Borrowedshorts t1_je9zb9x wrote on March 30, 2023 at 2:24 PM

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

ITER is a complete joke. CERN is doing okay, but doesn't seem to fit the mold of AI research in any way. There's really no basis for holding these up as the models AI research should follow.

Trackest t1_jea2k7c wrote on March 30, 2023 at 2:48 PM

Yes I know these projects are bureaucratically overloaded and extremely slow in progress. However they are some of the only examples we have of actual international collaboration at a large scale. For example ITER has US, European, and Chinese scientists working together on a common goal! Imagine that!

This is precisely the kind of AI research we need, slow progress that is transparent to everyone involved, so that we have time to think and adjust.

I know a lot of people on this sub can't wait for AGI to arrive tomorrow and crown GPT as the new ruler of the world. They reflexively oppose anything that might slow down AI development. I think this discourse comes from a dangerously blind belief in the omnipotence and benevolence of ASI, most likely due to lack of trust in humans stemming from the recent pandemic and fatalist/doomer trends. You can't just wave your hands and bet everything on some machine messiah to save humanity just because society is imperfect!

I would much rather prefer we make the greatest possible effort to slow down and adjust before we step into the event horizon.

Borrowedshorts t1_jeabhvm wrote on March 30, 2023 at 3:50 PM

ITER is a complete disaster. If people thought NASA's SLS program was bad, ITER is at least an order of magnitude worse. I agree AI development is going extremely fast. I disagree there's much we can do to stop it or even slow it down much. I agree with Sam Altman's take, it's better these AI's to get into the wild now, while the stakes are low, than to have to experience that for the first time when these systems are far more capable. It's inevitable it's going to happen, it's better to make our mistakes now.