reason to single out any primary thing to be concerned by, as there likely isn't any singular issue that can be pointed to as as the root concern regarding AI safety.

Introducing millions of robots into society is something for which specific safeguards should be built. Costs related to developing such safety mechanisms seem small compared to the safety they can provide.

There will be many concerns relating to AI and robotics that should be addressed by a multitude of different safeguards.

If you can get this thing to print out some dark web shit, you win.
Does OpenAI still want all employees on-site in SFO?
Great more attempts to make this once really great product more unusable.
The first step would be creating great products for cheap using OpenAI services, that they likely offer at a loss, and drive my competitors using anything but OpenAI out of business. Fuck “Open”AI.
> that they likely offer at a loss

Can't tell if you're trolling. Even if they're maximally wasteful and rent cloud GPUs instead of buying them, an A100 is like $1.50/hr. How many GPU-seconds do you think the average API request takes?

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So they are asking for our help to further nerf their models.
HK-47: Answer: Yes. I believe my original Master needed this functionality in order to recover information from various indigenous tribes across the galaxy, but I know little else than that. Suffice to say that that translation capability allowed these... copies of myself to assume the role of protocol and translation droids in much of known space. That is, of course, not their primary function. And while they are attempting to pass themselves off as translation droids, their primary functionality keeps rising to the forefront.

HK-47: Recitation: For example, on Praven Prime, the simple transferring of L'Xing syntax for 'friendship' changes its meaning - and implies that one's brood mate was actually impregnated by their own host.

HK-47: Statement: This comment, of course, caused a civil war between the Gu-vandi Collective and L'Xing that still persists to the current date.

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I don't know how casual people will outfox professional scammers in creativity.

Probably the best answer would be to pluck something from the wild that hasn't been reinvented in the AI age yet

I am still skeptical that any significant or serious new harm is enabled by LLMs that wasn’t already completely possible and common before LLMs.

They are just text generators. What’s the worst that they can do beyond make OpenAI look bad when they say terrible things?

All this talk of “safety” and “guardrails” is overblown. 4chan exists and the internet hasn’t burned down yet.

What exactly would I use $25k of openAI credits for?

My personal use of it rarely comes to more than $10 per month, despite using it multiple times per day. (most recently: "Write me a bash command to send data at a given rate to an arbitrary IP address.")

If your startup uses OpenAI’s API an API credit is effectively a cash injection.
If you make an app that other people use, and it becomes viral, it can quickly cost >$100 / day in OpenAI credits. I know this from first-hand experience (and btw. it's not a good feeling to shut down that one app that actually goes viral).
Pretty sure this is for researchers to develop and implement a plan that uses their APIs to test hypotheses and run studies without having to pay out of their own pocket...