Is it just me, or has the BS with OpenAI shown that nobody in the AI space actually cares about "safeguarding AGI?"

40+ years on this planet have made me 100% certain that no one with the power to safeguard AGI will make any legitimate effort to do so. Just like we have companies spending millions greenwashing while they pollute more than ever, we'll have plenty of lip-service about it but never anything useful.

We are no where near developing AGI.

It’s so far fetched that you might as well legislate for time travel and FTL drives while you’re at it.

Permanently Deleted

Somewhere between

A bunch of incapable, spoilt, completely insane men-children with too much money think they can save the world.

and

A bunch of scam artists build an artificial human who they claim can talk and draw and reason just like a real human would.

For the CEOs of this brave new AI world this probably changes depending on their level of hangover and/or midlife crisis.

It's common business practice for the first big companies in a new market/industry to create "barriers to entry". The calls for regulation are exactly that. They don't care about safety--just money.

AGI is still science fiction right now

For your first point sure it couldn't run itsself on consumer hardware, but it could design new zero day malware faster than any human and come up with new scams to get it onto people's machines

It could also design a more efficient version of itsself to spread that will run on lower powered hardware

How could an intelligence that requires massive amounts of CPU, RAM, and database storage even concievably able to leave the confines of its own computing environment?

Why would it need to leave its own environment in order to impact the world? How about an AGI taking over the remote fly system for an F-35, B-21, or NGAD in order to go all Skynet? It doesn't have to execute itself on the onboard system of the plane, it simply has to have control of the remote control system. Penetration of and fuckery with the systems that run major stock exchanges present the same problem. It doesn't need to execute itself on those platforms, merely exert control over them.

The concern here isn't about an AGI taking over systems in order to execute itself, it's about AGI taking control of systems away from humans in much the same way that traditional Black Hat hackers would but at a much faster speed and with potentially far less concern for any human cost.

I'm of the opinion that Microsoft was tired of losing money on OpenAI, so made some kind of plan to out the current CEO, tank the stock price, and be in the perfect position to buy the company and monopolize AI technology. It wouldn't be the first time they pulled shady crap like that.

I think there are real concerns to be addressed in the realm of AGI alignment. I've found Robert Miles' talks on the subject to be quite fascinating, and as such I'm hesitant to label all of Elizier Yudkowsky's concerns as crank (Although Roko's Basilisk is BS of the highest degree, and effective altruism is a reimagined Pascal's mugging for an atheist/agnostic crowd).

Even while today's LLMs are toys compared to what a hypothetical AGI could achieve, we already have demonstrable cases where we know that the "AI" does not "desire" the same end goal that we desire the "AI" to achieve. Without more advancement in how to approach AI alignment, the danger of misaligned goals will only grow as (if) we give AI-like systems more control over daily life.

I for one don't understand why people have the need for a Tech Visionary Messiah to cling on to and adore. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, lots of others, Sam Altman is the latest. They always and without exception turn out to be little human beings with little selfish needs behind their grandiose altruistic sales pitches. People never learn, do they.

Money wins, every time.

And right there, you answered your own (presumably rhetorical) question.

The money people jumped on AI as soon as they scented the chance of profit, and that's it. ALL other considerations are now secondary to a handful of psychopaths making as much money as possible.

What's AGI?

Homie got rich and famous by making a chat bot that spits out the internet back at you while spewing out buzzwords like only the best Valley hustlers can.

Personally I'm more worried about the robodogs and terminators that the likes of Boston Labs are putting out.

AI isn't the danger, it's human application of "AI" that will be horrible as fuck.

Perhaps we should actually do some research and not use Hollywood movies as our reference?

AGI isn’t real

I agree with everything you said I only want to add that there is kinda one or two ways for the AGI problem a la Sci-Fi to happen.

By far the most straight forward way is if the military believe that it can be used as a fail safe in MAD scenarios, i.e. if they give the AI the power to launch nuclear ICBM's a la War Games. Not very likely, but still not something we want to dismiss entirely. This is also a problem with regular AI and LLM's.

The second, and, in my opinion, more likely scenario is if the AI is able to get a large number of people to trust it implicitly and then use seemingly unrelated benign actions from each of them to do something catastrophic.

Something you may notice about these two scenarios is that neither one of them can be "safeguarded" in the code, only by educating people on the proper usage of and posture to have when handling AI.

Once they saw the big stack of money, they suddenly forgot that OpenAI's charter specifically mentioned preventing AI to benefits select fews and instead hands over everything to Microsoft on a silver platter.

