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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26664 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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NYT: Before Altman’s Ouster, OpenAI’s Board Was Divided and Feuding

The NYT scooped everybody. We finally know why Sam Altman was fired:

A few weeks before Mr. Altman’s ouster, he met with [OpenAI board member Helen Toner] to discuss a paper she had recently co-written for Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Mr. Altman complained that the research paper seemed to criticize OpenAI’s efforts to keep its A.I. technologies safe while praising the approach taken by Anthropic, according to an email that Mr. Altman wrote to colleagues and that was viewed by The New York Times.

In the email, Mr. Altman said that he had reprimanded Ms. Toner for the paper and that it was dangerous to the company, particularly at a time, he added, when the Federal Trade Commission was investigating OpenAI over the data used to build its technology.

Ms. Toner defended it as an academic paper that analyzed the challenges that the public faces when trying to understand the intentions of the countries and companies developing A.I. But Mr. Altman disagreed.

“I did not feel we’re on the same page on the damage of all this,” he wrote in the email. “Any amount of criticism from a board member carries a lot of weight.”

Senior OpenAI leaders, including Mr. Sutskever, who is deeply concerned that A.I. could one day destroy humanity, later discussed whether Ms. Toner should be removed, a person involved in the conversations said.

There are a few other minor issues mentioned in the article, but this sounds like the big one. Rationalist/EA types take being told that they can't criticize "allies" in public very negatively, a position I am quite sympathetic to. Helen Toner works at an Open Philanthropy-funded think tank, so she's as blue blood an effective altruist as they get. My guess is that this was the moment that she decided that Sam had to be eliminated before he took control of the board and jeopardized OpenAI's mission.

What gets me is how disingenuous this makes the original firing announcement: "Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities." It sounds like he was perfectly candid. They just didn't like what he was about.

In completely unrelated news, ChatGPT has been down for the last three hours.

Also, just to point this out explicitly:

By Cade Metz, Tripp Mickle, and Mike Isaac

By Cade Metz.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-altmans-ouster-openai-was-precipitated-by-letter-board-about-ai-breakthrough-2023-11-22/

Reuters says OpenAI made an AI breakthrough on the maths department, that it could reliably do some simple mathematics well. Now this is a 'people familiar with the matter' story and I'm not ruling out journalistic ineptitude (GPT-4 could already do some fairly complex maths) and fearmongering... Even so, it feels like timelines are shortening.

Nov 22 (Reuters) - Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s four days in exile, several staff researchers sent the board of directors a letter warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The sources cited the letter as one factor among a longer list of grievances by the board that led to Altman’s firing. Reuters was unable to review a copy of the letter. The researchers who wrote the letter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The maker of ChatGPT had made progress on Q* (pronounced Q-Star), which some internally believe could be a breakthrough in the startup's search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as AI systems that are smarter than humans.

Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems, the person said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. Though only performing math on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success, the source said.

In addition to announcing a slew of new tools in a demonstration this month, Altman last week teased at a gathering of world leaders in San Francisco that he believed AGI was in sight.

"Four times now in the history of OpenAI, the most recent time was just in the last couple weeks, I've gotten to be in the room, when we sort of push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward, and getting to do that is the professional honor of a lifetime," he said at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

I’ll be honest I have come down on the Toner being correct and Altman deserved to be fired side of the coin. I do think going slow with AI is in humanities best interest though I don’t know how to do it. All of humans evolutionary competitive pressures force us forward.

This feels legitimately like a tech where we aren’t sure on how it will end up. I prefer having safety people in charge (even though I think usually their probably my political enemies). I believe Oppenheimer had a fear nukes could ignite the atmosphere. But he thought it was a low probability. I agree with the people who think the AI kills us all is a plausible scenerio. I don’t know how to put odds on that.

The other thing is Hansons work. I don’t know why we haven’t met aliens. It appears to me a great filter exists and AI feels like it could be that.

It’s not going to be a Hollywood movie where somehow the human spirit wins at the end of the day. If the AI is off it will just kill us all.

If you think it might be a great filter I don’t think delaying it a 100 years is a big deal or even a thousand years. It’s a minuscule amount of time in the galaxy.

Now we have capitalism doing its thing which is usually a good thing for pushing techs forward, but it feels different if you think it could be existential. If my choice is between going slow and watching China do it then I guess a prefer Microsoft’s MBA’s.

I also predicted Sam would be back atleast the first time. The now second coming back I’m a bit surprised on.

The other thing is Hansons work. I don’t know why we haven’t met aliens. It appears to me a great filter exists and AI feels like it could be that.

AI makes no sense as a Great Filter. It just changes the question to "why haven't we met any alien robots?"

I don’t think so. If the AI is taught to maximize some stupid constraint then kills the creator it might lack the desire to do more.

Though I somewhat agree with you I do think there are paths where the AI might just die after killing its creator.

For a Great Filter to even work, it needs to eliminate ~all technological civilizations.

I don't think homicidal AI with no self-preservation or replication instincts is likely enough for that to be the case.

