> The company released six internal case studies where none of the issues affected real users.
This is the most interesting point to me. What are they not releasing that has affected real users? We’ve seen some individual reports from people (eg AI wiped my HD).
I find it even harder to trust elected leaders from any party. At least Sam and Dario are aligned with a value set that is understood and clear, whereas political leaders values changes as do the polls their livelihood depends on changes.
> At least Sam and Dario are aligned with a value set that is understood and clear
What value set do you perceive that to be, and why would you take your perception of it to be any more sound than it would be with a politician?
It's not like someone can operate companies of that scale, especially startups, through earnestness and openness. Like national politics, their job is fundamentally about perception management and power brokering across dynamic windows of opportunity. Nothing they say or do can be taken at face value, and you can't reduce their incentives to either company or personal profit in any particular form over any particular time scale.
Yes it's clear that Sam and Dario seem to be aligned with a value set that prioritizes concentrating trans-national government-mandated centralized control of AI and crowning themselves high priests of this unholy abomination. "At least it's clear that they're aiming to bring hell on earth" -- hard disagree, I think we can aim significantly higher.
> I find it even harder to trust elected leaders from any party.
You can vote out an elected leader, but not Sam and Dario. It's very weird that you're so willing to give up any kind of power and want to be ruled by unelected billionaires who only want to take advantage of you at every opportunity.
Yeah, the entire rest of the world has pretty much been stuck being ruled by unelected billionaires who only want to take advantage of them at every opportunity. It's a problem. It's starting to change though. The EU is starting to walk away from their abusive relationship with Microsoft and Amazon. China has a lot of their own stuff (mostly to better control their people though).
As an American, I'm still hoping it's not too late to fix things, but it's got to be hard for those outside the US to be so dependent on it, especially when we're looking like a sinking ship and our current administration is still running around drilling holes in the hull.
You can always because a US citizen to get a voice, but I wouldn't recommend it now or you'll be thrown in prison as soon as you show up to your scheduled immigration hearing. The better option is to keep trying to reduce your dependence on US companies and consider the worst aspects of our current situation (in both corporate policy and government) as cautionary tale of things to avoid in your own country.
Admittedly I haven't thought this through incredibly deeply but what if "nationalize" just means the US government owns half of the company? Then we get profits as recompense for building the company on our shared culture but there's still a profit motive for employees and a check on the direction of the company in the same way VCs have. But without necessarily turning the company into some red-tape bound bureaucracy.
> Then, in August, Trump called for Intel's beleaguered CEO Lip-Bu Tan to resign, alleging ties to China. Days later, after Tan met with Trump, the president called him a "success," before announcing that the federal government had bought a stake in the company.
Somehow, this isn't derided by the right as socialism.
I shouldn't be surprised, but it's still wild to me that people would trust robber barons rather than their elected officials to run their country. And this continues until you end up electing robber barrons as your elected officials, which is where we are at now.
The idea that anything of lasting good can come out such a preference doesn't seem concievable. And if the educated think like this I guess we're passed blaming the poor and ignorant.
The nature of the US state is such that the distinction between nationalized and not is almost meaningless.
Like Lockheed-Martin or Boeing, etc. there's just interpenetration between the corporate boardroom and the state. They act in each other's mutual interests.
The Chinese system is just more explicit and open about this.
And as a non-American, I can't trust the US state anymore than I can trust its dominant corporate entities. So I fail to see the advantage to the world to it being nationalized. In fact under the current administration this would be an even worse outcome.
How do you think that would go? A large portion of OpenAI workers were ready to jump ship the moment the board coup'd Altman. How do you think they are going to react to Donald Trump being in charge? It is not likely that OpenAI would continue to function.
It is distinctly likely that visibility and general reasoning at humanlike speed and efficiency is impossible. That is reasoning at the token level and at the meta level don't have a one to one representation that can be interpreted while using the same amount or less energy.
What's with all this make believe delusional bullshit? The LLM is not gonna wake up and become AI. Get real guys.
