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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   40081 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Was a bit surprised to see this hadn't been posted yet, but yesterday Yudkowsky wrote an op-ed in TIME magazine where he describes the kind of regime that he believes would be necessary to throttle AI progress:

https://archive.is/A1u57

Some choice excerpts:

Many researchers working on these systems think that we’re plunging toward a catastrophe, with more of them daring to say it in private than in public; but they think that they can’t unilaterally stop the forward plunge, that others will go on even if they personally quit their jobs. And so they all think they might as well keep going. This is a stupid state of affairs, and an undignified way for Earth to die, and the rest of humanity ought to step in at this point and help the industry solve its collective action problem.

The moratorium on new large training runs needs to be indefinite and worldwide. There can be no exceptions, including for governments or militaries. If the policy starts with the U.S., then China needs to see that the U.S. is not seeking an advantage but rather trying to prevent a horrifically dangerous technology which can have no true owner and which will kill everyone in the U.S. and in China and on Earth. If I had infinite freedom to write laws, I might carve out a single exception for AIs being trained solely to solve problems in biology and biotechnology, not trained on text from the internet, and not to the level where they start talking or planning; but if that was remotely complicating the issue I would immediately jettison that proposal and say to just shut it all down.

Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for anyone, including governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

if its presence in the CW thread needs justifying, well, it's published in a major magazine and the kinds of policy proposals set forth would certainly ignite heated political debate were they ever to be seriously considered.

"Yudkowsky airstrike threshold" has already become a minor meme on rat and AI twitter.

I see we're back to trying to outlaw mathematics. I encourage everyone to read this article by Stephen Wolfram describing how LLMs work before panicking. I cannot understand the degree to which LLMs have apparently broken some people's brains.

I'm not sure why you find that article reassuring. Wait until you hear about the shitty hardware that human brains run on, only 30 Watts! Yud isn't even saying that the current LLMs are all that dangerous, he's saying that we're pouring 10B/y and all the top talent into overcoming any limitations to making them as smart or smarter than humans. What would make you scared?

I do not think the takeaway from the article is about the hardware that LLMs are being run on. It's about the way LLM's function. The LLM doesn't understand the content of the query or its response the way you or I do. It just understands them as probabilistic sequences of tokens and its job is to predict the tokens that should come next. An interaction I recount in another comment showcases this issue. I point to the article because it is not clear to me that what LLMs do (token prediction) is the kind of thing that can be extrapolated to the dangers people like Yudkowksy are worried about with respect to unfriendly AI.

What would make you scared?

If we had an AI that actually understood the meaning of what it was being asked.

I think you're being misled by a very specific failure mode of LLMs trained on tokenized input. The spelling and number of words is explicitly scrubbed from their input. Asking for word counts is like asking a blind person who reads and writes Braille about the shape of letters.

Good enough next-token prediction is, in principle, powerful enough to do anything you could ask someone to do using only a computer. I'm not claiming that this is a plausible route to super-powerful AI. But the "just" in "It just understands them as probabilistic sequences of tokens" seems totally unwarranted to me.

To be clear, I think LLMs can do a lot of really impressive things. I've used Github Copilot in my job and it was able to autocomplete some mostly correct code (variable/property names needed fixing) just from my writing a comment. It was pretty cool! But the leap from Copilot or GPT-4 or whatever to "We need international regulation on GPU production and monitoring for GPUs and to air strike countries that look like they have too many GPUs" is absurd.

Good enough next-token prediction is, in principle, powerful enough to do anything you could ask someone to do using only a computer.

I guess with the caveats "good enough" and "in principle" I am not sure I disagree but I am also not sure any LLM will be "good enough."

I still don't understand why you think the capabilities of current LLMs are an important factor in how scared we should be about AGI in the medium term. I also don't understand what threshold of capabilities you want to use where we could wait until we see it to coordinate a slowdown. The better these things get, the more demand there will be for their further development.

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