Yeah, I think people should give a lot more consideration to the Carboniferous as a great filter.

I’ll be honest I have come down on the Toner being correct and Altman deserved to be fired side of the coin.

I think if the board had just led with that a lot of people would have agreed. "Leader tries to dismantle the structures that hold him accountable" is a problem that people know very well, and "get rid of leader" is not a controversial solution to that problem.

But in fact the board accused Altman of being a lying liar and then refused to stand behind that accusation, even to the subsequent CEOs.

There's gotta be something else going on.

I mentioned this deep in the guts of some other thread, but everyone is modeling this race wrong and buying into the kayfabe too much. Your mental model of this race should consist of a bunch of sinister scheming wizards gazing into their scrying orbs and hissing "Ultimate power must be MINE ALONE at any cost!" Everything else is varying degrees of prevarication and misdirection.

Some of these necromancers want to crush their enemies, get rich, normal shit like that. Others want to create god, or become god, or uplift kangaroos to sentience so they can marry one, or god knows what. Point is, the safetyists never stood a chance. At best they're pawns to be swept aside when they become inconvenient. If ultimate godlike power is on the table, there was never going to be anything but a mad scramble for it.

I mean I think at least some of the people involved on the are quite clear that their goal is a "gameboard-flipping" act which results in world which is permanently safe from anyone who could destroy it. Probably by seizing ultimate power.

I don't think sufficiently godlike power for world domination (as in "gaining control of the world without destroying almost everything of value") is actually on the table though.

Point is, the safetyists never stood a chance. At best they're pawns to be swept aside when they become inconvenient.

Oh, here I was, thinking I'm agreeing with you. No, they're the necromancers hissing "ultimate power must be mine alone".

Yeah the safetyists IMO are also mostly evil sorcerers. They just have better marketing lines.

he had reprimanded Ms. Toner for the paper

Replacing the toner usually fixes any issues you're having with the paper in my experience

Aaand he's back: https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1727205556136579362

What a shitshow it has been.

We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.

…

Larry Summers

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Any particular reason? I remember Summers from getting fired from Harvard for telling the unpleasant truth, and for working at the treasury. Any reason why either of those apply to being on the board of AI, or is it something I'm missing?

Apparently he has a lot of experience with Jeffrey Epstein. Like a lot a lot.

I don't mind gossip as long as it's clearly framed as gossip, but this kind of statement I feel should be elaborated upon. Intended or not, it smacks of bait as currently written.

No need for gossip. Respectable mainstream sources suffice.

Thank you for sources.

No need. Everybody who was somebody was friend of Epstein, from William Burns to Noam Chomsky.

Dead bird link here, if you are interested in going further down this rabbit hole.

There's a lot of controversy and reputation about the man in economics, but I don't really have a good level of confidence in evaluating whether he's right or wrong on those.

Summers has a lot of pieces like this or this in his history. It's more generally a side effect of his state-first thinking, and it's not even always wrong, but it's very much the normie version of "AI Safety" as about jobs programs or small-scale disruption. Maybe his personal experience at Harvard will stop him from advocating for RLMFing LLMs in loops; I'm not confident on that one.

Makes him a very high-profile and high-reputation version of the only opponents of things I like can be Luddites view.

This has been the best news story since Will Smith punched Chris Rock at the Oscars.

Best since the previous Sam was deposed in the previous November

What happened then? All the news articles that come up for me are about this November.

Sam Bankman-Fried, of FTX fame.

Either something really strange is going on behind the scenes (like a pseudo government take over) or the board are complete clowns.

My bet is on them being clowns. Or, more charitably, out of their league. How many of them actually have any experience in boardroom intrigue? To loosely quote one journalist about a similar experience:

My first intimate encounters with the police were quite sobering. Here you are, a relatively famous journalist being questioned by a dull-looking criminal investigator. You are the master of the written and spoken word, you are, if not very smart, then definitely smarter that this uniformed oaf in front of you that can't use more than one finger to type your answers. You know what you should never say to the police, so you carefully choose every word of your replies, which the investigator dutifully records. And yet he then glances at the screen, looks at you and asks you a question that leaves you dumbfounded. How could you let yourself be led into this trap when you were his intellectual superior? And yet you yourself answered A to the first question, B to the second question, so C and D, which both prove your culpability, are the only possible answers to the third one.

I don’t know if they were out of their leagues. And I don’t think Toner was even wrong. But our entire system is made to push things forward and one side had better cards. AI Safety died to the system.

If I were an AI researcher with 8-9 figure pay package on the line I probably would have favored the Sam/Msft deal even if I had very serious safety concerns. It too hard to turn off the human drive to move forward and achieve.

"Obviously I'm smarter than this guy, therefore there's zero danger when I play his game, on his turf"

Where did you get that story from? I’d love to read the rest of it.

It's from Arkady Babchenko, https://pastebin.com/9xw4R2PW

That reiterates the 10 words everyone needs to know when dealing with the police:

"I'm not answering any questions, and I want a lawyer."

