Money wins, every time. They’re not concerned with accidentally destroying humanity with an out-of-control and dangerous AI who has decided “humans are the problem.” (I mean, that’s a little sci-fi anyway, an AGI couldn’t “infect” the entire internet as it currently exists.)
However, it’s very clear that the OpenAI board was correct about Sam Altman, with how quickly him and many employees bailed to join Microsoft directly. If he was so concerned with safeguarding AGI, why not spin up a new non-profit.
Oh, right, because that was just Public Relations horseshit to get his company a head-start in the AI space while fear-mongering about what is an unlikely doomsday scenario.
So, let’s review:
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The fear-mongering about AGI was always just that. 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? It’s not like it can “hop” onto a consumer computer with a fraction of the same CPU power and somehow still be able to compute at the same level. AI doesn’t have a “body” and even if it did, it could only affect the world as much as a single body could. All these fears about rogue AGI are total misunderstandings of how computing works.
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Sam Altman went for fear mongering to temper expectations and to make others fear pursuing AGI themselves. He always knew his end-goal was profit, but like all good modern CEOs, they have to position themselves as somehow caring about humanity when it is clear they could give a living flying fuck about anyone but themselves and how much money they make.
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Sam Altman talks shit about Elon Musk and how he “wants to save the world, but only if he’s the one who can save it.” I mean, he’s not wrong, but he’s also projecting a lot here. He’s exactly the fucking same, he claimed only he and his non-profit could “safeguard” AGI and here he’s going to work for a private company because hot damn he never actually gave a shit about safeguarding AGI to begin with. He’s a fucking shit slinging hypocrite of the highest order.
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Last, but certainly not least. Annie Altman, Sam Altman’s younger, lesser-known sister, has held for a long time that she was sexually abused by her brother. All of these rich people are all Jeffrey Epstein levels of fucked up, which is probably part of why the Epstein investigation got shoved under the rug. You’d think a company like Microsoft would already know this or vet this. They do know, they don’t care, and they’ll only give a shit if the news ends up making a stink about it. That’s how corporations work.
So do other Lemmings agree, or have other thoughts on this?
And one final point for the right-wing cranks: Not being able to make an LLM say fucked up racist things isn’t the kind of safeguarding they were ever talking about with AGI, so please stop conflating “safeguarding AGI” with “preventing abusive racist assholes from abusing our service.” They aren’t safeguarding AGI when they prevent you from making GPT-4 spit out racial slurs or other horrible nonsense. They’re safeguarding their service from loser ass chucklefucks like you.
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.
Anyone who thinks America or your local government is going to regulate AI are delusional, especially in the face of companies planning to build AI Data Centers on ships and float them into International waters where the law does not apply to them. If not there,they will put it in space. Unregulated AI is coming where you like it or not, unless we destroy the entire planet which I would not rule out. Sure this commenter would agree on that.
An AI data center acting as a rogue state will just be sunk the moment they actually become a legitimate problem.
And billionaires will pay their fair share of taxes.
Depends on how much money and power they’re entangled with, and who they threaten
I don’t disagree that the people with money who are funding this kind of development don’t care about regulations or safety.
That said, the idea that they’ll do it out on the open sea or in space are absolutely laughable. Those ideas pitched so far completely ignore all the obvious engineering problems. Not to mention that going to international waters to avoid regulations means that the navy of that country you’re thumbing your nose at now has free reign on you.
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My biggest concern with generative AI is all of the CEOs that will eagerly seize the opportunity (and some already have) to fire staff and offload their work onto their remaining employees so they can use ChatGPT to make up for lost productivity. Easy way for them to further line their pockets without increasing pay for anyone else, further dividing the worker/CEO wage disparity and class divide.
All this noise just to serve up ads
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Lets see what nuggets I can find in the post hist- didn’t even need to scroll past the first page.
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How do you know?
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Because I’m smarter than you isn’t really an answer
Are you able to articulate at least one specific reason that we are nowhere close to developing AGI?
Without any specific reason being stated, I’m tempted to believe you are just confidently declaring this to protect yourself from fear.
Imagine if we had FTL, that would be so cool.
If we actually had AGI I suppose it’s possible we would have FTL.
I agree we’re far out, but not as far as you think. Advancements are insane and AGI could be here in 5-10 years. The way the industry have been attempting it the past decade is wrong though, training should be more indepth than images/videos, I think a few are starting to understand how to do more indepth training, so even more progress will start soon
I think you are being optimistic.
If you are old enough to remember AIM chatbots, this current generation is maybe multiple times more advanced, not exponentially so. From what I have seen, all the incredible advancements have been in image production.
This leads me to believe that AGI has never been the true commercial goal, but rather an advancement of propaganda media and its creation.
This leads me to believe that AGI has never been the true commercial goal, but rather an advancement of propaganda media and its creation.
Uh what? Why wouldn’t it be because text/image generation isn’t even on the same plane of difficulty as AGI?
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.
The greed never ends. You’d think companies as big as Microsoft would just be like “maybe we don’t actually need to own everything” but nah. Their sheer size and wealth is enough of a “barrier to entry” as it is.
Google: “
Don’tbe evil.”
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.
Because it’s just human? It’s a lot less common than movie or music superstars anyway and those are even more unphantomable to me, like, the producer sure but the singer that was groomed from birth to regurgitate boomer poetry?
I guess it makes sense to call them STEM pop stars.
AGI is still science fiction right now
insert spacesuit “always has been” meme here.
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.
