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Notes -
Is it over for AI Safety? From an interview:
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117269745153543631
Meanwhile in China, Dario's call for AI pacing have not gone down well. Understandably, they are not enthusiastic about the US achieving a permanent high ground in a key technology after the last few years of semiconductor sanctions and suppression. Also they can tell that Dario doesn't like the Party at all and seems to be openly plotting its downfall.
Dario's essay: https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
A Chinese semi-official response: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202609/1370436.shtml
So if Trump is keen for an AI race and so is China, then it looks pretty much over for Safety? Even the other US tech companies have only provided lip service to slowing things down. Elon said Dario's sentiment was good but is still moving quickly. Sam Altman says all kinds of things about safety, while displaying heroic negligence in training AIs. I don't doubt the sincerity of employees who quit, they have many financial reasons to go with the flow and downplay risks. Lurid rumours of Aella promising reverse gangbangs to those who quit frontier AI companies don't neccessarily outweigh the personal financial gains. It seems silly to doubt those at the frontier who are frightened when we ourselves have no special insights. In pure observational terms they're better equipped than anyone, only in policy or analysis should we be disagreeing, I think.
I also find it comical that the AI-safety camp spent such a long time building up institutions and factions and entire AI companies but seem to have been totally snookered by Jensen's suave dinner party skills and the appeal of fun AI videos to a Boomer's Boomer plus the raw partisanship of 'Dems want it, so I don't'. Even Aschenbrenner managed to do better at Trump-whispering. Shortly after he wrote his essay, I recall a video where the fundamentals were accepted by Trump, someone told him about it. And it did fit well with his instincts, getting one up on China + more energy production.
Right now Trump is reTruthing Fox News clips framing AI safety as a global one world government Democrat control-seeking scheme: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117273026439561125
I don't see any AI safety people on right wing twitter either, those who acknowledge the issue at all still would prefer to let it rip than hand the left/big tech elites control of the world, favouring decentralization of AI instead.
I wonder whether it would always have gone down this way, or whether Kamala was going to do things differently? Would Jensen's marketing skills and the need to keep stocks up + compete with China prevail over the Bernie Sanders-style Left element? Probably not? The Dario vision does seem much more closely aligned with Democrats, Civil Society and so on. But on the other hand, the US government is exceptionally slow to legislate and big tech has strong lobbying power.
And who knows if it will stay this way. Sometime soon there's probably going to be a much bigger AI swarm incident, which might yet incite a hysterical kneejerk reaction.
We're so incredibly far from RSI that I think safety people have no business messing with the current advancement of AI. Certainly AI models are dangerous, but mostly at the hands of enabling unskilled bad actors to approach human expert level performance on dangerous tasks.
While AI usage may be speeding up frontier AI development, mostly this happens through helping human researchers do boilerplate work faster. While an AI agent may be able to eke out a few more percent on optimizing a model to be better, a soft takeoff requires the model to think of novel, never-before-seen techniques to build a better new model, and the new model needs to be able to think of new techniques that the previous model couldn't. And even if we got a soft takeoff, it would give many chances in the future to pull the plug.
Meanwhile a hard takeoff is completely unthinkable. Current frontier AI has zero ability to self modify, only the ability to make new models that might be better than themselves. This happens on the scale of months not minutes.
I don't know why you think that. I have a hobbyist system, today, that researches new architectures (mostly around "biologically plausible" learning), and there's one result in particular that is very impressive (you'll have to take my word for it). And that's with a highly constrained budget.
It's not truly autonomous--there's a big issue with what one might call research taste--but it makes investigating different architectures in bulk very easy, with easy signals (e.g. loss) to identify the more promising approaches. If there is some simple algorithmic trick that's been overlooked that leads to the current deficits in LLMs, OAI could throw a ridiculous but feasible amount of compute at the problem and find it, similar to its math results.
Forgive me for the skepticism but many people have made similar claims, and it turns they just built a slop factory along with a minor case of ai psychosis.
Of course hobbyists have come up with real breakthroughs too but I don't really buy a "just trust me bro" here
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