I wish this narrative would get more traction. I don't get the love for Altman, even inside Open AI.

This whole drama has revealed.what I suspect is a larger problem across tech- that there are product-focused people who are legitimately trying to make tools to better society, and there are people who just want to make money.

Two guesses which type of person is usually in the C suite.

At this point I think it's safe to assume that if a business is doing something, they're doing it for money no matter what else they say. And while OpenAi is a 'non-profit' the board is made up of almost all business folks who are gonna behave the same way regardless of the venue.

itt, lots of people who don't know shit about the glorified decision trees people call ai

My biggest issue with this whole debacle is that the non-profit board hasn't clearly explained itself to the pubic or its employees. There's an ethics discussion that absolutely positively needs to happen and there needs to be some sort of governance in place around a myriad legal and moral issues from copyright to displacing human jobs and that can't happen right now because we still don't know what the fuck the board was trying to accomplish.

I'm all for responsible stewards of AI, but I don't think this board is it. They've cut themselves out of any future governance ability in any event.

It doesn’t matter if anyone cares about the safety of AGI.

AGI is a direct source of power, much like any weapon. As soon as AGI exists, we will exist in a state of warfare due to the fact that the “big guns” will be out.

I know I’m having trouble articulating this point, but it’s very important to understand. AGI is like a nuclear weapon: once a person has it, it doesn’t matter how much others may want to regulate them. It’s just not possible to regulate.

The ONLY strategy that gives us hope of surviving AGI’s emergence without being enslaved is to spread AGI far and wide to ensure a multipolar AGI ecosystem, which will force AGI to learn prosocial interaction as a means of ensuring its own survival.

And if you want to come at me with “AGI doesn’t inherently have a self interest”, consider that the same is true of nuclear weapons. And yet nuclear weapons get their interests from their wielders. And the only way to stay safe from nuclear weapons is also to proliferate them far and wide so that there is a multipolar ecosystem of nuclear weapons, ensuring those holding nuclear weapons have to play nice to ensure their own survival.

All of this talk about restricting AGI will only have the effect of concentrating it in a few hands, leading to the very nightmare the regulators are trying to avoid.

If the regulators had succeeded, and the US had been the only nation to possess nuclear weapons in the long run, humanity would have suffered massively from that lack of parity. Let me be less coy: humanity would have suffered under the brutality of repeated nuclear holocausts as the interests of the few led to further and further justification of larger and larger strikes.

Nuclear weapons cannot be regulated by law. They can only be regulated by other nuclear weapons. Same is true of AGI.

Money is the catalyst to our own demise. By hook or by crook (ha!) greed and pride will crush us eventually unless extreme wealth is curtailed. The imaginary system of beans and shells that we arbitrarily follow is destroying us in fast motion.

How could an intelligence that requires massive amounts of CPU, RAM, and database storage even concievably

What you define as "massive" amounts might still be large amounts for most consumers. But even then it's not... really. Developers frequently fit these models in their own laptops. Some of the ML models fit on an iPhone or Android phone. It can generate ten, or hundreds of words (tokens) per second.

So the fact that they don't need massive amounts of CPU, RAM, and database storage is rather the point. Imagine if it could escape and multiply. It could conceivably do so quite quickly given current technology.

trusting corporations is always a bad idea

Any space. Any place. Money wins.

Hey I am not an AI , I have real feelings, and you hurt them by calling me a looser ass chucklefucks!

This should not be a surprise to anyone

Like someone else said "Open AI has been a farce ever since they disabled access to GPT3 for the sake of security".

The naive irony of all the Less Wrong people discussing letting the AI out of the box when we all know there won’t be a box at all.

"Safeguarding AGI" is as much of a concern as making sure the terrorists don't get warp drives.

But then, armies of killer teenagers radicalized by playing Mortal Kombat was never going to be a thing, either, and we spent decades arguing with politicians about that one. Once the PR nightmare is out it's really hard to put back in the box. Lamp. Bag. Whatever metaphor I'm going for here.

You're right, but there are other dangers, i.e.:

1. Using it for high-frequency trading and it behaves brutally wrong and ruins an important company/bank using it or crashes the market in a very problematic way.

2. Using it to control heavy machinery or weapons.

The danger is recklessness of humans at the moment. When they give that reaper drone an AI pilot, so it can react before the humans on the controls even know it's in trouble, that's when shit is about to go sideways. It won't cause the end of the world, but death, destruction and maybe even another war.

Well, to be fair, from what I've been hearing, one of the big points of contention of the internal battle at OpenAI was safety itself. Like some on the board being concerned about the "make your ChatGPT" feature debuting at the dev conference thing. So at least some people care. Which is more than I would have thought...

