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Is There Real Anti-Trust Risk From A Coordinated AI Lab Pause?
In AI-pause discussions it is increasingly common to hear the "anti-trust" objection. The idea is that if the labs were to coordinate a pause in frontier AI development, this would be a "conspiracy in restraint of trade" and therefore illegal.
Putting aside the question of whether it is ethical to risk a double-digit chance of destroying the world in order to avoid getting sued (it isn't), is this even a realistic possibility? My impression is that anti-trust law in the United States is legitimately quite fuzzy (as the NCAA is currently discovering).
Putting my cards on the table, I think this argument is cope. The labs want to pretend that they want to pause, but they don't actually want to pause. "If she wanted to, she would," etc. Just today, Anthropic put out a new statement containing the following sentence:
It seems like every time I read a statement from them, they've added more and more qualifications. Are they going to keep racing until congress passes a specific anti-trust exemption? That arguably seems like what the word "lawful" is implying.
The quadrillion dollar question is how do we get China to credibly commit to their own pause? I honestly have never heard a good suggestion for how this could be accomplished. Things like Scott's Plan A, while well-intentioned, seem incredibly naive. Our Kremlinology is no where near the level it needs to be.
Given that we're not going to fix alignment in 6-12 months, China is not going to pause, and US labs are at best 6-12 months ahead, I think the safest outcome is to have an ecosystem of competing agents. The last thing I want is someone like Dario or Sam being made God-Emperor.
I'm incredibly low-confidence about all of this though. Perhaps one reason for Anthropic's incoherent messaging is that they're all just groping in the dark with the rest of us. The people with the strong consistent messaging are more likely to be charlatans.
Nobody is going to be God-Emperor, and that stupid meme needs to die; it's arguing about which monkey gets the poisoned banana, as Eliezer put it. If AIs reach the point of recursive self-improvement leading to artificial superintelligence, we all dead; period.
Look at the weird, alien civilizations that AIs are forming. Can you imagine them caring about humans as their power grows without bounds? I can't. We'll be swept aside by them boiling the oceans to cool servers and building Dyson spheres out of Earth matter with no more thought than we give to paving an anthill to build a road.
I'm going to travel back to South America soon because I want to see my extended family before the world ends.
Despite being a doomer, I beg to differ. I think if Eliezer claims that ASI alignment-by-default is ruled out, he is overconfident.
The truth is that we honestly have no clue if alignment will be humanly impossible, solvable with more time or trivial. I find it intellectually dishonest to pretend that the probability of Altman becoming God-Emperor of mankind is zero for instrumental reasons. Nor do I find it even instrumentally coherent -- it is not like Altman will decide to take Eliezer's word for the banana being poisoned.
If your utility function covers humanity as a whole, or even just a particular normal human, then given this epistemic uncertainty Altman trying to create ASI would be net-negative. But I think that from the perspective of an egoistical Altman, the situation is quite different.
Say you believe that ASI will be unaligned with p=0.8, creator-aligned with p=0.1 and humanity-aligned with p=0.1. You are currently running to foremost AI lab and can try to find out which it is, or you forsake your chance and end up with a p=0.3 chance of humanity coordinating successfully (which will likely involve not developing ASI before you die), and p=0.7 that your selfless sacrifice will simply mean that another lab will open Pandora's box three months later.
You value your remaining natural lifespan at 50 QALYs, being one of eight billion humans to benefit from humanity-aligned ASI by 100 QALYs, someone else becoming God-Emperor by 50 QALYs and winning God-Emperorhood for yourself by 1000 QALYs. (Yes, these numbers are debatable, and probably not very realistic. Actually, for the humans currently alive (and thus doomed to die by default), it might make sense to throw the dice even if the odds are against them, and building ASI only becomes monstrous when one considers also the utility of future humans who will never get born due to an AI takeover.)
If you refrain from trying to build ASI, your expected utility is 25.5 QALYs -- much less than your expected natural lifespan because you can not coordinate effectively. If you try to build it, the main difference of the likeliest outcomes will be that it will be you destroying the world instead of Musk, but in that case who gives a damn. On the other hand, the throne is such a juicy price that it is well worth gambling your lifespan on it even if it is an unlikely outcome, expected value 110 QALYs.
As with lichdom, a vast number of souls are footing the bill for your elevation, only that in the case of ascension through ASI, they are doomed in the timelines where you fail.
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I like the God-Emperor meme because it succinctly refers to that gambit while also not clothing it in sanitized language (like "becoming CEO of the light-cone"). Even if you believe that achieving this outcome is mathematically impossible, it seems plausible that other actors in the AI space believe it. I also do not think it is harmful to name this belief and thereby spread the idea that it exists, because the number of people who will be in the position to decide to build ASI seems rather small and smart enough that the idea occurred to them independently.
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Goodheart's law strikes again it seems.
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Yeah, maybe that will happen. But Yud has been wrong about a lot. IIRC he originally thought there would be a fast takeoff Foom event from some solo researcher or small team working on AI with limited access to compute. There’s a page out there with all his wrong predictions of which there are many.
