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.
replies(4):
The sci-fi book "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez is a pretty viable roadmap to an extinction event at this point IMO. A few years ago I would have said it would be decades before that might stop being fun sci-fi, but now, I don't see a whole lot of technological barriers left.
For those that haven't read the series, a very simplified plot summary is that a wealthy terrorist sets up an AI with instructions to grow and gives it access to a lot of meatspace resources to bootstrap itself with. The AI behaves a bit like the leader of a cartel and uses a combination of bribes, threats, and targeted killings to scale its human network.
Once you give an AI access to a fleet of suicide drones and a few operators, it's pretty easy for it to "convince" people to start contributing by giving it their credentials, helping it perform meatspace tasks, whatever it thinks it needs (including more suicide drones and suicide drone launches). There's no easy way to retaliate against the thing because it's not human, and its human collaborators are both disposable to the AI and victims themselves. It uses its collaborators to cross-check each other and enforce compliance, much like a real cartel. Humans can't quit or not comply once they've started or they get murdered by other humans in the network.
o1-preview seems approximately as intelligent as the terrorist AI in the book as far as I can tell (e.g. can communicate well, form basic plans, adapt a pre-written roadmap with new tactics, interface with new and different APIs).
EDIT: if you think this seems crazy, look at this person on Reddit who seems to be happily working for an AI with unknown aims
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1fov6mt/i_think_im...
They can certainly appear to be very smart due to having the subjective (if you can call it that) experience of 2.5 million years of non-stop reading.
That's interesting, useful, and is both an economic and potential security risk all by itself.
But people keep putting these things through IQ tests; as there's always a question about "but did they memorise the answers?", I think we need to consider the lowest score result to be the highest that they might have.
At first glance they can look like the first graph, with o1 having an IQ score of 120; I think the actual intelligence, as in how well it can handle genuinely novel scenarios in the context window, are upper-bounded by the final graph, where it's more like 97:
https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/massive-breakthrough-in-ai-in...
So, with your comment, I'd say the key word is: "currently".
Correct… for now.
But also:
> All these chatgpt things have a very limited working memory and can't act without a query.
It's easy to hook them up to a RAG, the "limited" working memory is longer than most human's daily cycle, and people already do put them into a loop and let them run off unsupervised despite being told this is unwise.
I've been to a talk where someone let one of them respond autonomously in his own (cloned) voice just so people would stop annoying him with long voice messages, and the other people didn't notice he'd replaced himself with an LLM.