Thatingles t1_jeak9ce wrote on March 30, 2023 at 4:47 PM

Reply to comment by acutelychronicpanic in Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down by Eliezer Yudkowsky by Darustc4

It's basic game theory, without wishing to sound like I am very smart. An AI developed in the full glare of publicity - which can only really happen in the west - has a better chance of a good outcome than an AI developed in secret, be it in the west or elsewhere.

I don't think it is a good plan to develop ASI, ever, but it is probably inevitable. If not this decade than certainly within 20-50 years from now. Technology doesn't remain static if there is a motivation to tinker and improve it, even if the progress is slow it is still progress.

EY has had a positive impact on the AI debate by highlighting the dangers and I admire him for that, but just as with climate change if you attempt impossible solutions its doomed to failure. Telling everyone they have to stop using fossil fuels today might be an answer, but it's not a good or useful answer. You have to find a way forward that will actually work and I can't see a full global moratorium being enforceable.

The best course I can see working is to insist that AI research is open to scrutiny so if we do start getting scary results we can act. Pushing it under a rock takes away our main means of avoiding disaster.

acutelychronicpanic t1_jeap8m1 wrote on March 30, 2023 at 5:19 PM

Yeah, I greatly respect him too. I've been exposed to his ideas for years.

Its not that it wouldn't work if we did what he suggests. Its that we can't do it. It's just too easy to replicate for any group with rather modest resources. There are individual buildings that were more expensive than SOTA LLM models.

The toothpaste is out if the tube with transformers and large language models. I don't think most people, even most researchers had any idea that it would be this "easy" to make this much progress in AI. That's why everyone's guesses were 2050+. I've heard eople with PhDs confidently say "not in this century" within the last 5-10 years.

Heck, Ray Kurzweil looks like a conservative or at least median in this current timeline (I never thought I would type that out).