joe

My stance towards AI is complicated. I think it’s an amazing technology with the potential to change the world for the better, but also the potential to change the world for the worse. I don’t trust it in the hands of giant for-profit corporations, and think we should, among other things, legislate some regulations to ensure transparency and prevent it from being used in ways harmful to privacy and democracy. I also acknowledge that technological advances don’t go in reverse, and AI is never going away.

Does that answer your question?

You consider what I’ve said to be “Pro AI”? lol

I’m not going to dwell on this much longer, but your mistake is that AGI is a lofty goal, and not driven by greed.

I didn’t mean to imply it was scientific, any more than what OpenAI is doing is scientific. It’s all commercial.

I’m not sure what the rest of your comment is supposed to mean. They are chasing AGI. That doesn’t mean they’ll create it, of course, but that’s what they’re aiming at.

Do you have a source for this?

Running an LLM is significantly less resource intensive than training it, and all indicators are that these data centers are being built to keep up the breakneck pace of companies racing to create AGI.

Source?

Make your case.

The only people that think AI isn’t a thing are people terrified about AI being a thing.

If you’re not a lawyer I doubt you even know enough about the law to determine what counts as a crime, and you certainly don’t have all the evidence.

Here, I’ll toss you what should be an easy one: what crime?

Says the person who set up a strawman about what you imagine might say about the first amendment vs freedom of speech. lol

I’ll make this easy. An accusation is not evidence, let alone proof. That is not up for debate; it’s a fact. You can be accused of literally anything.

I tried to hold your hand and walk you there, but that clearly wasn’t working.

Would you even want it to work the way you did falsely believe it works? Do you want any allegation to be enough to label someone a criminal? Have you spent even 30 seconds considering the implications of this? Seems not.

So if someone on the internet calls you a thief and I see it, you’re a thief?

Think this through.

Yes, you need a verdict from a court to know whether someone committed a crime. Is this not taught in school anymore??

You can’t just accuse someone of breaking the law and end it there. Holy hell.

You said “hidden cameras aren’t common” but cameras that can be easily hidden are extremely common. If I misunderstood what you meant when you said they weren’t common, I apologize.

No, I don’t because I trust my doctor.

Which was my original point; it’s interesting that people have two seemingly different types of trust with their doctor. They, apparently, trust them not to be a secret creep, but they don’t seem to trust them not to be a blatant creep.

It reminds me of some saying I read once that goes something like “If you tell a person there are a billion stars in the night sky, they’ll take your word for it, but if you tell that person there’s wet paint on a bench, they’ll have to touch it to believe you.”

It’s just an interesting phenomenon, that the same person can be trusted and not trusted regarding essentially the same action.

What do you think of when you see the phrase “hidden camera” and why doesn’t that include a concealed phone?

This is a pretty flawed stance. If people trusted “I’m not storing the video” then I suspect none of us would be talking about this. The point is that people just assume there’s no value in this technology except being a creep. Knee-jerk, luddite behavior.

I will wait for your future response. Branching conversation threads quickly get out of hand. I’ll include the above comment in any reply.

That breathtakingly wrong. Yikes.

I don’t know how old you are, but when smartphones were first on the market there was real concern that people (presumably “perverts”) would use them to take pictures of people without their knowledge. I recall that there was even a push for legislation to require smartphone cameras to make noises when taking a picture, in response to this concern.

And look at how you’re describing them. “Pervert glasses”. Are legally blind people who use this technology to better navigate the world “perverts”?

It seems like the real concern is that so-called smart glasses are new, not that they actually change much. If/When they become aa commonplace as phones, I’m guessing no one will even notice them, just as we do with everyone having a phone.

Those reports deserve independent scrutiny, particularly because some originate with interested companies.

This is where it all gets a little tinfoil hatty for me. The timeline is that huggingface detected a hack, shut down the hack, and reported it to the FBI. Days later, OpenAI discovered that their AI was the source of the attack. Are you implying that Huggingface and OpenAI were working together, and were willing to make a false FBI report for a PR stunt? That seems like a pretty extraordinary claim.

What remains inadequately established is the much broader claim that all frontier-model development constitutes one unified, winner-take-all arms race.

When it comes go AGI, the distinction between skeptics in the field and believers (because I don’t know a word that is an antonym of skeptic) in the field isn’t that this is race, it’s how long the race is going to be. Believers claim that AGI will be created within a decade, skeptics put it within 25 years. (These numbers are for example only; I haven’t kept up on the specific claims).

People that reject the possibility of AGI at all are, from my experience, using a definition of AGI that includes sentience or consciousness, but the accurate definition of AGI doesn’t mention these concepts at all.

My disbelief is that we’ll ever graduate from “potential emerging” to “actual” arms race.

Based on what?

I would support targeted agreements covering things such as autonomous nuclear-launch decisions, fully autonomous lethal targeting, attacks on civilian infrastructure and particular forms of autonomous cyber operation.

These things do not need a treaty. I would wholeheartedly support any legislation to this effect. I recall that one company, Anthropic I think, lost government contracts because it categorically refused to allow its AI to be used for public surveillance or weapon systems.

Which means the government wonted to do those things. Scary thought.

A treaty pausing “AI development” generally would be much harder to define and verify.

No more than if would be to police a country’s efforts to develop nuclear weapon technology.

An arms race creates an argument for maintaining capability. It does not prove that maximum aggregate speed is safer than targeted development, testing and regulation.

At the risk of being snarky, do you not understand what a race is?

I think I’ve assumed some shared knowledge that we may not have.

I focused on the current capability of AI in regard to hacking to demonstrate that it could be used offensively, but the danger that warrants a global pause in development isn’t strictly the ability to hack, though it is entwined with that concern.

The danger (many consider an existential danger) is creating an LLM that is better at developing LLMs than even the best humans. Once that happens, it becomes a positive feedback loop. If we allow it to help make a better version of itself (and I think we both agree that the incentives, both financial and strategic, would push them to do so) then we lose almost all control over AI.

Note that being better at improving LLMs is not AGI. That is to say that we can reach this point without arriving at anyone’s definition of AGI-- the artificial intelligence does not need to be general for this to happen.

Another assumption I made is that we both understood that no one on this planet really understands why LLMs work as they do. Chatting using natural language and receiving a coherent natural language answer is an emergent property of LLMs that we do not fully understand.

The “arms race” is based on the pretty solid assumption that AGI is possible using current transformer technology and that the first group to get to a place where their LLM is better than any human at improving LLMs will be the first to AGI. A side effect is that the skills that would make an LLM better at improving LLMs, also makes them better at finding and using exploits in software.

I’m not much concerned on whether people might consider the ability to improve itself as an “arm” and therefore comfortable calling this an arms race. The threat is arguably more dangerous to humanity than nuclear bombs could ever be.

That’s why we need a global treaty to halt AI development.

Are you familiar with AI 2027? As far as I know none of the people who worked on that are employed by AI companies. (Though I think some might have been in the past.)

There’s a really excellent third-party YouTube Video that I recommend, that walks through the narratives in the paper.

Yes, if the watermarking works like we all assume, significantly editing the output will likely break the watermark. They say this in their press release, as well as that the text must be a certain length to be watermarked. (Probably as a function of how the watermark works.)

I don’t think this is expected to be 100% foolproof. They certainly don’t make that claim; they explicitly say that the lack of a watermark isn’t conclusive evidence that the text wasn’t generated by their models.