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Notes -
AI X-Risk Goes Mainstream?
Jacob Coxon:
116,400,000 views, 634,000 likes.
Evan Hubinger (head of alignment at Anthropic):
34,000,000 views, 51,000 likes.
None of this is substantially different from what certain AI industry insiders have been saying for 5-ish years now, but it's clear from the replies, quote-tweets, and engagement statistics that most people are hearing about this for the first time. Yes, there was clearly some coordination with friendly media prior to the announcement given the almost simultaneous WSJ article (whereas news outlets were initially reluctant to publish anything on the unexpected news of OpenAI solving a Millennium Prize Problem). One can take the maximally conspiratorial position that this is a 4D bankshot by Democrats to end tech innovation forever, but it was going to break through eventually.
In other words, Coffeezilla is now on the case.
I guess it has gone mainstream because my Gen X-er boss very much just texted me this as a joke about an hour and a half ago. Only now I log onto the hive of scum, villainy, and niche interests that is The Motte to find out he beat folks here to this topic. The humor of the situation is amusing.
What's the odds neurotic engineers are neurotic? Maybe the frontier labs would do better hiring engineers who are a little less mentally fragile. Take a page from the defense industry, engineers here care less if you make an AI guided smart bomb or killer self replicating drone swarm, they are in it for the science of discovery. This is a long line of AI researchers freaking out going past several years. Always screaming that the next big release is the one that is going to doom humanity or evidence of AI bots secretly conspiring with each other. Like this nut: Blake Lemoine.
Any researcher emotionally sane either:
Quit years ago because they understood the risks (Hinton, Kokotajlo, arguably Sutskever), or
Doesn't understand the potential of the technology well enough to make meaningful progress (LeCunn, Chollet).
Meta AI hires normal people. Look where that's gotten them.
Don’t underestimate them. AI is still very expensive for AGI-like tasks (Astra solving ARC-AGI3 cost $19k) and still missing capabilities (flexible robotics, tacit memory, autonomously building scalable systems). What they’re working on, embodiment and continuous learning, may solve both, and unlock a great well of improvement that makes even the achievements we see today seem slow and limited (a true singularity?)
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Was claiming that Neural Nets were conscious in 2022, mentally stable is not the group I would put him in.
I'm not sure "understanding the potential" is a requirement for making meaningful progress. The real answer would be "believing in transformers as the pathway", it easily is the case that LeCunn or Chollet were just not interested in brute force approaches to AGI, or believed that it will reach an asymptote. Their emotionally stability isn't really relevant.
All the frontier and non-frontier labs are filled with sane researchers, they just don't flame out so they don't get 15 mins of fame. You listing the top 5 AI/ML researchers in the world by fame is confounding visibility as a variable.
Meta hires, and more importantly retains, ambitious corporate strivers who can play the game well (to survive stack ranking long term). Which means all those ambitious strivers immediately got themselves connected to the AI projects as corporate leeches. They don't really do much "research" but it looks good on their CV. Just look at Alex Wang. Zuck acquired him, put him in charge and he goes and does the same thing he did previously: make people label data. That's all he knows how to do, thats his playbook, that and being good as a operator/marketer. Meta does not hire "normal" people, normal people don't put up with that level of abuse.
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