Then you shut your trap.

See also Nathan Burney's excellent Self-Incrimination Flowchart, which lays out in detail exactly how to avoid incriminating yourself in the US.

https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2897

English, courtesy of GPT4: https://pastebin.com/UPGRajKA

Thank you. GPT4 blows DeepL out of the water, I didn't expect this level of quality.

Thanks! Now I am curious about real or fictional record of such interrogation.

I get that it can be done, now I am curious about how it works in practice. And not so curious to go to Russia (or irritate FBI) to look at it in practice.

Here you go

https://youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE&t=1607 - the second half of the don't talk to the police talk.

Eventually - you are in a room, nervous with persons that have all the time in the world to grill you. And they can do it until you are tired, sleepy, dizzy or whatever. All while your adrenaline is rushing and you feel helpless.

Por que no los dos?

Fair enough.

This seems... weird, as an explanation, and given my expectations for the NYT may reflect more what one party has fed to the reporter than the real facts on the ground.

The Toner paper in question is here, and there's wayback machine version dating back to Oct 24th. The closest bit I can get to the description from the NYT piece is the section where :

While the system card itself has been well received among researchers interested in understanding GPT-4’s risk profile, it appears to have been less successful as a broader signal of OpenAI’s commitment to safety. The reason for this unintended outcome is that the company took other actions that overshadowed the import of the system card: most notably, the blockbuster release of ChatGPT four months earlier. Intended as a relatively inconspicuous “research preview,” the original ChatGPT was built using a less advanced LLM called GPT-3.5, which was already in widespread use by other OpenAI customers. GPT-3.5’s prior circulation is presumably why OpenAI did not feel the need to perform or publish such detailed safety testing in this instance. Nonetheless, one major effect of ChatGPT’s release was to spark a sense of urgency inside major tech companies.149 To avoid falling behind OpenAI amid the wave of customer enthusiasm about chatbots, competitors sought to accelerate or circumvent internal safety and ethics review processes, with Google creating a fast-track “green lane” to allow products to be released more quickly.

This result seems strikingly similar to the race-to-the-bottom dynamics that OpenAI and others have stated that they wish to avoid. OpenAI has also drawn criticism for many other safety and ethics issues related to the launches of ChatGPT and GPT-4, including regarding copyright issues, labor conditions for data annotators, and the susceptibility of their products to “jailbreaks” that allow users to bypass safety controls. This muddled overall picture provides an example of how the messages sent by deliberate signals can be overshadowed by actions that were not designed to reveal intent.

A different approach to signaling in the private sector comes from Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s primary competitors. Anthropic’s desire to be perceived as a company that values safety shines through across its communications, beginning from its tagline: “an AI safety and research company.” A careful look at the company’s decision-making reveals that this commitment goes beyond words. A March 2023 strategy document published on Anthropic’s website revealed that the release of Anthropic’s chatbot Claude, a competitor to ChatGPT, had been deliberately delayed in order to avoid “advanc[ing] the rate of AI capabilities progress.” The decision to begin sharing Claude with users in early 2023 was made “now that the gap between it and the public state of the art is smaller,” according to the document—a clear reference to the release of ChatGPT several weeks before Claude entered beta testing. In other words, Anthropic had deliberately decided not to productize its technology in order to avoid stoking the flames of AI hype. Once a similar product (ChatGPT) was released by another company, this reason not to release Claude was obviated, so Anthropic began offering beta access to test users before officially releasing Claude as a product in March.

Anthropic’s decision represents an alternate strategy for reducing “race-to-the-bottom” dynamics on AI safety. Where the GPT-4 system card acted as a costly signal of OpenAI’s emphasis on building safe systems, Anthropic’s decision to keep their product off the market was instead a costly signal of restraint. By delaying the release of Claude until another company put out a similarly capable product, Anthropic was showing its willingness to avoid exactly the kind of frantic corner-cutting that the release of ChatGPT appeared to spur. Anthropic achieved this goal by leveraging installment costs, or fixed costs that cannot be offset over time. In the framework of this study, Anthropic enhanced the credibility of its commitments to AI safety by holding its model back from early release and absorbing potential future revenue losses. The motivation in this case was not to recoup those losses by gaining a wider market share, but rather to promote industry norms and contribute to shared expectations around responsible AI development and deployment. Yet where OpenAI’s attempt at signaling may have been drowned out by other, even more conspicuous actions taken by the company, Anthropic’s signal may have simply failed to cut through the noise. By burying the explanation of Claude’s delayed release in the middle of a long, detailed document posted to the company’s website, Anthropic appears to have ensured that this signal of its intentions around AI safety has gone largely unnoticed. Taken together, these two case studies therefore provide further evidence that signaling around AI may be even more complex than signaling in previous eras

Yes, this is weird writing, in the sense that it's (a little) odd for someone to praise their market competitor so heavily, and it's also a trivial thing to get that bent out of shape about either way, but we're talking about a bunch of self-considered weird auteurs; it'd be less believable to not have some tyranny of trivial disagreements involved.