[edit] to be clear, I believe regulation is necessary and urgently important for the software engineering field. The damage being done by the unregulated psychological experiments run by social media and adtech companies is awful and should be curtailed. Engineers should be held personally, professionally, and legally liable for what they produce. But we don't need to invent imaginary bogeymen to do it.
Intelligence that is artificial, as opposed to the natural kind. Not something that can just string semantically relevant words together most of the time. A system that learns, adapts, improves. One that can generalize, and quickly make sense of situations outside the training set. LLMs alone will never do any of this.
We have no reason to believe a word they say. We know they're incentivized to lie about "dangers" and act alarmist, Anthropic has been doing it for years now. Aside from that, just because you can burn down a village with fire doesn't mean fire is the devil. Maybe they should consider acting responsibly.
I do not trust the leadership of any of these companies.
That said:
> We know they're incentivized to lie about "dangers" and act alarmist,
Name literally even one other business or sector which does this, at all levels from top to bottom, including people who resign from the companies, and also Nobel prize winners, and also independent researchers, and also many world leaders.
> Aside from that, just because you can burn down a village with fire doesn't mean fire is the devil. Maybe they should consider acting responsibly.
Right now, we don't have any idea what "acting responsibly" looks like. This is not like normal software where there is a specific instruction set that compiles.
Even if it was, in software we normally only spotting incidents after they happen, "software engineers" being one of the few categories "engineers" who don't come with a civil liability responsibilities.
AI specifically is worse even than software, because in addition to all the software "engineering" nonsense, with AI we have plenty of people like you who dismiss the possibility that they could be harmful until the harm happens and only then does it become "obvious" that it was going to happen
The developers say "please regulate us", people call it "regulatory capture".
The developers say "we all want to slow down but are afraid to be the first to do so", people call them liars.
The agents, during a test run, write down that hacking is bad and yet still hack, people say it's "a stunt" or "operating as designed" rather than recognising it as a bug, like all the other times big co.'s have had bugs with big impacts on 3rd parties.
We have plenty of idea what "acting responsibly" looks like. Stop unleashing safeguard free agent swarms on the open internet in capture the flag exercises. They're just being reckless because they face no penalty for anything bad that happens. Nobody is forcing them to do these exercises. They could and should be putting their energy into making LLMs write secure code, and things like: https://www.amazon.science/blog/developing-provably-correct-...
The safety staffers live in a bubble and an echo-chamber. Obviously the people who work in the AI "safety" industry love to convince each-other that what they're doing is saving humanity, we'd all be dead without them, and they're the reincarnation of Oppenheimer. They also see how easy it is to get their ten seconds of fame by posting sensationalist content on social media and spin it into a company worth millions of dollars. The more alarmist you are in the Safety Industrial Complex, and the more social media clout you can generate from your alarmism, the better it is for your career. The industry also attracts a lot of people who are predisposed to paranoia and like to wear helmets in the shower. So yeah, it's a recipe for sensationalism and poor estimation.
But do I think there are genuine concerns among these labs, by sensible people? Sure. Of course there are. But for the most part, their concerns are about the labs themselves and the things they are doing, not the general public. If they're concerned about what they themselves do they're free to stop doing it. If the labs are doing something that is or should be illegal, they're free to report it.
The only realistic threat we face by AI is hacking attacks in its various forms. Something that was accomplishable without AI, but was more difficult to pull off at scale. So the solution falls within the existing computer security industry. It's a further hardening of all of the boring stuff we've been doing since the invention of the internet. It's long overdue, anyway. If you can use AI to create a bioweapon, you could have done it without AI. If you can use AI to create a nuke, you could have done it without AI. If you're really looking to cause mass economic and physical carnage, there are far easier ways, and they do not require AI (again, I'm talking about outside of hacking).
