acutelychronicpanic t1_je9qay6 wrote
Reply to comment by Trackest in LAION launches a petition to democratize AI research by establishing an international, publicly funded supercomputing facility equipped with 100,000 state-of-the-art AI accelerators to train open source foundation models. by BananaBus43
I don't mean some open-source ideal. I mean a mixed approach with governments, research institutions, companies, megacorporations all doing their own work on models. Too much collaboration on Alignment may actually lead to issues where weaknesses are shared across models. Collaboration will be important, but there need to be diverse approaches.
Any moratorium falls victim to a sort of prisoner's dilemma where only 100% worldwide compliance helps everyone, but even one group ignoring it means that the moratorium hurts the 99% participants and benefits the 1% rogue faction. To the extent that Apocalypse isn't off the table if that happens.
Its a knee-jerk reaction.
The strict and controlled research is impossible in the real world and, I think, likely to increase the risks overall due to only good actors following it.
The military won't shut its research down. Not in any country except maybe some EU states. We couldn't even do this with nukes and those are far less useful and far less dangerous.
Trackest t1_je9s80s wrote
Right, taking into account real-world limitations perhaps your suggestion is the best approach. A world-wide moratorium is impossible.
Ideally reaching AGI is harder than we think, so the multiple actors working collaboratively have time to share which alignment methods work and which do not like how you described. I agree that having many actors working on alignment will increase probability of finding a method that works.
However with the potential for enormous profits and the fact that the best AI model will reap the most benefits, how can you possibly ensure these diverse organizations will share their work, apply effective alignment strategies, and not race to the "finish"? Getting everyone to join a nominal "safety and collaboration" organization seems like a good idea, but we all know how easily lofty ideals collapse in the face of raw profits.
acutelychronicpanic t1_je9ttym wrote
The best bet is for the leaders to just do what they do (being open would be nice, but I won't hold my breath), and for at least some of the trailing projects to collaborate in the interest of not being obsolete. The prize isn't necessarily just getting rich, its also creating a society where being rich doesn't matter so much. Personally, I want to see everyone get to do whatever they want with their lives. Lots of folks are into that.
Edit & Quick Thought: Being rich wouldn't hold a candle to being one of the OG developers of the system which results in utopia. Imagine the clout. You could make t-shirts. I'll personally get a back tattoo of their faces. Bonus, there's every chance you get to enjoy it for.. forever? Aging seems solvable with AGI.
If foundational models become openly available, then people will be working more on fine-tuning which seems to be much cheaper. Ideally they could explicitly exclude the leading players in their licensing to reduce the gap between whoever is first and everyone else, regardless of who is first. (But I'm not 100% on that last idea. I'll chew on it).
If we all have access to very-smart-but-not-AGI systems like GPT-4 and can more easily make narrow AI for cybersecurity, science, etc. Then even if the leading player is 6 months ahead, their intelligence advantage may not be enough to allow them to leverage their existing resources to dominate the world, just get very rich. I'm okay with that.
Caffdy t1_jebfvjx wrote
> The prize isn't necessarily just getting rich, its also creating a society where being rich doesn't matter so much
This phrase, this phrase alone say it all. Getting rich and all the profits in the world won't matter when we will be a inch-step close to extintion; from AGI to Super Artificial Intelligence it won't take long; we are a bunch of dumb monkeys fighting over a floating piece of dirt in the blackness of space, we're not prepared to understand and undertake on the risks of developing this kind of technology
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