Is that what people think about when talking about Claude?

it's also a trivial thing to get that bent out of shape about either way

I'm going to disagree. A member of your board praising your competitor for not releasing a product and criticizing you for releasing a very popular product that is now the face of the industry. The CEO should advocate for her removal from the board at that point.

I get her focus is safety and his is releasing products, so there's an obvious tension here. But her public criticism is a knife in the back. There's a difference between being vocally self-critical and undermining your peers. I hope she has the foresight to realize that block of text would cause internal division including possibly the "release products" faction retaliating.

That you disagreed highlights how Sam's position isn't so implausible that it must be dishonest on his part.

But those who are claiming it was a pretext for Sam's power play have a point imo. The paper wasn't widely read or reported on, even in AI safety nobody had heard about it until this incident. Why would Sam care then? If it was a NYT op ed sure.

A member of your board praising your competitor

Yes, this would be very unusual and blameworthy when "board" means "board of directors of a traditional C Corp." But OpenAI is a nonprofit and this was a nonprofit board. It was set up that way purposefully to allow the directors to slow OpenAI down if they felt it necessary for their mission. I'm glad that Sam prevailed, and I want them to accelerate at least for the time being, but the common assumption that "the board" was supposed to act to further OpenAI's commercial interests (as opposed to its mission) is wrong.

Senior OpenAI leaders, including Mr. Sutskever, who is deeply concerned that A.I. could one day destroy humanity

These people are so weird. They are obsessed with making something they think will destroy the world. Just build AI or don't. If AI is so dangerous, nothing you can do will really stop it in the long run. Eventually, over hundreds or even thousands of years, the inevitable will happen. I feel like this is almost a religion for them and they are the absolute worst people to be in charge or this kind of technology.

  1. They think AGI is inevitable, and if it's not made by people with safety and alignment in mind, the odds of it being misaligned skyrocket.

  2. Control of an aligned Superintelligent AGI is equivalent to having the keys to the lightcone, if you make it through the gauntlet of it not killing you and it listens to what you tell it, then you have the means to dominate everyone else, including others who make misaligned AGI, if yours is capable of squashing them at birth, or at the very least capable of panopticon surveillance to prevent anyone from building one in the first place.

  3. Even prior to that, being on the cutting edge of AI research gives you a voice, people can dismiss Eliezer Yudkowsky as a crank, far harder to do that to Geoffrey Hinton or Ilya Sutskever. You have far more power to get governments to regulate things, or develop industry best standards that reduce the risk of more laissez-faire competitors YOLOing the whole thing.

AI is dangerous, as is anything much smarter than you that potentially doesn't share your goals, but if you see it as inevitable, then your best bet is making sure it comes out with goals you share or control.

My own p(doom) from AI has dropped to about 30% from a high of 70%, when RLHF and other techniques showed that it was possible to ~mostly align the best AI today, in the form of LLMs, which are the frontrunners for the best AIs of tomorrow. Just because I currently do not think AI will probably kill us in a decade doesn't mean I don't think it's a serious risk, and there are few things on the planet more worth being passionate about.

It is not remotely as simple as build AI or don't, even if everyone associated with the AI X-risk community died overnight, the genie is out of the bottle, and others will pursue it with billions of dollars. OAI had a value, before this debacle, of about $80 billion, with operating expenses on the order of 500 million p/a.

If you can't undo that, or enforce a "pause", then you grudgingly find a way to stay ahead of the competition while doing your best not to be the reason why it all went to hell.

Control of an aligned Superintelligent AGI is equivalent to having the keys to the lightcone

I think this sort of argument consistently relies on assumptions regarding the possibilities of various highly-powerful technologies being physically possible but not yet discovered due to humans not being smart enough that I find insufficiently supported. It's always "AI will give us X" — Drexlerian nanotech, space elevators, "energy too cheap to meter," whatever — without considering the outcome where it turns out none of these is actually possible, no matter how smart you are. To quote from the Futurama episode "A Clone of My Own":

Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Nothing is impossible. Not if you can imagine it. That's what being is a scientist is all about.

Cubert J. Farnsworth: No, that's what being a magical elf is all about.

I disagree, it's largely Yudkowsky who vocally claims that a SAGI will rely on things like "diamondoid bacteria" and other nanotech to get an advantage.

For me, and many others, subversion of existing human infrastructure through social engineering to do things like launch nukes, engineering hyper-lethal and virulent pathogens and the like are all feasible for something modestly above human, without relying on anything that doesn't exist. The AI will need robust automation to replace humans, but we're already doing that ourselves, so..

We could already have had energy too cheap to meter if we went full send on nuclear, for one. It would certainly be dirt cheap compared to today's rates.

subversion of existing human infrastructure through social engineering

I think this is overrated, too — though that might be due to reading too many "unboxing" arguments predicated on the assumption that absolutely anyone can be convinced to do absolutely anything, if only you're smart enough to figure out the particular individually-tailored set of Magic Words.