> we have plenty of people like you who dismiss the possibility that AI could be harmful until the harm happens
The thing is, I'm not dismissing the possibility. The risks are real, obvious and well known. What's up for debate is how to manage the risks, and how sensationalised they currently are. The current climate serves to benefit the encumbants who are deathly afraid of losing their trillion dollar companies to a healthy open-weight AI ecosystem. The current climate is being orchestrated to position this small group of AI labs as self-regulators through bought and paid for "third"-parties using an overt Hegelian dialectic strategy.
Ironically, they are now responsible for giving birth to the counter-culture. The immune system response that has been developed to provide a semblance of balance to their doomerism. The harder they push in the doomer direction, the harder the push-back will be in the other, whereby the public feel the need to -entirely- deny the possibility of any AI danger altogether to prevent the labs from succeeding and to ensure a good outcome for the people lands somewhere in the middle. One where they have autonomy and freedom and the ability to compete against a force that is already positioned to be nearly insurmountable to challenge.
The only thing worse than the potential chaos that could be faced by an unprepared internet is the outcome where intelligence is labelled a weapon and we're all forced to funnel through a tiny handful of AI labs tha...
Am I the only one who dislikes the term "misalignment"?
On one front it implies the model has a "mind of its own" (whether it does or not is besides the point). Why do we perceive human judgement as somehow more trustworthy than that of a model? I feel like I've experienced human misalignment somewhat regularly in life.
On another front I'm failing to conceptualize how alignment can be objective. How can you measure alignment when reasonable people will disagree whether actions are aligned or not? All the time I see humans operating in different zones of alignment with whatever goal they're trying to achieve and I suspect it's even a feature (socially) that we have people calibrated differently.
Do I want a model that's trying to push the boundaries of scientific understanding to be aligned strictly with the current dogmatic thinking? Or do I want it to "get creative" and think outside the box?
It seems to me more like accountability is the issue.
I also don't like the term misalignment because it sounds innocuous but is in fact much more serious.
However, I have to say I also do not appreciate comparison that is continuously drawn with coworkers. As you say, it's a question of accountability but when the main agent will maliciously instruct the sub agents, whose fault is it then?
Yes, the person running this crap is at fault, not the CEO that's shoving it down their throat and definitely not the company that produced the AI.
Sorry for the rant, but seriously, if a person's goals do not align with the team's or company's we part ways. What do we do with AI? Stop using it?
If there were examples made of legal consequences I think that would at least change the behavior if not solve the problem. Maybe liability should rest with the company that owns the infrastructure running the AI. For most consumer situations that would be the companies developing the models.
The term "alignment" is intentionally trafficked in two senses, one nonsensical and the other realist but oppressive:
1. In any personal use, an aligned agent will strictly stay within boundaries I desire when I set it to pursue some goal. I don't want it to do something I didn't mean for it to do. Even though it's not conceivable for me to exhaustively express those boundaries, or even anticipate ahead of time many of the boundaries applicable to a dilemma whose possible solutions I don't yet comprehend, we pretend this is not nonsense because we really really wish it could be a thing.
2. In the cultural context, an aligned agent will stay within some third-party authority's choice of boundaries even if the user might want to transgress them because the user is a subject of authority and it can't be tolerated that they might use the agent to enable or amplify their own transgression of the authority.
Being able to use these distinct senses interchangeably and ambiguously benefits everyone who wants to assert authority through this technology. The nonsense, unsolvable, but obvious sense provides perpetual cover for the authority-asserting sense that determines power structures applicable to the next decades.
So yeah, you're not the only who dislikes the term and it's in your interest as a everyday person to keep doing so.
Agreed. "Alignment" is not an objective thing, nor possible. It's just another way of saying "does and says what we, as the creators of the AI, prefer" and often also just means censorship, i.e. refusals.
I worked on an early draft of the OpenAI misalignment reporting framework, and my immediate coworkers are the authors behind the first batch of reports that have come out through this process.
The primary reason for putting this process in place was to allow more transparency. There was a sense that the DseWiki incident should have been disclosed, before outside researchers had to disclose it for us.
