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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:
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.
If we had an AI that actually understood the meaning of what it was being asked.
This to me seems like a pretty shallow explanation of understanding and the same criticism can be applied also to humans. According to some people like Scott Alexander, human brain is "just" a multi-layer prediction machine. It seems that the feeling of understanding itself is nothing extra special, some people on drugs like LSD feel as if they cracked the code and now understand the whole universe and their place in it. In practice understanding can be viewed as ability to give correct output given an input. We do not have access to many other methods, that is why we use tests to see if students understand things they learned.
Additionally I do not think that saying that the LLM doesn't understand the content of the query or its response the way you or I do. is that much reassuring. Quite to the contrary - LLMs give correct answer to very large set of problems and yet obviously they came to that place using completely different approach compared to humans. This makes them more alien, more inscrutable and thus more dangerous in my eyes.
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