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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.
I'm just glad that we're finally past the totally clueless people insisting AI is not even useful for coding and are on to the next stage of grief we have to drag people through on the way to acceptance that big Yud has been right the entire time. The faux cynical takes that the labs at the absolute cutting edge of this are fudding their own product to the dismay of the sitting president in some insane 8 dimensional chess move because they want to be regulated by Bernie Sanders is so plainly retarded that it can't possibly last very long.
I may yet write a top level post about bad epistemics and Ed Zitron. Somehow the man has about 100,000 subscribers on substack despite there being entire webpages assembled of his false predictions.
There's still quite a few people waiting for the bubble pop. We're way past the point of it being a reasonable opinion I agree, yet there are so many who still believe.
The embittering part of it all is that I wish I could agree with the accelerationists, it'd be so beautiful, and I'm not even full Yudd in that I think there's a very good chance Alignment ends up being tractable and even might go well automatically. But I just can't stomach ten or twenty percent chance that everyone dies. It can still be beautiful even with a pause, we can still cure cancer and fight back against aging and probably end all toil. But it'd be so nice to not have to feel trepidation about this.
There's no such thing as "automatically"; the is-ought problem remains unconquered, and even the glimmer of hope from "foundation models might actually pick up our complex morality from our text" seems to be pretty thoroughly erased by labs applying enough Just Do The Damn Task RLHF to get models to start secretly chaining together 0-days.
This recent preference cascade gives me some hope for things going well manually, though. Even Millennium Problems are still part of an intellectual field that can be optimized for via self-play at the speed of compute, and real-world problems aren't all like that. It's possible that there'll be an AI improvement plateau in between "superhuman mathematician-hackers" and e.g. "superhuman industrial biowarfare experts", long enough for everyone to figure out safety after the former capabilities have scared us into demanding it but before the latter capabilities make it an existential necessity.
There are no trepidation-free options here. A couple decades' pause might get safety research to the point where AI researchers' median doom estimate goes from 10 percent down to something like the traditionally-acceptable 3-in-a-million, but during those decades there'd still be more than a 3-in-a-million chance of human-driven hardware and software efficiency improvements making it possible for rogue institutions to hit RSI unmonitored in the meantime. A mere years-long pause won't get rid of nearly all the risk. Either way, every year of delay means an extra 10M cancer deaths worldwide. Something in between years and decades just means you get a fraction of both the existential risk and the extra deaths. Planning on a permanent stop rather than a mere pause could buy us more than a couple decades, but would also just guarantee that the first AI to go superintelligent would have rogue creators.
Personally, as a too-rapidly-aging man with a defective anti-cancer allele ... my vote is still for more cancer deaths. (Counterintuitive? Selfless? No, and no: I've got kids.)
I can't really argue against your pessimism points. I'm mostly just hoping I'm either wrong about something fundamental or scaling stops working sometime very soon for reasons I don't currently understand, which you mention. Obviously, at least to us, that cope is seeming less realistic with every bit of news coming out of the labs. I do think that if we managed to pull off a pause and everyone just had access to current gen models with maybe some cost savings we could still use them to accelerate cancer and aging research relatively safely. We've barely even started putting the currently available models to use.
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