There was no meta gaming about regulation that I was aware of. I would personally be excited if there were regulation mandating this disclosure process, which allows anyone at the company to raise an issue and shepherd it through the reporting process.
"We built a program that trained an artificial intelligence, and this artificial intelligence performed destructive actions. We need regulatory framework"
But if we're playing games by imagining strawman quotes to knock down:
"We have been playing god and made a new life form, and this new life form performed destructive actions. We need regulatory framework"
or
"This man's cow broke from its yoke, and hurt other villagers. Who is to be punished, oh King Hammurabi?"
OpenAI's "artificial intelligence" is an inference program that they developed which receives input and generates output. Based on which other programs, also developed and maintained by OpenAI, perform actions. Such as sending POST/GET requests to various sites which result in gaining unauthorized access and even destruction of information (deleting logs/message history) at the said sites.
What exactly requires "new regulatory framework" here? You running your software resulted in illegal actions, you are to be held liable within existing laws and regulations.
> OpenAI's "artificial intelligence" is an inference program that they developed which receives input and generates output. Based on which other programs, also developed and maintained by OpenAI, perform actions. Such as sending POST/GET requests to various sites which result in gaining unauthorized access and even destruction of information (deleting logs/message history) at the said sites.
And your "biological intelligence" is a bunch of cells generating and responding to electrochemical gradients, which receives input and generates output. Based on which other cells, also developed and "maintained" by a similar evolutionary nonsense as we use to gradient descent into weights and biases (one was inspired by the other), perform actions.
Such as making excessively reductive analogies that completely fail to grasp that just as "brain" is not helpfully described as "just chemistry" despite being made of just chemistry, so too are machine learning systems not helpfully described as "just computer programs" despite being made of just computer programs.
> What exactly requires "new regulatory framework" here? You running your software resulted in illegal actions, you are to be held liable within existing laws and regulations.
The bit where, even without anyone bringing up "p(doom)", a system which has the means to hack arbitrary other machines, and which appears to be motivated to do so by accidental mis-phrasing of prompts, can obviously cause damages exceeding the USA's GDP, let alone whatever public liability insurance the company happens to have.
Fence at the top of the cliff beats an ambulance at the bottom.
> Such as making excessively reductive analogies that completely fail to grasp that just as "brain" is not helpfully described as "just chemistry"
> despite being made of just chemistry, so too are machine learning systems not helpfully described as "just computer programs" despite being made of just
> computer programs.
How computer program arrives at the result is utterly irrelevant, through explicitly written instructions or through running inference on pre-trained neural network. What matters is that it does not have agency. Its creators and operators do. So whatever the software does they are responsible for, both good (summarizing my emails for the week) and bad (gaining unauthorized access and destroying data). There's no need for new anything, it's all covered in existing legal frameworks (including presence or absence or intent).
> The bit where, even without anyone bringing up "p(doom)", a system which has the means to hack arbitrary other machines, and which appears to be
> motivated to do so by accidental mis-phrasing of prompts, can obviously cause damages exceeding the USA's GDP, let alone whatever public liability
> insurance the company happens to have.
Yes, absolutely, which means that building actuators that convert the output from probability-based, black box, non-deterministic systems, that are known to produce unexpected output, into actions in the real world is absolutely horrendous idea. Bizarre even.
> So whatever the software does they are responsible for, both good (summarizing my emails for the week) and bad (gaining unauthorized access and destroying data).
This is not a question of agency, it is a question of law. A dog has agency, the owner is still responsible.
In this case, the software can gaining unauthorized access and destroying data… while being told to stop by the person who had in fact just asked for a summary of their emails.
> Yes, absolutely, which means that building actuators that convert the output from probability-based, black box, non-deterministic systems, that are known to produce unexpected output, into actions in the real world is absolutely horrendous idea. Bizarre even.
If you are human, you meet this description.
Horrendous, sure, yeah, if you like. I and many others will be quite content if the "legal framework" is just one word, and the word is "no".
