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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34551 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Two Tweets from OpenAI's Sam Altman: "eliezer has IMO done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else. certainly he got many of us interested in AGI, helped deepmind get funded at a time when AGI was extremely outside the overton window, was critical in the decision to start openai, etc." "it is possible at some point he will deserve the nobel peace prize for this--I continue to think short timelines and slow takeoff is likely the safest quadrant of the short/long timelines and slow/fast takeoff matrix."

Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks that the rapid development of AGI will likely kill us and he has devoted his life to trying to stop this from happening, and Sam Altman almost certainly knows this. My personal guess is that quantum immortality means regardless of who is right, some branches of the multiverse will survive AGI, and the survivors will have enough computational power to know what percentage of the branches survived, and consequently whether Altman or Yudkowsky were right.

Edit: Eliezer's response Tweet, which I don't understand.

A common complaint I am seeing is that openai is an existential threat. Why can't tech billionaires pool together crate their own unbiased openai alternative? It is way easier than trying to make another facebook.

The arguments I've seen that OpenAI is an existential threat are from people who think it's an existential threat in the same way that a business whose product was consumer-grade bioweapon development kits would be an existential threat.

If your problem is that a company is selling bioweapon development kits, starting a competing company that also sells bioweapon development kits does not help.

I have seen Cernovich and others argue it is a threat because of left-wing bias, not destroy-the-world threat .

You've seen him argue that it's an existential threat because of left-wing bias?

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