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Notes -
The future of AI is likely decided this week with Sam Altman's Congressional testimony. What do you expect?
EDIT: the recording is here.
Frankly I've tried to do my inadequate part to steer this juggernaut and don't have the energy for an effortpost (and we're having a bit too many of AI ones recently), so just a few remarks:
AI Doom narrative keeps inceasing in intensity, in zero relation to any worrying change in AI «capabilities» (indeed, with things like Claude-100K Context and StarCoder we're steadily progressing towards more useful coding and paperwork assistants at the moment, and not doing much in way of AGI; recent results seem to be negative for the LLM shoggoth/summoned demon hypothesis, which is now being hysterically peddled by e.g. these guys). Not only does Yud appear on popular podcasts and Connor Leahy turns up on MSM, but there's an extremely, conspicuously bad and inarticulate effort by big tech to defend their case. E.g. Microsoft's economist proposes we wait for meaningful harm before deciding on regulations – this is actually very sensible if we treat AI as an ordinary technology exacerbating some extant harms and bringing some benefits, but it's an insane thing to say when the public's imagination has been captured by Yuddist story of deceptive genie, and «meaningful harm» translates to eschatological imagery. Yann LeCun is being obnoxious and seemingly ignorant of the way the wind blows, though he's beginning to see. In all seriousness, top companies had to have prepared PR teams for this scenario.
Anglo-American regulatory regime will probably be more lax than that in China or the Regulatory Superpower (Europeans are, as always, the worst with regard to enterpreneural freedom), but I fear it'll mandate adherence to some onerous checklist like this one (consider this as an extraordinary case of manufacturing consensus – some literally who's «AI policy» guys come up with possible measures, a tiny subset of the queried people, also in the same until-very-recently irrelevant line of work, responds and validates them all; bam, we can say «experts are unanimous»). Same logic as with diversity requirements for Oscars – big corporations will manage it, small players won't; sliding into an indirect «compute governance» regime will be easy after that. On the other hand, MSNBC gives an anti-incumbent spin; but I don't think the regulators will interpret it this way. And direct control of AGI by USG appointees is an even worse scenario.
The USG plays favourites; on the White House meeting where Kamala Harris entered her role of AI Czar, Meta representatives weren't invited, but Anthropic's ones were. Why? How has the safety-oriented Anthropic merited their place among the leading labs, especially in a way that the government can appreciate? I assume the same ceaseless lobbying and coordinating effort that's evident in the FHI pause letter and EU's inane regulations is also active here.
Marcus is an unfathomable figure to me, and an additional cause to suspect foul play. He's unsinkable. To those who've followed the scene at all (more so to Gwern) it is clear that he's an irrelevant impostor – constantly wrong, ridiculously unapologetic, and without a single technical or conceptual result in decades; his greatest AI achievement was selling his fruitless startup to Uber, which presumably worked only because of his already-established reputation as an «expert». Look at him boast: «well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance». He's a small man with a big sensitive ego, and I think his ego will be used to perform a convincing grilling of the evil gay billionaire tech bro Altman. Americans love pro wrestling, after all.
Americans also love to do good business. Doomers are, in a sense, living on borrowed time. Bitter academics like Marcus, spiteful artists, scared old people, Yuddites – those are all nothing before the ever-growing legion of normies using GPT-4 to make themselves more productive. Even Congress staff got to play with ChatGPT before deliberating on this matter. Perhaps this helped them see the difference between AI and demons or nuclear weapons. One can hope.
Scott has published a minor note on Paul Ehrlich the other day. Ehrlich is one of the most evil men alive, in my opinion; certainly one of those who are despised far too little, indeed he remains a respectable «expert». He was a doomer of his age, and an advocate for psyops and top-down restrictions of people's capabilities; and Yud is such a doomer of our era, and his acolytes are even more extreme in their advocacy. Both have extracted an inordinate amount of social capital from their doomerism, and received no backlash. I hope the newest crop doesn't get so far with promoting their policies.
Apparently not. Much like generals, PR consultants have a bad habit of always fighting the last war. The corporate PR paradigm of parroting the woke shibboleths of the day is woefully inadequate for the coming wave of, “my daughter spends all day in her room with her chatbot instead of talking to boys,” and, “I had a cushy office job, now I have to do degrading manual labor for a living”.
Agreed here. I think that most major institutions will be massively blindsided, at least from the public perspective. With a technology this volatile that's so hard to predict, I think the risk assessment will make these hide bound juggernauts try to avoid taking a public stance until the chips fall decisively to one side or another. Which is precisely when their statements will cease to really matter.
This is, of course, by design.
I get a lot of pleasure watching the AI Ethics folks pointedly refuse to even acknowledge that LLMs are getting more capable. Some of them have noted publicly that they're bleeding credibility because of it, but can't talk about it because of chilling effects.
It's also remarkable how the agreed-upon leading lights of the AI Ethics movement are all female (with the possible exception of Moritz Hardt, who keeps his head down). The field is playing out like you'd imagine it would in an uncharitable right-wing polemic.
Is Harry Potter considered right-wing now? I get serious Professor Umbridge vibes from Emily M Bender. Imagine
Harry PotterSam Altman demonstrating the magic of artificial intelligence to congress in person, and then having Professor Bender show up and start lecturing about how it is impossible in-principle for LLMs to provide useful information, then start ranting incoherently about “techbros” and “AI hype”.The novel series about kids starting a secret gun club because all government institutions are thoroughly corrupt and infiltrated by a cabal of perverted elites that want to live forever?
Always has been.
It's also a whole bunch of other things because despite being a stylistically poor writer, Rowling is actually an artist and capable of tapping into the archetypes of the English collective unconscious to extract the nature of masculine evil and feminine evil, all different that they are.
If Voldie only wanted to live forever he wouldn't be the villain. No one would know who he is.
Of course I playfully skip over the main thing that makes HP left wing coded in some people's minds, the EVIL NAZIS who want to ethnically cleanse the wizarding world.
But do understand my point is that it's not really left wing or right wing. It is both and neither because it's trying to actually relate to the human experience of being a British schoolboy with a destiny. And what's more British than fighting the Nazis, really?
You don't mean to imply that the House of
Saxe-Coburg and GothaWindsor isn't British do you?More options
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