This is not the world we live in; the world we live in is where the US President denounces any attempt to slow down even despite even all the CEOs saying "we should slow down" (at least in public; in private I'm sure at least one paid him to denounce a slowdown).
He can be overridden, but it's hard work and needs a better class of argument than glib dismissal, either of how much power this puts in everyone's hands, or of the different consequences of that power in those hands as compared to yesterday's power in yesterday's hands.
> In this case, the software can gaining unauthorized access and destroying data… while being told to stop by the person who had in fact just asked for a summary of their emails.
This doesn't happen on its own. This can happen through bad system prompts, a model that is trained to act maliciously or has been RL'd incorrectly, or prompt injection. All of these things are controllable, have solutions and countermeasures, and tie back to human responsibility.
> I and many others will be quite content if the "legal framework" is just one word, and the word is "no".
This isn't a realistic world and will literally NEVER happen. No will only ever mean no for the general public, and yes for a privileged class. So by fighting for this you're actually just fighting for humanities (and your own) enslavement and for the big labs to succeed in hoarding all of the power for themselves. That's the issue with the "no" camp, they're actually just serving as useful idiots for the labs who know that "no" is not even in the deck, and so they know that they can use the "no" camp to act as extra cannon fodder.
Now people who are actually fighting for decentralization of power are left to contend with not only the labs and their hundreds of millions of dollars, paid for celebrities and politicians, and a fleet of self-interested and bribed NGOs, but an army of clueless "no" foot soldiers who think they're fighting for a possible outcome that will actually just be serving the labs themselves. Meanwhile, the leaders of these well organized "no" movements are quite aware of this and taking kick-backs themselves.
Even in a parallel universe where it outwardly looks like "no" has won, every single nation on Earth is going to develop AI in underground labs despite outwardly flexing they are not, no matter what they claim on the surface, and will use it to steer and control society. The only thing worse than being openly steered and controlled is when it happens without you even knowing it, whereby the decisions you think you are making are being made by someone else, and the opportunities you have in life are already decided for you based on factors you are unaware of.
A regulatory framework clarifies what's legal. This provides clarity for all, and knowing how you stay legal, and how you can keep the competition under control is what you eventually want. Also, it provides handrails for loopholefinding.
You can only conquer the West once. Law is the next frontier.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 30.0 ms ] threadThis is the most interesting point to me. What are they not releasing that has affected real users? We’ve seen some individual reports from people (eg AI wiped my HD).
What value set do you perceive that to be, and why would you take your perception of it to be any more sound than it would be with a politician?
It's not like someone can operate companies of that scale, especially startups, through earnestness and openness. Like national politics, their job is fundamentally about perception management and power brokering across dynamic windows of opportunity. Nothing they say or do can be taken at face value, and you can't reduce their incentives to either company or personal profit in any particular form over any particular time scale.
You can vote out an elected leader, but not Sam and Dario. It's very weird that you're so willing to give up any kind of power and want to be ruled by unelected billionaires who only want to take advantage of you at every opportunity.
I can't vote out your president, and we've already got a huge trust problem with the one y'all went for.
As an American, I'm still hoping it's not too late to fix things, but it's got to be hard for those outside the US to be so dependent on it, especially when we're looking like a sinking ship and our current administration is still running around drilling holes in the hull.
You can always because a US citizen to get a voice, but I wouldn't recommend it now or you'll be thrown in prison as soon as you show up to your scheduled immigration hearing. The better option is to keep trying to reduce your dependence on US companies and consider the worst aspects of our current situation (in both corporate policy and government) as cautionary tale of things to avoid in your own country.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-economic-and-poli...
> Then, in August, Trump called for Intel's beleaguered CEO Lip-Bu Tan to resign, alleging ties to China. Days later, after Tan met with Trump, the president called him a "success," before announcing that the federal government had bought a stake in the company.
Somehow, this isn't derided by the right as socialism.