But like we only think about “controlling” it’s goals and shit when honestly what we only need is a fucking stop button like in a fucking factory. Whops it’s genocidal again Claus, all right Lars slam the off button and let’s start over
The stop button problem is not yet solved. An AGI would need a the right level of “corrigability”: a willingness allow humans to stop it when undertaking incorrect behavior.
An AGI that’s incorrigible might take steps to prevent itself being shut off, which might include lying to its owners about its own goals/internal state, or taking physical action against an attempt to disable it (assuming it can).
An AGI that’s overly corrigible might end up making an association “It’s good when humans stop me from doing something wrong. I want to maximize goodness. Therefore, the simplest way to achieve a lot of good quickly is to do the wrong thing, tricking humans into turning me off all the time”. Not necessarily harmful, but certainly useless.
Exactly
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It often seems to be… ‘Gee Brian, that’s a great invention! I wonder how we can kill people with it’, the thought having germinated in a slurry of greed and self interest. (Apologies for the slightly jaundiced view of our betters and elders, it comes with age.)
AGI isn’t real
You mean that physical objects cannot display human level intelligence? That’s obviously untrue, I have about seven billion counterexamples to show you.
What? No. That’s clearly not what they meant. What???
Those are naturally conceived with some good ol’ fucking (or in vitro fertilization), not artificially created with thousands of GPU.
Unless you can actually point to special magic consciousness dust that’s in human brains that doesn’t really make any difference.
Why does consciousness have to be organic based, after all there’s plenty of life on this planet that’s organic and has no consciousness, so can the inverse not be true.
Well 3.5 billion. Since half of them display sub-human level intelligence.
Ewwww. Super icky comment.
I’m just having a bit of a go at you about the fact that you conflated AGI with human intelligence.
A good number of humans couldn’t think their way out of an unlock room.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
-George Carlin
People take offence if you point in it out though
Maybe they’re just bad at math and don’t understand how averages work.
Perhaps we should actually do some research and not use Hollywood movies as our reference?
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.
This feels like a weird point to make for OP since I figure anyone here talking about AI is very familiar with distributed networked computing. Botnets have been such a pain in the dick for at least 15 years now. Imagine something that intimately and only knows how to “live” in computing. The distributed areas of could “live” in and have access to all the resources it needs either directly or not. Storing info and using resources of anything it can touch through the network, computers, phones, TVs, cars, door bell cameras, router and networking infrastructure.
I feel there is inevitably either a human made virus or a standalone AIG that is going to accomplish this.The extent to which it spreads, if the damage can be recovered from, and how we progress after it’s going to be a big defining moment is technological history. The globalized network with everything communicating is the most powerful and least secure super computer ever. Those running botnets figured that out a long time ago. All it takes is one AI.
At this point at least, LLMs require vast amounts of GPU time, and the GPUs used likely need to be fairly close coupled to run at decent speeds, and as such one couldn’t spread itself over the vast network of consumer computers. At least not in a way that would still allow it to learn.
Any near-term AGI or similar would be based on a similar approach, making it fairly “safe” in that respect at least. Only a million other disruptive ways it can affect society…
In the event of such a worm/virus, we forget actually do have a very effective nuclear option: switch off the computers and re-image them. Painful as it might be, we could even shut off or partition the global IP network temporarily if faced with such an existential threat.
We don’t live in a sci-fi novel after all, and this distributed AI wouldn’t be able to hide in a single machine, plotting against us. It would only be able to “think” as a giant networked cluster, something easy to detect and disrupt.
And why would nobody stop it? We are pretty good at stop button technology for instance, we also have pretty good grasp of the reset button but maybe it shouldn’t be one of those hole you always break pens on
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.
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Planes that are primarily designed to be human-piloted tend to have to be wildly modified to become a drone, or a remote-pilot situation. The F-35, for example, can be heavily modified for this, but is not built for it to begin with. This argument would hold more weight if you were referring to the entire drone fleet.
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(Assuming drones) Generally, the military is pretty secure with these kind of things, and they won’t allow in external internet connections but will instead have their own internal communications network. For this to be successful, the AGI would essentially have to somehow get by air-gapped defenses and get close enough with a physical body to get a signal. How could they do this with drone pilots in a remote area in an non-internet connected building? The only way would be through the wireless signal. At that point, yes, it would be feasible to take over the drone. I find it very hard to believe that an AGI could do that, magically make connection to remote, air-gapped systems.
An AGI doing what you’re talking about doing would mean all secure facilities in the world would have just tossed their security practices out the window to begin with and having internet connections inside secure facilities. That’s just not how its done. Sure the psychotic wing of the Republican party doesn’t give a shit and Donald Trump doesn’t… but like, reasonable people do, and so security still exists.
This argument would hold more weight if you were referring to the entire drone fleet.
Sure, and we’re maybe 5 years away from that.
An AGI doing what you’re talking about doing would mean all secure facilities in the world would have just tossed their security practices out the window to begin with and having internet connections inside secure facilities.
Nearly all of the normal spy activities that can induce someone to action are available to an AGI; Bribery, Compromise, and Relationship. There’s also people who would willingly help because their goals aligned or because they believe things would be better with an AGI in charge.
…but like, reasonable people do, and so security still exists.
Sure, and that security gets penetrated and an AGI can do it in the same way its done now only faster and with no controls on its behavior.
You also need to drop the assumption that the AGI or its targets will be American.
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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.
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.
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.
Also, you shouldn’t underestimate how many of the actual coders don’t give a shit about ethics and just want that paycheck. Over 500 of them are walking to join Atlman at Microsoft.
Yeah, and that is also scary. There is so little accountability in tech and the excitement over AI is just going to create a new generation of tech bro leaders for Forbes to write cover stories about.
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.
