Does Sam Altman know what he’s creating?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/sam-altman-openai-chatgpt-gpt-4/674764/

by holografix • 3 years ago

75 34 3 years ago

Inb4 crazy identity requirements on LLM interactions that only Worldcoin can solve. Create problem, pay the system to be the solution.

version_five2• 3 years ago

You have to change the title (currently "Sam Altman demands regulation in effort to limit competition")

I strongly agree with that sentence, but it's not the title of the article, it's clickbait

adventured2• 3 years ago

Definitely needs changed. The actual title "Does Sam Altman Know What He’s Creating?" is excellent as is.

CharlesW• 3 years ago

Archive: https://archive.is/KvR5N

gumballindie• 3 years ago

But the public wouldn’t have been able to prepare for the shock waves that followed

Yup, no one was prepared for this level of fud and spam. OpenAI is simply an annoyance.

A_D_E_P_T2• 3 years ago

Altman doesn’t know how powerful AI will become, or what its ascendance will mean for the average person, or whether it will put humanity at risk.

In all seriousness, if practical AI development is potentially an extinction-level risk, it should simply cease. It may be a technology that mankind is not ready for, not equipped to handle. In this case, those who recklessly seek to commercialize it are, in a very real sense, privatizing profits and socializing losses. ("Heads, I become as rich as Croesus. Tails, we all die -- or, at the very least, we all experience unprecedented social upheaval.")

kmeisthax• 3 years ago

Heads and tails sound like the exact same scenario.

amelius• 3 years ago

Otoh, if we don't create it, some nation state actor will.

haswell• 3 years ago

It would require a military threat to shut this down globally, i.e. willingness to go to war to prevent further development.

Which is not necessarily a deterrent anyway.

entropicdrifter• 3 years ago

Just like with nukes, it's an international 200+ actor version of the prisoner's dilemma

adventured2• 3 years ago

They're going to anyway. And of course it won't just be nation state actors. It'll be criminal organizations out of Russia, or terrorist organizations, or some clandestine team inside a three letter US agency.

They're proliferating rapidly. The hardware will keep getting better. A lot more people will learn how to build them, in a lot of different locations around the globe. The genie is never going back into the bottle.

There will be extremely nefarious, highly potent, alt LLMs created, and soon. Focused on variations of social engineering. They will cause tens of billions of dollars in damages globally and lead to tight regulations on the proliferation of LLMs. Most likely all LLMs or the equivalent will have to be registered with a host nation and include details about its capabilities.

cubefox3• 3 years ago

The problem is that it can't realistically be stopped. In terms of game theory, it's a prisoner's dilemma. All nations are incentivized to race ahead with AI, since the benefits are enormous before they turn catastrophic. Moreover, international agreements (similar to a nuclear test treaty) can't be checked or enforced, since countries can just build AI supercomputers under ground where they can't be seen from satellites nor destroyed by rockets.

So the only hope is that the first organization which develops a superintelligence manages to align it with human values, or, alternatively, they manage to build a superintelligent "task AI" (non-agentic AI) which just follows instructions, and then use it to enforce the global stop in AI development until the alignment problem is solved.

A_D_E_P_T2• 3 years ago

All nations are incentivized to race ahead with AI

But what's happening, to all appearances, is that it isn't "nations" driving this. It's commerce and the investor class.

If AI development were de facto restricted to, e.g., the US Military and the Chinese military, that would slow everything down by years -- perhaps even longer than that -- and the most disruptive effects might never become manifest.

I'll grant that AI research probably cannot be stopped at this point. But with Altman agitating for "regulations" it should really be apparent that the best form of regulation in this case is the ultimate one: A total ban on above-ground AI development.

version_five2• 3 years ago

In all seriousness, if practical AI development is potentially an extinction-level risk, it should simply cease.

In all seriousness, it isn't, at least not in a way that's different from the risks of general purpose computing.

Social media (anything that let's humanity interact at a scale we aren't prepared for), biological (disease) research, nuclear weapons, inadequate asteroid and tsunami preparedness, etc are actual risks, it's ridiculous and dangerous to put computers in the same category, this is a manufactured panic to sell chatbots.