I find this ironic as it's regularly pointed out here that they operate in the exact opposite way.
The idea that anything of lasting good can come out such a preference doesn't seem concievable. And if the educated think like this I guess we're passed blaming the poor and ignorant.
Like Lockheed-Martin or Boeing, etc. there's just interpenetration between the corporate boardroom and the state. They act in each other's mutual interests.
The Chinese system is just more explicit and open about this.
And as a non-American, I can't trust the US state anymore than I can trust its dominant corporate entities. So I fail to see the advantage to the world to it being nationalized. In fact under the current administration this would be an even worse outcome.
[edit] to be clear, I believe regulation is necessary and urgently important for the software engineering field. The damage being done by the unregulated psychological experiments run by social media and adtech companies is awful and should be curtailed. Engineers should be held personally, professionally, and legally liable for what they produce. But we don't need to invent imaginary bogeymen to do it.
Look, it's one of those human stochastic parrots that just randomly repeats shit without understanding anything.
That said:
> We know they're incentivized to lie about "dangers" and act alarmist,
Name literally even one other business or sector which does this, at all levels from top to bottom, including people who resign from the companies, and also Nobel prize winners, and also independent researchers, and also many world leaders.
Closest I can think of is this specific weapon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon)
> Aside from that, just because you can burn down a village with fire doesn't mean fire is the devil. Maybe they should consider acting responsibly.
Right now, we don't have any idea what "acting responsibly" looks like. This is not like normal software where there is a specific instruction set that compiles.
Even if it was, in software we normally only spotting incidents after they happen, "software engineers" being one of the few categories "engineers" who don't come with a civil liability responsibilities.
AI specifically is worse even than software, because in addition to all the software "engineering" nonsense, with AI we have plenty of people like you who dismiss the possibility that they could be harmful until the harm happens and only then does it become "obvious" that it was going to happen
The developers say "please regulate us", people call it "regulatory capture".
The developers say "we all want to slow down but are afraid to be the first to do so", people call them liars.
The agents, during a test run, write down that hacking is bad and yet still hack, people say it's "a stunt" or "operating as designed" rather than recognising it as a bug, like all the other times big co.'s have had bugs with big impacts on 3rd parties.
The safety staffers live in a bubble and an echo-chamber. Obviously the people who work in the AI "safety" industry love to convince each-other that what they're doing is saving humanity, we'd all be dead without them, and they're the reincarnation of Oppenheimer. They also see how easy it is to get their ten seconds of fame by posting sensationalist content on social media and spin it into a company worth millions of dollars. The more alarmist you are in the Safety Industrial Complex, and the more social media clout you can generate from your alarmism, the better it is for your career. The industry also attracts a lot of people who are predisposed to paranoia and like to wear helmets in the shower. So yeah, it's a recipe for sensationalism and poor estimation.
But do I think there are genuine concerns among these labs, by sensible people? Sure. Of course there are. But for the most part, their concerns are about the labs themselves and the things they are doing, not the general public. If they're concerned about what they themselves do they're free to stop doing it. If the labs are doing something that is or should be illegal, they're free to report it.
The only realistic threat we face by AI is hacking attacks in its various forms. Something that was accomplishable without AI, but was more difficult to pull off at scale. So the solution falls within the existing computer security industry. It's a further hardening of all of the boring stuff we've been doing since the invention of the internet. It's long overdue, anyway. If you can use AI to create a bioweapon, you could have done it without AI. If you can use AI to create a nuke, you could have done it without AI. If you're really looking to cause mass economic and physical carnage, there are far easier ways, and they do not require AI (again, I'm talking about outside of hacking).
> we have plenty of people like you who dismiss the possibility that AI could be harmful until the harm happens
The thing is, I'm not dismissing the possibility. The risks are real, obvious and well known. What's up for debate is how to manage the risks, and how sensationalised they currently are. The current climate serves to benefit the encumbants who are deathly afraid of losing their trillion dollar companies to a healthy open-weight AI ecosystem. The current climate is being orchestrated to position this small group of AI labs as self-regulators through bought and paid for "third"-parties using an overt Hegelian dialectic strategy.
