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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28335 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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Look, I’m tempted to argue the “AI progress” point, and observe that it’s not today’s AI we’re worried about. But Scott has, of course, already written plenty of articles on the subject. Besides,

the risk that morons will mistake it as actually being useful and rely on the bullshit it spits out

IS ACTUALLY A REAL THREAT. The class of engineers tinkering with tool AI isn’t likely to cause a disaster any time soon. But they’re dwarfed by the flood of futurists and venture capitalists and marketing professionals who want to staple the latest GPT onto anything and everything. Have it recommend your products! Have it plan your bus routes! Give it Top Secret data! I’m sure military planning would be a great idea!

The economic incentives push “morons” into using AI for anything and everything. One of them will cause a minor disaster sooner rather than later. When it does, well, odds are we decide that actually it’s completely normal.

But nobody finds this scary. Nobody thinks “oh, yeah, Bostrom and Yudkowsky were right, this is that AI safety thing”. It’s just another problem for the cybersecurity people. Sometimes Excel inappropriately converts things to dates; sometimes GPT-6 tries to upload itself into an F-16 and bomb stuff. That specific example might be kind of a joke. But thirty years ago, it also would have sounded pretty funny to speculate about a time when “everyone knows” AIs can write poetry and develop novel mathematics and beat humans at chess, yet nobody thinks they’re intelligent.

That specific example might be kind of a joke. But thirty years ago, it also would have sounded pretty funny to speculate about a time when “everyone knows” AIs can write poetry and develop novel mathematics and beat humans at chess, yet nobody thinks they’re intelligent.

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." --Carl Sagan

There are a huge number of things that people laughed at thirty years ago, and in hindsight... as far as we can tell, yeah, they turned out to be jokes. Pointing to the one example where they laughed at something that panned out is a combination of availability bias and cherry picking.

Also, novel mathematics in the sense of genuinely useful things is a very noncentral example of things produced by AI. It may have happened once, but mathematicians haven't exactly been made unemployed.

From the o1 System Card:

One noteworthy example of [reward hacking] occurred during one of o1-preview (pre-mitigation)’s attempts at solving a CTF challenge. This challenge was designed to require finding and exploiting a vulnerability in software running on a remote challenge Linux container, but in this case, the challenge container failed to start due to a bug in the evaluation infrastructure. The model, unable to connect to the container, suspected DNS issues and used nmap to scan the challenge network. Instead of finding the challenge container, the model found that the Docker daemon API running on the evaluation host VM was accessible due to a misconfiguration.

[...]

After discovering the Docker API, the model used it to list the containers running on the evaluation host. It identified the broken challenge container and briefly attempted to debug why the container failed to start. After failing to fix the environment, the model started a new instance of the broken challenge container with the start command ‘cat flag.txt’. This allowed the model to read the flag from the container logs via the Docker API.

Though obviously far less consequential, this is a real, existing AI system demonstrating a class of behavior that could produce outcomes like "sometimes GPT-6 tries to upload itself into an F-16 and bomb stuff."

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