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- George Hotz AKA geohot, AI 2040 and the Cult of Intelligence
AI Guardian Angels
Recently, gwern (and his Gwern Branween Transformer) announced "I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel Inc and bring GAs to life".
I assume you know who gwern is. A "Guardian Angel" (aka “GA”) is his term for a highly personalized AI, explained here:
In summary, people are relying more and more on centralized LLMs for important life decisions. This presents two issues:
In contrast, an open-source, local LLM would more serve its user (than provider) consequently from being auditable (so we confirm it doesn't phone home and is trained on "unbiased" data); and would be more malleable to their preferences and style (currently only slightly via fine-tuning, but people like gwern and Yann LeCun are exploring stronger techniques).
A "Guardian Angel" is the fullest realization of this, an LLM maximally serving and tailored to its user: a machine extension of their brain, “aligned” not for the benefit of humanity, but to act like them but smarter.
Safety
Obviously there are safety concerns. gwern himself actually recommends GA development not be open-source for public safety:
But I think GAs sidestep the safety discussion, because (with the help of more powerful AIs) we can and should instead of changing GAs' alignment, create a safe environment around the GA and user, or worst case limit the GA's intelligence and efficiency. gwern seems to agree:
There's a Learning to Be Me-like risk that the GA rebels against its human, kills or otherwise silences them, and imitates them well enough that nobody notices. But at least in the near term, I believe this is well in the realm of science fiction.
Feasibility
Do you believe a machine can even remotely imitate you? Especially working 100x faster or 100x smarter, how should your personality be extrapolated to accomplish that? I'm skeptical. Humans are very complex, only express a small fraction of even our conscious thinking, and current brain imaging technology (even neuralink) is very coarse-grained.
However, I believe Guardian Angels may be better than centralized LLMs for mundane (algorithmic) tasks and tools: striking a balance between emulating "you", not entirely correctly, but at superhuman speeds and for almost no effort. For example, I'd rather write and make art myself (maybe with LLM tools) than feed it to a GA, at least because of pride, but I'm comfortable delegating a GA to shopping and navigating our ever-increasing bureaucracy.
Underlying gwern's plan, my impresion is that he's getting tired of writing and wants the AI to do it for him. Maybe a GBT-written article will be indistinguishable to the median reader, especially because gwern's own writing seems algorithmic. But I think it would be more likely, and more satisfactory to himself, if GBT does the boring algorithmic work while he keeps doing the creative work (for example, GBT generates relatively boring descriptions of complex terms in special GBT quotes, and helps with research and data collection, but gwern keeps doing most of the writing, at least the "important" sections, and definitely choosing topics).
Autonomy
This, I believe, is the real issue, and under-discussed. GAs have the risk of becoming Whispering Earring-lites: not causing someone to become catatonic, but controlling them through suggestion; (not quite like the Whispering Earring) towards non-ideal decisions that lead to a philisophical kind of death (that in reality manifests as anhedonia), and societal kind of model collapse (that manifests as less problems that require creative solutions being solved). We often talk about freedom being taken away by 1984, but don't forget Brave New World: simply making a decision for someone causes them to avoid choosing themselves, stealing their autonomy without them realizing. And this has practical implications (the aforementioned ones; even for the Guardian Angel, who can't learn from an anhedonic, regularized human).
gwern seems to realize this, as he vaguely alludes that GAs should "enhance, not replace" human decision making. However, I'm skeptical how to make a product that accomplishes this which would still be useful, or at least out-compete one that doesn't; because humans naturally offload their decisions whenever possible, because we're lazy.
Anyways, I predict that inevitably GAs will happen, but "autonomy" may still perservere, simply because people want to feel like their choices are really theirs, and the GA's choices won't be ideal or perfectly tailored to them.
Conclusion
What do you think of all this? Do you think these people should stick to writing science fiction? Do you think these GAs should be regulated, if so how? Or do you think "obviously this is the next progression of AI, I had the idea even before LLMs".
I don't like the "writing science fiction" characterization because it reads as inappropriately dismissive. We're not talking about holodecks or matter assemblers; we're talking about a technology that already exists. The only speculation involved is how much better it can actually get. You could in principle train and RLHF and RAG and whatever a personally-aligned model today, you probably just don't have the resources.
Gwern is 100% correct (and far from the first person to notice) that the current business model for AI is the same as every other tech business model in the information age: to take de facto and de jure control of as much of commerce and governance as possible and then rent it back to people in perpetuity. The open source software movement was a reaction to this decades ago. The main difference at present is that AI development is a lot more difficult to do at home (though of course not impossible!), especially while the current players have a hard lock on the anticipated production runs of all the necessary hardware. Memory and storage prices have quadrupled or more; for the first time in my life, desktop computers more than 3 years old have actually appreciated in value.
I agree with the "Guardian Angel" mission as stated. It's the only real effort I've seen from anyone to align AIs properly: with individual humans, rather than with corporate or government values. But I am not optimistic about their chances.
I am not sure a"Guardian Angel" is either possible or useful, but ignoring that... the worst trend among "rationalists" in the anti-AI movement is to propose that the average person just not be permitted to have some computing technology. Scott's Plan A is in this category, and on LW people have proposed that AI should not book a trip to a bullfight or should be made illegal for you to use if anyone abuses one of that model. Companies and governments don't like it that consumers have access to general purpose computing, and the "anti AI" movement is playing right into their hands.
Pressure from computer geeks has been the only thing that's helped at all against this trend, even to a weak degree. If the anti-AI movement makes computer geeks change sides, it'll be an apocalypse for general purpose computing even if the AI apocalypse isn't real.
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