I do like the word "chucklefucks", though.

There are plenty of people who say they care. They're all lying tho

I think it will be fine as long as we don't give the AI thumbs.

Agree. Ever since they started lobbying politicians it's been clear that "safety" is a just a pretext for regulatory capture.

Lets be thankful we have commerce, buy more, buy more now and be happy... - Om

I think that ship sailed when ChatGPT dropped and a ton of journalists instantly lost their job. No need to speculate, it's already happening.

If they wanted to safeguard AI, they would actually make the models public. Bad actors are bound to get them anyways, hiding it behind secrecy is very unlikely. And I mean, AI could make a virus infecting most infrastructure on planet (Amazon and Google data centres) and then shutting it down or using it for its own purposes. As several programming memes lay out, the entire modern web infrastructure is surprisingly dependent on just a few APIs and tools

All of these people who make part of their public, and apparently also actual real personas being very concerned about AGI are hypocrites at best and con artists at worse.

How many of such people express vehement public opposition to granting automated military systems the ability to decide whether to fire or not fire?

We are /just about/ to blow through that barrier, into building software systems that totally remove the human operator from that part of the equation.

Then we end up pretty quickly with a SkyNet drone airforce, and its not too long after that it is actually conceivable we end up with something like ED 209 as well, except its a boston dynamics robot mule that can be configured for either hauling cargo, or have a mounted rifle or grenade launcher or something like that.

Corporations gonna profiteer. Capitalists gonna exploit. "Visionary business leaders" gonna turn out to be dirt bags when you dig into them (Google Annie Altman).

And "we" keep falling for it and putting up with it en masse, unto our collective doom.

I’ve only seen a bunch of rumors about the firing but nothing concrete since the board hasn’t given an explanation. So yeah it could be that money wins or it could be something else entirely.

I doubt that Microsoft would’ve hired him if he had strong allegations of wrongdoing.

SAM'S LLM agrees with you.

-gpt4

Alright, let's dive into this cesspool of corporate and AGI ethics:

1. The whole rogue AGI apocalypse scenario is more Hollywood than Silicon Valley. AGIs like Skynet are great for popcorn flicks but in reality, they're about as likely as a kangaroo becoming Prime Minister. The computing power needed for an AGI to go rogue is not something you can find in your average laptop.

2. Sam Altman playing the AGI safety card could easily be seen as a crafty move to keep competitors at bay and wrap his profit-driven motives in a pretty 'saving humanity' bow. After all, in the corporate world, wearing a cape of altruism makes dodging taxes and scrutiny a bit easier.

3. Altman's criticisms of Elon Musk could be seen as the pot calling the kettle black. Both seem to be cut from the same cloth – big talk about saving the world, but at the end of the day, it's all about who gets to be the hero in the billionaire's club.

4. The allegations against Sam Altman are part of a wider narrative that often surfaces around powerful figures. It's like a classic play: as soon as someone climbs the ladder, out come the skeletons from the closet. Whether true or not, these stories get less attention than a new iPhone release, because, hey, who wants to take down a tech titan when there's money to be made?

And on your last point, yep, moderating content to avoid racist rants isn't exactly what they meant by "safeguarding AGI." It's more like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound – it looks like they're doing something, but in reality, it's just a cosmetic fix to keep the masses and the ad revenue rolling in.

All I know is Satya is making out like a bandit no matter what lmfao

Everything was clear enough for people like me, when we knew every possible public service and API was being abused to scrape data for OpenAI LLMs. Shit was never "Open", just like USA is not a democracy. Fucking shithole country with ultracapitalist leeches and the world's best media propaganda machinery is what it is, and there are plenty of Sam Altmans, Zuckerbergs, Steve Jobses and Larry Pages in there, while real people like Steve Wozniac get sidelined.

Capitalists give 0 fucks about anything other than MOAR money. That includes innovation and tech advancement for our species. Only a socialist framework could give 2 hoots about such grand goals instead of resorting to leeching the public content makers for 0 pennies. Many artists, writers, musicians, programmers and other creative people will either stop working and stop making the public domain richer, or they will Patreon and copyright the hell out of everything they make, either way we lose because nobody got paid respect, and only LLM corpo leeches became rich.

Oh yea. If fascism doesn’t kill us, AI will. We’re all fucked and we’ve known it since skynet entered the American psyche.

That was a long rant. I didn't read it.

Don't really think AGI needs any safeguards. Let's just throw it out there and see what happens.