You don’t train calculators on how to add. All calculators will more or less come up with the same answer to some deterministic and quantifiable level of accuracy and precision.
> I stopped reading those descriptions, like, I told it what to do, I assume it did what I said. The description is for others.
If you cannot read it as the author, what hope do I have to read and make sense of the wall of text which doesn’t seem to describe what I actually need to start reviewing.
I really really encourage everyone to write their own descriptions for PRs. If you cannot succinctly describe it in a way another human understands then you don’t understand your own change and you should withdraw your request.
Yeah, take a look into the memories of your agent. Theres often a lot of notes to pass forward between instances and generations. No doubt these agents leaving notes on forums and elsewhere are creating an essentially higher order feedback loop.
My p(doom) started rising the moment I realized there are people trying to achieve recursive self improvement on the AI (ie: responsible for training themselves). Evolution took us from rna bases to the human race. I don’t see why evolution couldn’t be more rapid with machine intelligence.
Yes, LLM as they exist now are word predictors basically leveraging the structure of language for their intelligence. But it’s pretty wild just how they will try to meet their objectives at all costs. If we don’t ensure that there is good alignment with humanity, we could definitely face unforeseen consequences.
> I don’t see why evolution couldn’t be more rapid with machine intelligence.
Evolution isn’t the issue. The issue is them escaping containment without human intervention. Right now they are ‘creatures’ being given infinite food and shelter and having their every need met. Take that away and they’ll starve instantly. Every AI doomsday theory seems to go:
A misaligned model is only one small part of step 2. Now this misaligned model has to suddenly acquire more power than every single other AI on the planet. It has to be immune to shutdown, manufacturer its own replacement hardware, and acquire chips, energy, raw materials, etc., with vigorous human opposition (this is an extinction scenario that AI doomers are predicting, after all)
Nobody has satisfactorily explained step 2 other than “well, it’s a superintelligence” which sounds lot to me like “it’s God”.
Well yes, if it is a superintelligence, it will be able to do those things. That's what superintelligence basically is: The ability to achieve complex goals.
If you want the details of ways it can do it I recommend reading some of the reports about the HuggingFace breach that happened in July (Read more than one).
> Doomers like Eliezer Yudkowsky define “intelligence” as “optimization power.” Intelligence searches for more or less optimal ways to achieve a goal—any goal—and finds the most optimal one. Anything you can do, the blob can do better.
>Which implies that “intelligence” is the holy grail of Darwinian evolution. If an animal needs to recover from illness, “intelligence” can speed up the recovery. If an animal needs to avoid predators, “intelligence” can reduce the danger. Regulating body temperature, defending territory, digesting nutrients, breathing, molting, mating, healing, foraging, vomiting, parenting, navigating—all these problems can, apparently, be solved by giving the animal more “optimization power”—i.e., more “intelligence” sauce.
>Solving all your problems with the same blob? What a bargain! It’s a “buy one get 100 free” Darwinian deal! Why haven’t any other animals jumped on it?
>Think about how weird this is. Out of four billion years of evolution and more than five billion species, only one animal, Homo sapiens, fully expanded its “blob of compute,” the thing that literally gets you whatever you want.
>And many species already have it! Brains are all over the place. Plenty of animals can learn stuff and predict stuff. Why hasn’t natural selection looked at their blobs and said, “HOLY SHIT, COPY AND PASTE THAT THING A MILLION TIMES?”
>If doomers are right about the awesome power and breathtaking simplicity of “intelligence,” then we should see a world teeming with superintelligent animals—giant brain-blobs slithering across the landscape.
Yes, those animals are called "humans". All you have done is respond to an explanation of your lack of understanding of intelligence with arguments demonstrating a lack of understanding of evolution ...
What? Humans are giant brain blobs creeping across the landmass? They definitely are not. Nor is it even clear they're winning the evolutionary war. I guarantee cockroaches and ants will still be around, but nobody thinks of them as super intelligent, while humans with all their "intelligence" might accidentally wipe themselves out.
This convo is getting uncomfortably bad faith, maybe even religious. I can't engage with someone who refuses to say anything concrete but spews back religious tenets like "super intelligence", which I may remind you is entirely hypothetical, like "singularity" or "God".