I have never claimed it can convince anyone of literally anything. We've already had plenty of nuclear close-calls simply because of the fog of war or human/technical error.

Similarly, there are already >0 misanthropically omnicidal people around and kicking, and an AI could empower them to pursue their goals, or they might choose to adopt the AI for that purpose.

Mere humans, or human-run orgs like the CIA have long engineered regime change, it seems to me incredibly unlikely, to the point it can be outright dismissed from consideration, that an AGI only modestly higher in intelligence couldn't do the same, and even independently play multiple sides against each other until they all make terrible decisions.

Besides, it's clear that nobody even tries the Yudkowskian boxing approach these days. ARC evals, red-teaming and the like are nowhere close to the maximally paranoid approach, not even for SOTA models.

A group of say, 160 IQ humans with laser-focus and an elimination of many/most of the coordination and trust bottlenecks we face could well become an existential threat. Even a modestly superintelligent or merely genius level AGI can do that and more.

and an AI could empower them to pursue their goals, or they might choose to adopt the AI for that purpose.

Empower them how, exactly? What is it that they aren't able to do now only because they're not smart enough, that more intelligence alone can solve? Intelligence isn't magic.

that an AGI only modestly higher in intelligence couldn't do the same, and even independently play multiple sides against each other until they all make terrible decisions.

Perhaps, but what's your proof that it could do this so much better than the CIA or anyone else, just because it's smarter? Intelligence isn't magic.

A group of say, 160 IQ humans with laser-focus and an elimination of many/most of the coordination and trust bottlenecks we face could well become an existential threat.

Actually, as a 151 IQ human, I mostly disagree with this, so that's part of it right there.

Even a modestly superintelligent or merely genius level AGI can do that and more.

What's your proof of the part I just emphasized? You appear to simply assume it.

I think you might be a uniquely ineffective 151 IQ human if it doesn't seem plausible to you that a group of very smart humans could do extreme and perhaps existential harm. To me, the main thing preventing that seems to be not the inherent hardness or weakness of, say, COVID-Omicron-Ebola, but the resistance of an overwhelming majority of other humans (including both very smart ones and mediocre but well-organized ones).

As for what a superintelligent AI changes? Well for one thing, it eliminates the need to find a bunch of peers. And, with robots, the need for lab assistants.

And I have like 3% P(AI Doom).

This is an excellent answer. One small quibble:

Control of an aligned Superintelligent AGI is equivalent to having the keys to the lightcone, if you make it through the gauntlet of it not killing you and it listens to what you tell it, then you have the means to dominate everyone else, including others who make misaligned AGI, if yours is capable of squashing them at birth, or at the very least capable of panopticon surveillance to prevent anyone from building one in the first place.

For the record I think Yudkowsky and friends are wrong about this one. Control of the only superintelligent AGI, if that AGI is a single coherent entity, might be the keys to the lightcone, but so far it looks to me like AGI scales horizontally much better than it scales vertically.

This, if anything, makes things more dangerous rather than less, because it means there is no permanent win condition, only the deferral of the failure condition for a bit longer.

Thanks!

but so far it looks to me like AGI scales horizontally much better than it scales vertically.

This particular concern hinges on recursive self-improvement, and I agree that we haven't seen much evidence of that, yet, but it's still the early days.

I think that the intelligence of LLMs needs to at least reach that of the average ML researcher capable of producing novel research and breakthroughs before we can call it one way or another, and we're not there yet, at least in terms of released models, not that I expect Gemini or GPT-5 to be that smart yet. The closest I can think of is training LLMs on synthetic data curated by other models, or something like Nvidia using ML models to optimize their hardware, but that's still weaksauce.

If it turns out to be feasible, it still remains to be seen whether we have a hard take-off with a Singleton or a slow (yet fast on human timescales, just months or years) takeoff which might allow for multipolarity. I remain agnostic yet gravely concerned myself.

This particular concern hinges on recursive self-improvement

And most of the talk on that issue assumes that the point where said self-improvement hits steep diminishing returns must necessarily be somewhere far above human intelligence — again, apparently based on nothing beyond it being more conducive to one's preferred outcomes than the alternative.

Diminishing returns != no or negative returns. Intelligence is the closest thing we have to an unalloyed good, and the difference in capabilities between people with just 20 or 30 IQ points is staggering enough.

Nothing at all suggests that the range of IQ/intelligence seen in unmodified humans constrained by a 1.4 kg brain in a small cranium applies at all to an entity that spans data-centers, especially those that can self-modify and fork themselves on demand. You don't need a bazillion IQ points to be immensely dangerous, human scientists with maybe 160 or 170 invented nukes.

We have AI that already matches human intelligence on many or even most cognitive tasks, the scaling laws still hold, and companies and nations can easily afford to throw several OOMs more money at the problem.

Humanity itself has seen exponential or even super-exponential advancement, and we've barely gained a handful of IQ points from the Flynn effect, most of it was merely technological compounding.

