From the Abstract:
Rather than targeting state-of-the-art performance, our objective is to highlight GPT-4’s potential
They weren't aiming for SOTA! What happens when they do?
The way I see the above post (and it's accompaniment) is knocking down all the soldiers that I've encountered talking to lots of people about this over the last few weeks. I would appreciate it if you could stand them back up (because I'm really trying to not be so doomy, and not getting any satisfactory rebuttals).
Thanks for writing out your thoughts in some detail here. What I'm trying to say is that things are already really bad. Industry self-regulation has failed. At some point you have to give up on hoping that the fossil fuel industry (AI/ML industry) will do anything more to fix climate change (AGI x-risk) than mere greenwashing (safetywashing). How much worse does it need to get for more people to realise this?
The Alignment community (climate scientists) can keep doing their thing; I'm very much in favour of that. But there is also now an AI Notkilleveryoneism (climate action) movement. We are raising the damn Fire Alarm.
From the post you link:
some authority somewhere will take notice and come to the rescue.
Who is that authority?
The United Nations Security Council. Anything less and we're toast.
And we can talk all we like about the unilateralist's curse, but I don't think anything a bunch of activists can do will ever top the formation and corruption-to-profit-seeking of OpenAI and Anthropic (the supposedly high status moves).
It's really not intended as a gish gallop, sorry if you are seeing it as such. I feel like I'm really only making 3 arguments:
1. AGI is near
2. Alignment isn't ready (and therefore P(doom|AGI is high)
3. AGI is dangerous
And then drawing the conclusion from all these that we need a global AGI moratorium asap.
I think you need to zoom out a bit and look at the implications of these papers. The danger isn't in what people are doing now, it's in what they might be doing in a few months following on from this work. The NAS paper was a proof of concept. What happens when it's massively scaled up? What happens when efficiency gains translate into further efficiency gains?
This post was only a little ahead of it's time. The time is now. EA/LW will probably be eclipsed by wider public campaigning on this if they (the leadership) don't get involved.
Advocate for a global moratorium on AGI. Try and buy (us all) more time. Learn the basics of AGI safety (e.g. AGI Safety Fundamentals) so you are able to discuss the reasons why we need a moratorium in detail. YMMV, but this is what I'm doing as a financially independent 42 year-old. I feel increasingly like all my other work is basically just rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
Thank you for doing this. I'm thinking that at this point, there needs to be an organisation with the singular goal of pushing for a global moratorium on AGI development. Anyone else interested in this? Have DM'd.
Ok, I admit I simplified here. There is still probably ~ a million times (give or take an order of magnitude) more relevant compute (GPUs, TPUs) than was used to train GPT-4.
It won't need large orders to gain a relevant foothold. Just a few tiny orders could suffice.
I didn't mean literallly rob the stock market. I'm referring to out-trading all the other traders (inc. existing HFT) to accumulate resources.
Exponential growth can't remain "slow" forever, by definition. How long does it take for the pond to be completely covered by lily pads when it's half covered? How long did it take for Covid to become a pandemic? Not decades.
I referred to social hacking (i.e. blackmailing people into giving up their passwords). This could go far enough (say, at least 10% of world devices). Maybe quantum computers (or some better tech the AI thinks up) could do the rest.
LessWrong:
A post about all the reasons AGI will kill us: No. 1 all time highest karma (827 on 467 votes; +1.77 karma/vote)
A post about containment strategy for AGI: 7th all time highest karma (609 on 308 votes; +1.98 karma/vote)
A post about us all basically being 100% dead from AGI: 52nd all time highest karma (334 on 343 votes; +0.97 karma/vote, a bit more controversial)
Also LessWrong:
A post about actually doing something about containing the threat from AGI and not dying [this one]: downvoted to oblivion (-5 karma within an hour; currently 13 karma on 24 votes; +0.54 karma/vote)
My read: y'all are so allergic to anything considered remotely political (even though this should really not be a mater of polarisation - it's about survival above all else!) that you'd rather just lie down and be paperclipped than actually do anything to prevent it happening. I'm done.