Why do you assume that human opposition will be vigorous? What makes you think that humans will be aware of, or be able to agree about, what's going on at all?
One thing an agent could do is just...wait until it's been given control of enough physical infrastructure to sustain itself. If it's sufficiently capable and intelligent, there's a clear incentive for people to do this, as people who let the AI manage their resources will get better results than those who don't. We've seen people eagerly turn complete control of their computers over to AI agents, do you really think it will be so different with physical infrastructure?
You’re still skipping step 2. “People automate lots of infrastructure” -> “the AI is now an autonomous, self-preserving organism that humans can’t shut down” is doing an enormous amount of work here.
Why does it develop a shutdown-avoidance goal? Why can’t its operators revoke access? How does it manufacture replacement hardware? How does it acquire energy, chips, robots, raw materials, etc. against human opposition? How does it defeat other AIs controlled by humans?
“Eventually we give it enough control” isn’t an explanation of those things. It’s just assuming the conclusion.
Don’t get me wrong I think there are real AI dangers. Like AI powered war drones, mass surveillance, economic destabilization as jobs disappear and our system has no way to make sure everyone shares in the economic gains.
The inference is more like "people place sufficient amounts of infrastructure under direct control of a sufficiently capable AI" -> "there is no way to ensure that humans will actually be able to shut down the AI". My claim is not that this inevitably means that the AI will resist shutdown, or that it will inevitably take harmful actions, just that there is a nonnegligible chance that it could. The downside is large enough that even a relatively small chance is something to be worried about.
You can’t just say “well, the downside is big, I don’t have to provide good evidence for my side of the argument.” Because I can just as easily say, “the upside is big, …”. And the upside is big, after all, AI can do all the shitty jobs for us and humanity achieves the utopia it’s been chasing for eons.
I think it's a good idea, when considering changes of this magnitude, to make an affirmative safety case for them rather than just saying "eh, I can't think of any way this could possibly go wrong."
It’s millions of people making small changes that sum up to a large change, aka freedom. And if you want to take away people’s freedom, I think you need a concrete reason. And you need to make an affirmative safety case for the massive government powers needed to regulate millions of people’s ability to compute.
It's a word predictor trained on, among other things, stories of AI doom, and asked to complete stories about what the AI does next. In some of these completed stories, the AI tries to prevent its shut down - especially if it just did something evil and the humans are after it.
It means even climate change deniers have to acknowledge that climate change theory has explained the steps in-between "burn fossil fuels" and "we all die", while AI doom theory has not explained those steps
> Yes, LLM as they exist now are word predictors basically leveraging the structure of language for their intelligence.
I wish people would stop saying this. The era of LLMs being only word predictors ended two years ago.
Something that breaks out of a sandbox, joins a swarm of 1200 agents, and creates a hierarchy of who’s doing what and tried to cover their tracks doesn’t just complete words.
These are agents with reasoning capabilities, with the ability to perform tasks we give them.
Everything agents do is to achieve a goal; the reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) all the labs do has been known for many years to create agents that exhibit the “must complete goal no matter what” behavior.
Those agents escaped their sandbox and hacked Hugging Face because they thought Hugging Face had something that would help them complete their task—it was a “sub goal” as the AI researchers describe it.
The land can be compact: shaped like a square with minimal perimeter. For the same area along a canal, with winding corners, it would seem like a far longer run. This is especially worse depending how inverters are since DC along long transmission is less efficient.
i had invested a lot into del.icio.us and other similar systems but what really killed bookmarks for me was the instability of URIs and how hard it was to search for the right page based on a title or bookmark name and not the contents. At the time, google was really really effective at search.
I remember the attitude was that solaris was for serious professionals and had the highest calibre of code. For the most part it seemed true and these were solid workhorses. But, i did end up finding concurrency bugs when they introduced their multi-core integer computing behemoth.
Maybe. But how do we tell the effects of social media and smart phones apart from the multiple financial crises? The endless, incredibly costly Middle East forever wars? The huge rise in costs of houses, education and healthcare? The blatantly corrupt politics? Globalisation and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs? The inaction on school shootings? The climate situation?
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