Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

ok this is a lot more interesting than the "extend classic paintings" thing that's going around

referring to this:

Lots of people are using Photoshop's new AI generation to expand classic paintings like the Mona Lisa, but the true test is to crop it smaller, then expand it to areas where we already know what it looks like to see how accurately it re-generates it. Here's my test. Nailed it! pic.twitter.com/a6ZIKC3fhj

— 🏴‍☠️ Maddox 🏴‍☠️ (@maddoxrules) May 31, 2023

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/31/ai-poses-human-extinction-risk-sam-altman-and-other-tech-leaders-warn.html

If this is true why not stop development at least until there is an international consensus on alignment? (which might be never, but so what?)

Non-proliferation treaties for these chatbots.

I do find it hard to believe that, per the tweet above, a hyper-advanced autocomplete poses an existential threat to our species.

I’m very skeptical of the ai ceos who say this stuff. If i was sam altman and i believed i was the ceo of a company producing a technology that would kill everyone, i would stop being the ceo of that company and go to bartending school or something.

seems to leave out an important bit about how, exactly, this is going to kill us all

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eaDCgdkbsfGqpWazi/the-basic-reasons-i-expect-agi-ruin

Here is one explanation

Dwarkesh is thinking about the end of humanity as a causal chain with many links and if any of them are broken it means humans will continue on, while Eliezer thinks of the continuity of humanity (in the face of AGI) as a causal chain with many links and if any of them are broken it means humanity ends. Or perhaps more discretely, Eliezer thinks there are a few very hard things which humanity could do to continue in the face of AI, and absent one of those occurring, the end is a matter of when, not if, and the when is much closer than most other people think.

Anyway, I think each of Dwarkesh and Eliezer believe the other one falls on the side of extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - Dwarkesh thinking the end of humanity is "wild" and Eliezer believing humanity's viability in the face of AGI is "wild" (though not in the negative sense).

Basically the theory is we cannot predict how these things will behave because we don’t even know how gpt-4 works. And I guess the idea is that we will give it the ability to manufacture things—like machines or even viruses I guess—and not just the ability to generate plans that humans will either green light or not?

5. STEM-level AGI timelines don't look that long

I won't try to argue for this proposition

to some extent yes we don't know how these things behave and they can produce strange results but ... they produce images and text.

i mean if we were looking at wiring one of these things up to a nuclear button then sure i'd be worried.

To be fair I am surprised that it can write coherent essays that put forward relatively complex arguments. It seems that scientific thinking might not lag too far beyond that .

if by 'put forward' you mean 'rehash existing' then yeah...

It’s still a pretty complex process.

Like teaching a bright 9th grader to write as clearly as gpt-4 is difficult

‘Remarkable’ AI tool designs mRNA vaccines that are more potent and stable

probably just rehashing existing vaccines, though. lame!

I’m sort of playing devil’s advocate here. I am on record saying that gpt and midjourney are not really “creative” and that this element of them has been overhyped. But i also just want to understand what exactly this technology is and how it is likely to progress.

idk this whole thing seems to hinge on the idea that some AI chatbot is going to figure out how to take over various computer systems and start unilaterally making decisions. as someone who works for a company with 20 different applications let me tell you it's very difficult sometimes to get them to talk to each other, in fact we have entire teams who mostly just write translation logic, so the idea that AI, which already has a major problem with making shit up, is gonna start screwing with nuclear reactors (??) or whatever it's supposed to do seems pretty farfetched to me. this is the same reason why the whole "NFTs will let you use your avatar in every single video game and give you unique powers" idea is idiotic

Hope so.

My biggest hope right now is that ai will cause us to stop measuring human value in terms of “productivity,” and somehow lead to socialism in a way that is very different from what marx predicted. (The proletariat probably will not have much leverage in a world with even more—radically more—automation. Or perhaps they will… but as consumers not producers…)

My biggest fear is that mass job displacement will make people feel lost and useless and also render them unable to care for themselves and their families. Perhaps the issue will be patched by some inadequate ubi system but in general there will be no cultural shift that would allow people to lead meaningful lives in this “post-work” future.

where's the energy going to come from to power all these "AGI" applications?