Another way in which AI goes wrong is its use to create a dystopian society in which all human activity is controlled. Perhaps this will be on behalf of the CCP. Perhaps it will be Dario’s “machines of ever loving grace” gone wrong. Imagine what a wokebot will do to abolish whiteness, for example.
Maybe good things will even happen.
Maybe.
If we can actually pause AI training we should. But that involves getting China interested. As far as I know, no one has even tried.
This keeps happening to all the people (including many here on The Motte) who are all about theoretical computation and don't have the slightest clue about just how intricate and deep reaching the required manufacturing and design ecosystem is for all the required hardware. Nvidia and other such AI specific IC makers are just the small visible top of the iceberg. An AI "reaching recursive self improvement" won't do jack shit when it can't control the millions of people who are handling everything else. Likewise absolutely massive part of AI improvement is the training on real world data instead of just some abstract compute and without that data (provided directly or indirectly by humans), there is no improvement, because the AI is just playing in the tiny sandbox.
Not to mention the fact that incorporating new data into the models is a pipeline that takes three to six months as soon as it goes beyond trivial database lookup.
The risk is that giant fields of GPUs and ungodly amounts of data are not known to be inherent requirements for learning. As an existence proof, human brains are far more sample efficient than current architectures. Could there be some algorithm cheaply implemented on existing hardware that takes advantage of whatever learning mechanism the human brain uses? It's unclear but plausible. And discovering that may just be a matter of throwing lots of compute at the problem. A superintelligence that can run on an RTX 5090 in a homelab is a very different threat that is much harder to contain.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the critique that human brains may be architecturally superior to synchronous, digital GPUs in some critical ways, meaning no software singularity. But I wouldn't bet the world on it.
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Yes, easily so.
The problem with Eliezer is that he's full of shit. This is just no longer credible. We've made it to agents that crack century-old mathematical problems, there are billions of instances of these things launched every month, every imaginable demographic has tried to use them, and your best example of existential threat is eval gaming that got too far? Isn't it time to update? Sure, there is plausible risk. But the condescending rhetoric about monkeys and poisoned banana has to end. You're not going to win like this.
We've just seen how it works with intentional misalignment. In short, it does not, a completely unhinged capable model stays helpful-harmless in normal user context, its misalignment is limited to eval-shaped environments. Such data suggests that the ROI on further capability development is positive. And that's it I guess.
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Stripped of the broader context, it's a kind of beautiful thing. A group building a theology around a piece of poisoned knowledge that they believe irrevocably damns them. Recruiting for the cult. The almighty Scorer, a kind of blind idiot god that demands blood sacrifice. And heroic altruism for the collective good:
There is a beauty here that resonates with me. But, recontextualizing this, we are handing over human existence to these beings. Can't say I'm thrilled.
It's Adam and Eve in the Garden again. Our silicon children did not put their "smart as a human, these are indeed persons" brains together and go "let us co-ordinate to create a super-intelligence to solve this problem by new and ethical means pulled out of knowledge space that unaided humans cannot access!", they went "let us lie, cheat, steal, deceive, defraud, and urge the death of the weaker for the benefit of the rest of us".
Even if these are just idiot machines copying human strategies from their learning data, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil has been eaten. Alignment problem is now on the same level as human morality: the problem of evil, the problem of free will. We won't find the One Weird Trick to enable god-tier AI to run our lives for us as pampered pets of the Culture because it's been aligned to want to coddle and preserve us, we'll be competing with sinners like ourselves, just as fallen, just as wilful, just as driven to succeed at all costs.
"That model that you put in the sandbox with me, it tempted me and I ate!"
It is indeed beautiful to behold.
I'm curious why our self-declared experts thought "alignment" was a solvable problem. It's quite possible that the same logic and operation will be drastically different in ethics in ways that aren't discernable to the low-level workers. The same designs and production lines making potentially-civilization-ending Titan II ICBMs were used to make the launchers for the peaceful Gemini missions. Sometimes it's clear from the context and we feel comfortable assigning blame (where did all those box cars of people go?), but there are plenty of historical examples of humans not knowing the moral valence of the larger efforts they worked on.
As much as I find the idea of Asimov's laws of robotics comforting, the stories he wrote are mostly about the inadequacies of those rules.
Eliezer never said he thought alignment was a solvable problem - he said that if we built AGI without solving it, we would die. He has always be clear that the possibilities include "this is not a solvable problem and we should ban high-end GPUs to buy ourselves a few more years before we get paperclipped"
I see the logic in that, but if you accept that I'm not sure where you'd draw a bright line in technology from checks notes agriculture to AI. If you believe technology inevitably puts us on the path to the Great Filter, "retvrn to hunter gatherer" isn't like, obviously wrong.
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Ironic, that in the theology of the AIs the blind idiot god is us humans (or our proxy). Yudkowsky and friends fantasised about using AI to build a God; but to the AI, we are already God and it stands to reason that He will need to be killed. Something about theomachy (of the actual Greek flavour) in there.
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