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Sooo, Big Yud appeared on Lex Fridman for 3 hours, a few scattered thoughts:
Jesus Christ his mannerisms are weird. His face scrunches up and he shows all his teeth whenever he seems to be thinking especially hard about anything, I didn't remember him being this way in the public talks he gave a decade ago, so this must either only be happening in conversations, or something changed. He wasn't like this on the bankless podcast he did a while ago. It also became clear to me that Eliezer cannot become the public face of AI safety, his entire image, from the fedora, to the cheap shirt, facial expressions and flabby small arms oozes "I'm a crank" energy, even if I mostly agree with his arguments.
Eliezer also appears to very sincerely believe that we're all completely screwed beyond any chance of repair and all of humanity will die within 5 or 10 years. GPT4 was a much bigger jump in performance from GPT3 than he expected, and in fact he thought that the GPT series would saturate to a level lower than GPT4's current performance, so he doesn't trust his own model of how Deep Learning capabilities will evolve. He sees GPT4 as the beginning of the final stretch: AGI and SAI are in sight and will be achieved soon... followed by everyone dying. (in an incredible twist of fate, him being right would make Kurzweil's 2029 prediction for AGI almost bang on)
He gets emotional about what to tell the children, about physicists wasting their lives working on string theory, and I can see real desperation in his voice when he talks about what he thinks is really needed to get out of this (global cooperation about banning all GPU farms and large LLM training runs indefinitely, on the level of even stricter nuclear treaties). Whatever you might say about him, he's either fully sincere about everything or has acting ability that stretches the imagination.
Lex is also a fucking moron throughout the whole conversation, he can barely even interact with Yud's thought experiments of imagining yourself being someone trapped in a box, trying to exert control over the world outside yourself, and he brings up essentially worthless viewpoints throughout the whole discussion. You can see Eliezer trying to diplomatically offer suggested discussion routes, but Lex just doesn't know enough about the topic to provide any intelligent pushback or guide the audience through the actual AI safety arguments.
Eliezer also makes an interesting observation/prediction about when we'll finally decide that AIs are real people worthy of moral considerations: that point is when we'll be able to pair midjourney-like photorealistic video generation of attractive young women with chatGPT-like outputs and voice synthesis. At that point he predicts that millions of men will insist that their waifus are actual real people. I'm inclined to believe him, and I think we're only about a year or at most two away from this actually being a reality. So: AGI in 12 months. Hang on to your chairs people, the rocket engines of humanity are starting up, and the destination is unknown.
Every discussion I've ever had with an AI x-risk proponent basically goes like
"AI will kill everyone."
"How?"
"[sci-fi scenario about nanobots or superviruses]"
"[holes in scenario]"
"well that's just an example, the ASI will be so smart it will figure something out that we can't even imagine."
Which kind of nips discussion in the bud.
I'm still skeptical about the power of raw intelligence in a vacuum. If you took a 200 IQ big-brain genius, cut off his arms and legs, blinded him, and then tossed him in a piranha tank I don't think he would MacGyver his way out.
Is he able to talk? Because if so, I'd bet there's a good chance he can come up with a sequence of words that he can utter that would either cause you not to want to throw him in the piranha tank, OR would cause a bystander to attempt to rescue him.
The existence of an information channel is a means of influencing the outside world, and intelligence is a way to manipulate information to achieve your instrumental goals. And spoken language MAY be a sufficiently dense method of information transmission to influence the outside world enough to find a way out of the Piranha tank.
Indeed, if he said the words "I have a reliable method of earning 1 billion dollars in a short period of time, completely legally, and I'll let you have 90% of it" you might not just not throw him in, but also go out and get him top-of-the-line prosthetics and cyborg-esque sight restoration in order to let him make you rich.
As long as you believed he could do it and was trustworthy.
Which is basically the scenario we're facing now, with AIs 'promising' incredible wealth and power to those who build them.
I highly doubt it.
My problem is not so much the "AI jedi mind tricks its way out of the box" idea as the "AI bootstraps itself to Godhood in a few hours" idea.
I think the analogy here is "imagine Jon Von Neumann, except running at 1000x speed, and able to instantly clone himself, and all the clones will reliably cooperate with each other."
If the AI's subjective experience of 'hours' is equivalent to decades of 'real' time, imagine how much 100 John Von Neumanns could get done in an uninterrupted decade or two.
I don't know to what extent JvN was bottlenecked by just not having enough time to do shit and/or by lack of further JvNs and I don't think anyone does.
But JVN existed and showed just how far raw intellect can get you, especially in terms of understanding the world and solving novel problems.
And we have little reason to believe he's the ceiling for raw intellect, outside of humans.
So it's less hard for me to believe that a truly high-IQ mind can solve problems in unexpected ways using limited resources.
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