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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38431 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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My favorite part of this timeline has been how OpenAI went from a non-profit foundation meant to democratize AI research into a for-profit subsidiary of the most ruthless monopoly of the last 30 years, with zero regard for AI safety if there is any chance to sniff a profit.

Yeah Sam Altman is a machiavellian genius deal-maker, apparently. Or he was in the right place at the right time.

Either way, he absolutely scooped those nerds at Google trying to just build tech for humanity and do research.

Very depressing how Google (the leader up until 2021 and maybe even still) chose not to release products, presumably for ethical reasons, and then Microsoft just bought OpenAI, gave GPT-4 access to the internet and said "let her rip".

It's a bad sign. It makes it more likely that people will adopt the attitude that there's no point in containing AI since if I don't do it, someone else will.

It makes it more likely that people will adopt the attitude that there's no point in containing AI since if I don't do it, someone else will.

but...that is obviously true. And was always obviously true. And you're saying it's bad if more people come to this true conclusion?

It's kinda hilarious, but a) there actually was a lot of conversation about this as a possible solution in LessWrong spheres in the late Obama era, and b) there's still people today, here making the "just don't do that" argument.

I don't think it should be surprising anymore, given the failed efforts post-COVID to provide serious oversight of even our own country's gain-of-function research, but I found that pretty disappointing.

Yes. It's bad. Microsoft's irresponsibility has pushed the timeline forward.

Thus all the memes of:

2015: "Obvious no one will hook AGI up to the internet"

2023: Leeroy Jenkins!!!

Perhaps it was inevitable. Perhaps it is even desirable according to some convoluted reasoning about hardware overhangs or whatever. For me, I'd prefer to live more years in the human era.

Just because defection seems inevitable doesn't absolve the first person to defect from responsibility.

Defection is inevitable when arguments for AI safety are bad and fail to convince most intelligent agents in the space.

We could agree on non proliferation of nuclear weapons because the harms are obvious and the benefits are essentially just more power. AI is a whole different ballgame.

Did Google not release anything for ethical reasons, or was it because they were a bunch of naval-gazers with the economic discipline of a DMV office?

I've seen claims that shipping everything was becoming impossible due to too much paper-pushing and people with veto power, so..

They didn’t want to release AI because it couldn’t help noticing inconvenient patterns in society

Well if they were determined enough to ship something they could have figured out a way to beat it over the head until it stops noticing (like OpenAI did). That’s part of the “economic discipline” thing.

Given Google’s track record with finished products, there isn’t much doubt what the reason was.

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