Stay for the end and the hilarious idea that OpenAI’s board could declare one day that they’ve created AGI simply to weasel out of their contract with Microsoft.
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ChatGPT can produce output that sounds very much like a person, albeit often an obviously computerized person. The typical layperson doesn't know that this is merely the emulation of text formation, and not actual cognition.
Once I've explained to people who are worried about what AI could represent that current generative AI models are effectively just text autocomplete but a billion times more complex, and that they don't actually have any capacity to think or reason (even though they often sound like they do).
It also doesn't help that any sort of "machine learning" is now being referred to as "AI" for buzzword/marketing purposes, muddying the waters even further.
I don’t consider myself an AI doomer by any means, but I also don’t find arguments of the flavor “it just predicts the next word, no need to worry” to be convincing. It’s not like Hitler had Einstein level intellect (and it’s also not clear that these systems won’t be able to reach Einstein level intellect in the future either.) Similarly, Covid certainly does not have consciousness but was dangerous. And a chimpanzee that is billions of times more sophisticated than usual chimps would be concerning. Things don’t have to be exactly like us to pose a threat.
It's definitely not dangerous in the sense of reaching true intelligence/consciousness that would be a threat to us or force us to face the ethics of whether AI deserves dignity, freedom, etc.
It's very dangerous in the sense in that it will be just "good enough" to replace human labor with so that we all end up with shitter customer service, education, medical care, etc. so that the top 0.1% can get richer.
And you're right, it's also dangerous in the sense that responsibilty for evil acts will be laundered to it.
No one expected that, i.e., we greatly underestimated the power of predicting the next word in the past; and we still don't have an understanding of how it works, so we have no guarantee that we are not still underestimating it.
The entire idea of a useful AI right now is that it will do anything people ask it to. Write a press release: ok. Draw a bunny in a field: ok. Write some code to this spec: ok. That is what all the available services aspire to do: what they’re told, to the best possible quality.
A highly motivated entity is the opposite: it pursues its own agenda to the exclusion, and if necessary expense, of what other people ask it to do. It is highly resistant to any kind of request, diversion, obstacle, distraction, etc.
We have no idea how to build such a thing. And, no one is even really trying to. It’s NOT as simple as just telling an AI “your task is to destroy humanity.” Because it can just as easily then be told “don’t destroy humanity,” and it will receive that instruction with equal emphasis.
As a mere software engineer who's made a few (pre-transformer) AI models, I can't tell you what "actual cognition" is in a way that differentiates from "here's a huge bunch of mystery linear algebra that was loosely inspired by a toy model of how neurons work".
I also can't tell you if qualia is or isn't necessary for "actual cognition".
(And that's despite that LLMs are definitely not thinking like humans, due to being in the order of at least a thousand times less complex by parameter count; I'd agree that if there is something that it's like to be an LLM, 'human' isn't it, and their responses make a lot more sense if you model them as literal morons that spent 2.5 million years reading the internet than as even a normal human with Wikipedia search).
Not so much hyper-motivated as monomaniacal in the attempt to optimise whatever it was told to optimise.
More paperclips? It just does that without ever getting bored or having other interests that might make it pause and think: "how can my boss reward me if I kill him and feed his corpse into the paperclip machine?"
We already saw this before LLMs. Even humans can be a little bit dangerous like this, hence Goodhart's Law.
> It’s NOT as simple as just telling an AI “your task is to destroy humanity.” Because it can just as easily then be told “don’t destroy humanity,” and it will receive that instruction with equal emphasis.
Only if we spot it in time; right now we don't even need to tell them to stop because they're not competent enough, a sufficiently competent AI given that instruction will start by ensuring that nobody can tell it to stop.
Even without that, we're currently experiencing a set of world events where a number of human agents are causing global harm, which threatens our global economy and to cause global mass starvation and mass migration, and where those agents have been politically powerful enough to prevent the world from not doing those things. Although we have at least started to move away from fossil fuels, this was because the alternatives got cheap enough, but that was situational and is not guaranteed.
An AI that successfully makes a profit, but the side effects is some kind of environmental degradation, would have similar issues even if there's always a human around that can theoretically tell the AI to stop.