Since the theoretical or practical upper limits on the size and speed of an AGI are massive, I wish to see what reason anyone has to claim they'll bottom out within spitting distance of the smartest humans. That is ludicrous prima facie, even if we don't know how fast further progression will be.

You don't need a bazillion IQ points to be immensely dangerous, human scientists with maybe 160 or 170 invented nukes.

Yes, but you're assuming there's a lot more even more dangerous things "out there" for a smarter entity to discover.

What is intelligence for? That is, what is its use? Primarily,

  1. modeling reality
  2. modeling other agents.

Our first day of Physics lab classes at Caltech, the instructor told us that it doesn't matter how many digits of pi we'd all memorized (quite a bunch), just use 3.14, or a scientific calculator's pi key, whichever was faster, because any rounding error would be swamped out by the measurement error in our instruments.

When it comes to modeling the physical world, sure, going from knowing, say, Planck's constant to two decimal places to knowing it to three decimal places will probably net you a bunch of improvements. But then going from, say, ten decimal places to eleven, or even ten decimal places to twenty, almost certainly won't net the same level of improvement.

When modeling other minds, particularly modeling other minds modeling you modeling… — the whole "I know that you know that I know…" thing — well, that sort of recursion provides great returns on added depth… in certain games, like chess. But AIUI, in most other situations, that kind of thing quickly converges to one or another game-theoretic equilibrium, and thus the further recursion allowed by greater intelligence provides little additional benefit.

I'm not saying we can't produce an intelligence "that spans data-centers" much smarter than us, and I'm not saying it's impossible that there are dangerous and powerful things such an intelligence might figure out, I'm just saying it can't just be assumed, or treated as highly likely by default. That it's unsupported extrapolation to reason 'smart=nukes, therefore super-smart=super-nukes and mega-smart=mega-nukes.' I'm not saying that machine intelligence will "bottom out within spitting distance of the smartest humans," I'm saying that it's possible that the practical benefits of such intelligence, no matter how much vaster than our own, may "bottom out" well below the dreams of techno-optimists like yourself, and you can't just rule that out a priori on an unsubstantiated faith that there's vast undiscovered realities beyond our limited comprehension just waiting for a smarter being to uncover.

I want you to at least consider, just for a moment, the idea that maybe we humans, with our "1.4 kg brain[s] in a small cranium," may have a good enough understanding of reality, and of each other, that a being with "900 more IQ points" won't find much room to improve on it.

I'm not saying "a machine can never be smarter than a man!" I'm saying "what if a machine a thousand times smarter than us says, 'yeah, you already had it mostly figured out, the rest is piddly details, no big revelations here'?"

Yes, but you're assuming there's a lot more even more dangerous things "out there" for a smarter entity to discover.

I repeat that, while I think this is true, it's still not necessary for a genius AI to be an existential risk. I've already explained why multiple times.

Nukes? They exist.

Pandemics? They exist. Can they be made more dangerous? Yes. Are humans already making them more dangerous for no good reason? Yes.

Automation? Well underway.

Our first day of Physics lab classes at Caltech, the instructor told us that it doesn't matter how many digits of pi we'd all memorized (quite a bunch), just use 3.14, or a scientific calculator's pi key, whichever was faster, because any rounding error would be swamped out by the measurement error in our instruments.

When it comes to modeling the physical world, sure, going from knowing, say, Planck's constant to two decimal places to knowing it to three decimal places will probably net you a bunch of improvements. But then going from, say, ten decimal places to eleven, or even ten decimal places to twenty, almost certainly won't net the same level of improvement.

I do not think that the benefits of additional intelligence as seen even in human physicists is well addressed by this analogy. The relevant one would be comparing Newtonian physics to GR, and then QM. In the domains where such nuance becomes relevant, the benefits are grossly superior.

For starters, while the Standard Model is great, it still isn't capable of conclusively explaining most of the mass or energy in the universe. Not to mention that even if we have equations for the fundamental processes, there are bazillions of higher-order concerns that are intractable to simulate from first-principles.

AlphaFold didn't massively outpace SOTA on protein folding by using QM on a molecule by molecule basis. It found smarter heuristics, that's also something intelligence is indispensable for. I see no reason why a human can't be perfectly modeled using QM, it is simply a computationally intractable problem even for a single cell within us.

In other words, knowing the underling rules of a complex system != knowing all the potential implications or applications. You can't just memorize the rules of Chess and then declare it's a solved problem.

That it's unsupported extrapolation to reason 'smart=nukes, therefore super-smart=super-nukes and mega-smart=mega-nukes.'

I'm sure there people who might make such a claim. I'm not one of them, and like I said, it's not load bearing. Just nukes is sufficient really. Certainly in combination with automation so the absence of those pesky humans running the machines isn't a problem.

I want you to at least consider, just for a moment, the idea that maybe we humans, with our "1.4 kg brain[s] in a small cranium," may have a good enough understanding of reality, and of each other, that a being with "900 more IQ points" won't find much room to improve on it.