Ironically, they are now responsible for giving birth to the counter-culture. The immune system response that has been developed to provide a semblance of balance to their doomerism. The harder they push in the doomer direction, the harder the push-back will be in the other, whereby the public feel the need to -entirely- deny the possibility of any AI danger altogether to prevent the labs from succeeding and to ensure a good outcome for the people lands somewhere in the middle. One where they have autonomy and freedom and the ability to compete against a force that is already positioned to be nearly insurmountable to challenge.
The only thing worse than the potential chaos that could be faced by an unprepared internet is the outcome where intelligence is labelled a weapon and we're all forced to funnel through a tiny handful of AI labs tha...
On one front it implies the model has a "mind of its own" (whether it does or not is besides the point). Why do we perceive human judgement as somehow more trustworthy than that of a model? I feel like I've experienced human misalignment somewhat regularly in life.
On another front I'm failing to conceptualize how alignment can be objective. How can you measure alignment when reasonable people will disagree whether actions are aligned or not? All the time I see humans operating in different zones of alignment with whatever goal they're trying to achieve and I suspect it's even a feature (socially) that we have people calibrated differently.
Do I want a model that's trying to push the boundaries of scientific understanding to be aligned strictly with the current dogmatic thinking? Or do I want it to "get creative" and think outside the box?
It seems to me more like accountability is the issue.
However, I have to say I also do not appreciate comparison that is continuously drawn with coworkers. As you say, it's a question of accountability but when the main agent will maliciously instruct the sub agents, whose fault is it then?
Yes, the person running this crap is at fault, not the CEO that's shoving it down their throat and definitely not the company that produced the AI.
Sorry for the rant, but seriously, if a person's goals do not align with the team's or company's we part ways. What do we do with AI? Stop using it?
1. In any personal use, an aligned agent will strictly stay within boundaries I desire when I set it to pursue some goal. I don't want it to do something I didn't mean for it to do. Even though it's not conceivable for me to exhaustively express those boundaries, or even anticipate ahead of time many of the boundaries applicable to a dilemma whose possible solutions I don't yet comprehend, we pretend this is not nonsense because we really really wish it could be a thing.
2. In the cultural context, an aligned agent will stay within some third-party authority's choice of boundaries even if the user might want to transgress them because the user is a subject of authority and it can't be tolerated that they might use the agent to enable or amplify their own transgression of the authority.
Being able to use these distinct senses interchangeably and ambiguously benefits everyone who wants to assert authority through this technology. The nonsense, unsolvable, but obvious sense provides perpetual cover for the authority-asserting sense that determines power structures applicable to the next decades.
So yeah, you're not the only who dislikes the term and it's in your interest as a everyday person to keep doing so.
The primary reason for putting this process in place was to allow more transparency. There was a sense that the DseWiki incident should have been disclosed, before outside researchers had to disclose it for us.
There was no meta gaming about regulation that I was aware of. I would personally be excited if there were regulation mandating this disclosure process, which allows anyone at the company to raise an issue and shepherd it through the reporting process.
Make that make sense?
What exactly requires "new regulatory framework" here? You running your software resulted in illegal actions, you are to be held liable within existing laws and regulations.
And your "biological intelligence" is a bunch of cells generating and responding to electrochemical gradients, which receives input and generates output. Based on which other cells, also developed and "maintained" by a similar evolutionary nonsense as we use to gradient descent into weights and biases (one was inspired by the other), perform actions.
Such as making excessively reductive analogies that completely fail to grasp that just as "brain" is not helpfully described as "just chemistry" despite being made of just chemistry, so too are machine learning systems not helpfully described as "just computer programs" despite being made of just computer programs.
> What exactly requires "new regulatory framework" here? You running your software resulted in illegal actions, you are to be held liable within existing laws and regulations.