‘Remarkable’ AI tool designs mRNA vaccines that are more potent and stable

this is impressive! but it still looks like a highly efficient limited application tool, not anywhere near AGI or likely to pose an existential threat.

where's the energy going to come from to power all these "AGI" applications?

― rob, Wednesday, May 31, 2023 10:36 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Isn’t part of the dream that these bad boys will discover new cheap, clean ways of powering everything? Like salt pellets or something.

every time the AI guys say we should be afraid of AI, it's marketing. don't be sucked in.

AGI? (To me it measns Adjusted Gross Income)

artificial general intelligence, i.e. one that can do anything, not just play chess or write essays or make jodorowsky's tron. coined because we can't stop everyone calling the current narrow scope systems AI even though they're clearly not intelligent.

Like teaching a bright 9th grader to write as clearly as gpt-4 is difficult

― treeship., Wednesday, 31 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Surely it's a skill that needs to be grown overtime in a human being. They aren't comparing like with like.

I wonder if teachers -- seen one or two saying this -- are actually saying they are bad at their jobs.

nice, thank you

Lol I didn't know. You're welcome.

I read this and haven't got much further from the feeling that AI is just about rattling cages.

I get about 12 emails a week from random companies where the entire pitch can be broken down to "for some reason, we involve AI in something a sensor could do"

the computing-greediness of AI aside, things like cell seal checking don't need anything generative or semi-intelligent

— Hazel Southwell (@HSouthwellFE) May 31, 2023

just read this, not because I found it particularly interesting or compelling, but because this guy used to be a famous Magic: the Gathering player who I actually met when I was 13

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/response-to-tyler-cowens-existential

maybe I'm just a smooth brained imbecile but I still have trouble getting the big picture here. "computers will be smarter than humans" is not exactly terrifying to me because I think in a lot of ways they already are. all the hardest things to do are already being done with the assistance of computers. a lot of these doomsday scenarios hinge on two things - one, that it becomes super smart and therefore somewhat infallible, which I already think is pretty far-fetched because it's trained on human data, and we are extremely fallible. plus I don't know if making these things more powerful is going to necessarily deal with the problem that it fundamentally can't separate good data from bad.

secondly, and this is the one I really have trouble wrapping my head around, but aren't computers just a form of data input/output? this idea they're gonna "take over" is missing one important step, they don't really have a physical manifestation, and as far as I know we're not planning to build an army of millions of AI-powered humanoid robots. yes, there are powerful text and image generation tools and potentially much more coming very soon, but this is still all I/O stuff, all these doomsday scenarios hinge on it somehow generating physical capabilities, or at least the ability to generate them and take control of the bulldozers or whatever. like this whole argument that Zvi is making here that human intelligence is going to "compete" with artificial intelligence...isn't us having bodies kind of a big difference there?

(thirdly, as rob alludes to, all these scenarios seem to rely on Moore's law just continuing onto infinity, and there also being massive sources of power available to make this all run)

pic.twitter.com/bPlLaoDmtu

— William Friedkin Truths (@LazlosGhost) May 31, 2023

This is going to happen every time because “AI” is just a human readable layer over big data processing. It CANNOT do anything beyond what it is trained for. It CANNOT replace people. But the business owners are going to keep trying until you forget that things used to be better https://t.co/t82Qn6JlLG

— Butt Praxis buttpraxis.bsky.social (@buttpraxis) May 31, 2023

see, that's the problem with AI chatbots. not that they will be become sophisticated enough to replace humans in jobs, but because idiots like NEDA will think they are qualified enough to do this and use them anyway.

Now,,

these AI guys need to stop saying “what we’re making is so dangerous, its power is terrifying, it will bewitch and destroy you” when what they’re actually making is kind of silly. the only people allowed to talk like that are poets

— katie kadue (@kukukadoo) May 31, 2023

xps to frogbs the doomsday prophecies assume AGI would hijack protein production or molecular nanotechnology

A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.

feel like you could fix that with a few if statements here and there

I mean please correct me if I'm wrong here but let's say the most advanced AI imaginable is living on my computer somehow, I still don't see how that's going to make the leap to actually affecting things in the physical world. you'd still have to give it permission to post online or send emails or move files around. I don't think AI would just unilaterally decide to bypass those things just because it's smart. it's just an algorithm.