I have considered it, at least to my satisfaction, and I consider it to be exceedingly unlikely. Increases in intelligence, even within the minuscule absolute variation seen within humans, is enormously powerful. There seems to be little to nothing in the way of further scaling in the context of inhuman entities that are not constrained by the same biological limitations in size, volume, speed or energy. They already match or exceed the average human in most cognitive tasks, and even if returns from further increases in intelligence diminish grossly or become asymptotic, I am the furthest from convinced that stage will be reached within spitting distance of the best of humanity, or that such an entity won't be enormously powerful and capable of exterminating us if it wishes to do so.

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The theory is that a) there's so much power and money on the table here that someone doing something world-changing is unavoidable, and b) that the early design stages of such a world-changing system will have massive impact on whether. There are ways to argue against either or both of these assumptions, or to point out separate issues.

((Some of which I agree with: even accepting those propositions, these guys are demonstrably putzes when it comes to actually persuading or planning.))

But 'it's like a religion' isn't a very meaningful claim.

Yeah other people have come to a similar conclusion: What OpenAI shares with Scientology

Ilya Sutskever ... thought Mr. Altman was not always being honest when talking with the board.

The lack of candour may have referred to this or to things not reported on in the article.

Luckily, a brand new article just dropped with details about that:

Some executives said they were getting questions from regulators and law-enforcement entities such as the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan over the charge of Altman’s alleged lack of candor, the people said. The truth was going to come out one way or another, they told the board.

People familiar with the board’s thinking said there wasn’t one incident that led to their decision to eject Altman, but a consistent, slow erosion of trust over time that made them increasingly uneasy. Also complicating matters were Altman’s mounting list of outside AI-related ventures, which raised questions for the board about how OpenAI’s technology or intellectual property could be used.

The board agreed to discuss the matter with their counsel. After a few hours, they returned, still unwilling to provide specifics. They said that Altman wasn’t candid, and often got his way. The board said that Altman had been so deft they couldn’t even give a specific example, according to the people familiar with the executives.

Not entirely related, but here's a particularly eye-popping quote:

OpenAI leadership and employees were growing increasingly concerned about being painted in the press as “a bunch of effective altruists,” as one of them put it.

Wait, why would being seen as EA he bad? If anything, wouldn't it be good? Or are people still kvetching over the Bankman-Fried stuff?

still unwilling to provide specifics. They said that Altman wasn’t candid, and often got his way. The board said that Altman had been so deft they couldn’t even give a specific example

This is profound weakness. Completely unacceptable for any functioning adult. How a group of them with hours of legal counsel advising them could still be this incompetent is baffling.

The link doesn't work for me - maybe this is explained elsewhere in the article, but going solely on the excerpt...

The board said that Altman had been so deft they couldn’t even give a specific example, according to the people familiar with the executives.

Horseshit. "Oh he was lying but we can't give you any examples because he's that good at lying" is the kind of excuse I would expect from a four year old, not a group of supposedly intelligent and qualified professionals. At this point I think that unless they actually give us the specifics, this all boils down to the GPT marketplace blowing up Poe and making a boardmember unreasonably angry.

I took the point to be adjacent to the one Scott made - wow, is it really that long ago? - last December about how the media rarely lies. I don't agree with how Scott frames the observation, which I would have phrased in terms of how the ways they lie are relatively subtle - but the observation itself, as distinct from the debate over the best language to characterize it, is solid.

Skilled liars make as few statements that are straightforwardly false in a plain, literal way as they can and still spread whatever narrative they want to spread. One of the many advantages of this is that there's rarely a clear-cut smoking gun someone in the board's position can point to. Instead it's a matter of which facts they emphasize and which they omit, what they juxtapose with what in order to imply connections that may not actually exist, how they manipulate your emotions around aspects of their narrative, how they take advantage of people's trust in them, or at least willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, in situations that really are ambiguous.

So while I can see how the statement you quote is poor optics, I have no trouble imagining how it could be true.

I totally agree with you that it is possible for someone to be deceptive in a subtle manner like this, but that doesn't change anything about the obligation to make your accusations comprehensible. There's nothing about this type of deception that makes it impossible to describe - even something simple in the form "While the situation was actually x, Sam deceived us into believing that the situation was y" would work. If the deception is so subtle and mysterious in its effects that it had no impact whatsoever, it wasn't a good enough justification for Sam's ouster.

"Oh he was lying but we can't give you any examples because he's that good at lying" is the kind of excuse I would expect from a four year old, not a group of supposedly intelligent and qualified professionals.

Sam Altman is a real business shark whose literal job for the last twelve years has been dealing with boards of directors and VC investors. Running circles around a shape-rotator like Sutskever is child's play for him. Running circles against an ivory tower researcher like Toner is easy for him. McCauley doesn't strike me as a serious contender for someone who successfully wrestled Reddit away from Conde Nast either. And, tellingly, only D'Angelo managed to remain on the board of directors after Altman got his way. Scratch that, I have no idea how D'Angelo managed to survive the debacle.

Running circles around a shape-rotator like Sutskever is child's play for him.