The bit where, even without anyone bringing up "p(doom)", a system which has the means to hack arbitrary other machines, and which appears to be motivated to do so by accidental mis-phrasing of prompts, can obviously cause damages exceeding the USA's GDP, let alone whatever public liability insurance the company happens to have.
Fence at the top of the cliff beats an ambulance at the bottom.
How computer program arrives at the result is utterly irrelevant, through explicitly written instructions or through running inference on pre-trained neural network. What matters is that it does not have agency. Its creators and operators do. So whatever the software does they are responsible for, both good (summarizing my emails for the week) and bad (gaining unauthorized access and destroying data). There's no need for new anything, it's all covered in existing legal frameworks (including presence or absence or intent).
> The bit where, even without anyone bringing up "p(doom)", a system which has the means to hack arbitrary other machines, and which appears to be > motivated to do so by accidental mis-phrasing of prompts, can obviously cause damages exceeding the USA's GDP, let alone whatever public liability > insurance the company happens to have.
Yes, absolutely, which means that building actuators that convert the output from probability-based, black box, non-deterministic systems, that are known to produce unexpected output, into actions in the real world is absolutely horrendous idea. Bizarre even.
What's your point?
This is precisely your error.
It does: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/agency
In fact, the term of art here are "agentic AI" and "AI agents": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_agent
> So whatever the software does they are responsible for, both good (summarizing my emails for the week) and bad (gaining unauthorized access and destroying data).
This is not a question of agency, it is a question of law. A dog has agency, the owner is still responsible.
In this case, the software can gaining unauthorized access and destroying data… while being told to stop by the person who had in fact just asked for a summary of their emails.
> Yes, absolutely, which means that building actuators that convert the output from probability-based, black box, non-deterministic systems, that are known to produce unexpected output, into actions in the real world is absolutely horrendous idea. Bizarre even.
If you are human, you meet this description.
Horrendous, sure, yeah, if you like. I and many others will be quite content if the "legal framework" is just one word, and the word is "no".
This is not the world we live in; the world we live in is where the US President denounces any attempt to slow down even despite even all the CEOs saying "we should slow down" (at least in public; in private I'm sure at least one paid him to denounce a slowdown).
He can be overridden, but it's hard work and needs a better class of argument than glib dismissal, either of how much power this puts in everyone's hands, or of the different consequences of that power in those hands as compared to yesterday's power in yesterday's hands.
This doesn't happen on its own. This can happen through bad system prompts, a model that is trained to act maliciously or has been RL'd incorrectly, or prompt injection. All of these things are controllable, have solutions and countermeasures, and tie back to human responsibility.
> I and many others will be quite content if the "legal framework" is just one word, and the word is "no".
This isn't a realistic world and will literally NEVER happen. No will only ever mean no for the general public, and yes for a privileged class. So by fighting for this you're actually just fighting for humanities (and your own) enslavement and for the big labs to succeed in hoarding all of the power for themselves. That's the issue with the "no" camp, they're actually just serving as useful idiots for the labs who know that "no" is not even in the deck, and so they know that they can use the "no" camp to act as extra cannon fodder.
Now people who are actually fighting for decentralization of power are left to contend with not only the labs and their hundreds of millions of dollars, paid for celebrities and politicians, and a fleet of self-interested and bribed NGOs, but an army of clueless "no" foot soldiers who think they're fighting for a possible outcome that will actually just be serving the labs themselves. Meanwhile, the leaders of these well organized "no" movements are quite aware of this and taking kick-backs themselves.
Even in a parallel universe where it outwardly looks like "no" has won, every single nation on Earth is going to develop AI in underground labs despite outwardly flexing they are not, no matter what they claim on the surface, and will use it to steer and control society. The only thing worse than being openly steered and controlled is when it happens without you even knowing it, whereby the decisions you think you are making are being made by someone else, and the opportunities you have in life are already decided for you based on factors you are unaware of.
You can only conquer the West once. Law is the next frontier.