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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32488 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead

Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future.

On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.

It’s the NYT, so it’s hard to tell for sure how big of a deal this is, but it sounds like this guy taught Ilya Sutskever.

In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his students in Toronto, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, built a neural network that could analyze thousands of photos and teach itself to identify common objects, such as flowers, dogs and cars.

One of the lines I see from techno-optimists and e/acc is that the people actually building the technology don’t believe in doom. It’s just the abstract philosophers on the sidelines freaking out because they don’t know anything. Unfortunately, this feels like the kind of move you only get if the people at the cutting-edge are nervous. Hinton must have been raking in cash, but he thought this was more important.

Dr. Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could work on technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, who led the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”

He does not say that anymore.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Cade Metz article without allegations of dishonest reporting:

In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly.

the people actually building the technology don’t believe in doom.

I don’t see why the people building the technology should be taken to be any more informed than the average interested layman on this point.

An AI that’s intelligent enough to be an x-risk is, as of today, a purely hypothetical entity. No one can have technical expertise regarding such entities because we have no empirical examples to study. No one knows how it might behave, what its goals might be, how easy it would be to align; one guess is as good as any other.

Professional AI researchers could have technical expertise regarding questions about the rate of AI progress, or how close we may or may not be to building an x-risk level AI; but given disagreement in the field over even basic questions like “are LLMs alone enough for AGI or will they plateau?” I think you could find a professional opinion to support any position you wanted to take.

Thus even the most informed AI researcher’s views on doom and utopia should be viewed primarily as a reflection of their own personal ideological disposition towards AI, rather than as being the result of carefully considered technical arguments.

I don’t see why the people building the technology should be taken to be any more informed than the average interested layman on this point.

Because the technology is complicated and they actually know how it works?

Because the layperson is basing their understanding on movies, like the terminator?

Really? Honest question, do you think you have a good understanding of AI?

Sorry if I didn't make it clear enough: when I said "doom" I was specifically thinking of Yudkowskian nanobot doom. No one on earth has technical expertise regarding such technology, because it doesn't exist. No one know how to build it or how it would behave once built.

Honest question, do you think you have a good understanding of AI?

No, but nothing in my post relied on such a (technical) understanding.

I was specifically thinking of Yudkowskian nanobot doom.

I misunderstood you. My mistake.

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