Actually, reportedly, it was Anna Brockman crying and begging Sutskever to switch his allegiance that seemed to clinch it. Ilya had officiated Greg and Anna's wedding, held at the OpenAI office. Another point for Hanania's theory that women's tears win in the marketplace of ideas.

It's not like you even have to be an experienced business shark to out-argue people who say "hey employees, you know what, I know that we can all become ridiculously rich in the next couple of years, but guys... guys... AI might destroy humanity at some point so let's not become ridiculously rich".

Trying to stop people from developing AI is like trying to stop people from developing nuclear weapons. Obviously, having nuclear weapons gives one enormous benefits. So the idea that someone could talk the whole world out of trying to get nukes by just using intellectual arguments is absolutely ludicrous.

Imagine starting a company called "OpenNuclear". "Let's develop nuclear technology in a safe way, for the benefit of all humanity". And then expecting that somehow the world's talented engineers will just go along with your goal of nuclear safety, instead of going to work building nuclear weapons for various organizations for huge salaries and/or because of powerful emotional reasons like "I don't want my country to get attacked". I can't think of any example in history of humanity as a whole refusing to develop a powerful technology. Even if somehow the world temporarily agreed to pause AI research, that agreement would probably be dropped like a hot potato the second some major war broke out and both sides realized that AI could help them.

It's not like you even have to be an experienced business shark to out-argue people who say "hey employees, you know what, I know that we can all become ridiculously rich in the next couple of years, but guys... guys... AI might destroy humanity at some point so let's not become ridiculously rich".

That's been my issue with the entire "open letter calling for a moratorium" and the rest of it. When the share price drops just because the guy who is promoting commercial use of AI gets booted, then we see how this plays out in reality. Market forces don't care about safety or alignment or paperclip maximisers or the rest of the beautiful Golden Age SF techno-optimism theories that the EA subset concerned about AI have been working on for years; they care about the magical eternal money-fountain that this technology promises to be. Microsoft and other companies are already selling their versions of AI to be integrated into your business and pump productivity and profitability up to the moon and beyond. People are already using AI for everything from "write my term paper for me" to increasing amount of articles I see online which are gibberish but do their job of "fill space, get clicks, earn ad revenue".

Nobody is going to pause for six months while their competitors get to market first. That's what the idealists seem to have their heads in the sand about: Microsoft partnered with OpenAI because (a) they were going to develop a marketable product fast and first and (b) just like Altman told Toner, it was to keep the regulators happy: "oh yeah we totally are working on security and safety, don't worry!"

But if "security and safety" stand in the way of "get our hands on the spigot of the money-fountain", guess which gets dropped? I think Sutskever and the board are learning that lesson the hard way now. Altman was telling them what they wanted to hear while making sure the funding kept flowing and the product was being developed. That's why they felt uneasy when it finally dawned on them that they weren't really in control of what was happening, and why they tried kicking him out (straight into the arms of Microsoft and now it seems returning like victorious Caesar to triumph over their corpses).

But the world did that with Atoms for Peace:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoms_for_Peace

See also the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Countries like Japan have highly developed nuclear industry, but they don’t have nuclear weapons.

Japan is often said to be a "screwdriver's turn" away from possessing nuclear weapons

Because such latent capability is not prescribed by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, this is sometimes called the "Japan Option" (as a work-around to the treaty), as Japan is considered a "paranuclear" state, being a clear case of a country with complete technical prowess to develop a nuclear weapon quickly

But do they have the willpower to do so? This is the country that has first-hand experience with what nuclear weapons can do in the middle of a war, after all.

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Countries like Japan have highly developed nuclear industry, but they don’t have nuclear weapons.

Because when America occupied them after the war, it made damn sure Japan would never again get any notions about being a military power. It's why their military is known as the Japanese Self-Defense Forces:

The Occupation was commanded by American general Douglas MacArthur, whose office was designated the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP). In the initial phase of the Occupation, from 1945 to 1946, SCAP had pursued an ambitious program of social and political reform, designed to ensure that Japan would never again be a threat to world peace. Among other reforms, SCAP worked with Japanese leaders to completely disband the Japanese military. In addition, SCAP sought to unravel the wartime Japanese police state by breaking up the national police force into small American-style police forces controlled at the local level. SCAP also sought to empower previously marginalized groups that it believed would have a moderating effect on future militarism, legalizing the Communist and Socialist parties and encouraging the formation of labor unions. The crowning achievement of the first phase of the Occupation was the promulgation at SCAP's behest in 1947 of a new Constitution of Japan. Most famously Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution explicitly disavows war as an instrument of state policy and promises that Japan will never maintain a military.

Countries like Japan have highly developed nuclear industry, but they don’t have nuclear weapons.

The question is how many hours after wanting to have they will have them.

Its implied that they are keeping quiet for legal reasons, but that seems like a cop-out to me. If getting rid of Altman is worth blowing up the most productive company on the face of the planet, then it's worth getting a defamation lawsuit over. Like really? You're letting the lawyers dictate your messaging about saving the world? Get it together.

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