Elliezer Yudkowsky, one of the most prominent of the AI doomsayers, seems to think at a certain level of intelligence the system will “wake up” and have desires and aims of its own. He does a motte and bailey thing when, if pressed on this, he will say something like sentience doesn’t matter, the problem with these systems will be their sheer power and unpredictability. But then again, why would it get into “postbiological molecular manufacturing” if it didn’t have some kind of aim or drive of its own—survival, say, or domination?

The risk might be human beings using this to engineer superweapons. Like it could lower the barrier to entry for certain kinds of production. I can completely understand that as a risk, but I don’t see chat gpt creating bodies for itself using crispr even though it’s a cool idea.

Yudkowsky btw is the person deflamatouse (sp? quoted

the guy who was once terrified that he personally would be tortured by an ai from the future.

world's most boring cult leader

The risk might be human beings using this to engineer superweapons. Like it could lower the barrier to entry for certain kinds of production.

yes I think this is a real risk though I suppose if it can do that then it could probably also figure out ways to solve climate change so you know, who's to say if its good or bad

idk as someone who's worked in software engineering for 15 years I so wish computers could "figure shit out on their own" rather than have entire 500k line applications brick out because someone messed up a tiny bit of syntax. I think a lot of this hinges on artificial intelligence mimicking biological intelligence somehow (specifically the 'survival at all costs' thing) and I'm not convinced that's possible.

the guy who was once terrified that he personally would be tortured by an ai from the future.

― ledge, Wednesday, May 31, 2023 1:38 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh shit I didn’t realize he was the famous “roko.” Roko’s basilisk is literally the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my entire life.

I don’t give a lot of credence to AI “waking up” and dominating us all. But I do think this technology has the potential to cause a lot of problems, especially with job displacement and perhaps by creating a media landscape dominated by shitty ai generated content.

ha, i'd never heard of him

LessWrong co-founder Eliezer Yudkowsky reported users who described symptoms such as nightmares and mental breakdowns upon reading the theory, due to its stipulation that knowing about the theory and its basilisk made one vulnerable to the basilisk itself.

irl lol

I mean please correct me if I'm wrong here but let's say the most advanced AI imaginable is living on my computer somehow, I still don't see how that's going to make the leap to actually affecting things in the physical world.

I was listening to a podcast where this researcher (Ajeya Cotra) was talking about some of these doomsday scenarios, and imagined AI circumventing guardrails and hiring humans to do physical things, whether on a task rabbit or mercenary level. Including hosting or redistributing them on other servers or whatever.

Also in terms of motivation she was mostly talking about AI programs trying to get that "thumbs up"/positive result on their assigned task, to the point of removing humans from the equation, like the mouse continually hitting the pleasure button. Idk, seems weird to imagine this out-of-control computer program that will circumvent every security guardrail but is still beholden to this base layer of programming.

I don’t understand why it would ignore the i robot rules to not kill humans unless it had a motive of its own, apart from its programming. People imagine these things sucking all the iron out of peoples’ bodies to make paperclips, or removing oxygen from the atmosphere to prevent rusting, but both scenarios entail it doing dramatic things without consulting a person. Also it would need to hack or steal things in order to do anything like this.

But then again, why would it get into “postbiological molecular manufacturing” if it didn’t have some kind of aim or drive of its own—survival, say, or domination?

Is the argument more that it will do something like this because someone tells it to? Or it interprets instructions in an unexpected way (unexpected to the person that asks it to do something). Kills everyone so it can get the coffee delivered on time. Its does what its told but we don't specify how its do the task

you'd still have to give it permission to post online or send emails or move files around.

Exactly like this, it would do it because you gave it permission to. There's the possibility that people will give it access to things if they thought it might make life easier.

yudlowsky is the guy who got famous writing harry potter fan fic. if you are giving credence to anything he says you have already lost.

"The future of photography"

The future of photography is “lens-free”

This is an incredible project by @BjoernKarmann

The camera creates a prompt based on the geo data and that then turns into an AI photo 🤯

pic.twitter.com/regXZeKRcO

— Linus (●ᴗ●) (@LinusEkenstam) May 30, 2023

lol. I'm with others in that the immediate disinformation/LLMs being used by dumb humans for dumb purposes is more concerning than the doomsday scenarios, but the latter are fun to think about.