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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.
They very much haven't.
I think it is impossible to overstate just how far outside of the bounds of thought EY style doomerism has been and remains for... well, everyone except the "rationalists." It is literally impossible to talk about "AI safety" with normal human beings without them looking at you like you have two heads. The logic doesn't matter. The world runs on inductive reasoning, not deductive reasoning. Because "AI safety" has never been a problem in real life so far, it is literally impossible for normal people to understand it, much less take it seriously. If you try to explain it, you will notice that they cock their heads while they listen to you, and this is from the cognitive effort of rewriting your arguments in realtime as they hear them to be about jobs and racial bias instead of AI safety.
I am not an AI doomer. I ascribe to exactly your view with respect to Erlich and Yudkowksy, and it's well said.
But I am reporting to you, from the corporate front lines, that every single person in a position of authority has a brain defect that makes it literally impossible for them to understand the concept of "AI safety." They don't disagree with AI safety concerns; they cannot disagree with the concerns, because they cannot understand them, because when you articulate a thought about AI safety, the words completely fail to engender concepts in their brain that relate to AI safety. They cannot even understand that other people have thoughts about the concept of AI safety, except perhaps as a marketing ploy to overstate the the commercial utility of various AI-powered systems.
So the PR people have not planned a response, and the policy people have not engaged with the concept, and the executives have not been briefed, and you should expect large companies to continue acting as uncomprehending about the topic of AI safety as they would about the threat of office wall art coming to life and eating their children.
"The Facebook algorithm accidentally ordered the genocide of the Rohingya in Burma in order to drive clicks" is sufficiently truth-adjacent that I no longer believe this.
(head cocks)
"Oh, yes, we have a huge team working on AI misinformation and AI racial bias to avoid incidents like that, that is indeed exactly what AI safety means and we are leaders in the field."
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