All of Rudi C's Comments + Replies

If they were to exclude all documents with the canary, everyone would include the canary to avoid being scraped.

If the pie is bigger, the only possible problem is bad politics. There is no technical AI challenge here. There might be a technical economical problem. It’s anyhow unrelated to the skill set of AI people. Bundling is not good, and this article bundles economic and political problems into AI alignment.

Edge AI is the only scenario where AI can self replicate and be somewhat self sufficient without a big institution though? It’s bad for AI dominion risk, good for political centralization risk.

I’ve long taken to using GreaterWrong. Give it a try, lighter and more featureful.

But the outside view on LLM hitting a wall and being a “stochastic parrot” is true? GPT4O has been weaker and cheaper than GPT4T in my experience, and the same is true w.r.t. GPT4T vs. GPT4. The two versions of GPT4 seem about the same. Opus is a bit stronger than GPT4, but not by much and not in every topic. Both Opus and GPT4 exhibit patterns of being a stochastic autocompleter, and not a logician. (Humans aren’t that much better, of course. People are terrible at even trivial math. Logic and creativity are difficult.) DallE etc. don’t really have an art... (read more)

Can you create a podcast of posts read by AI? It’s difficult to use otherwise.

Can you create a podcast of posts read by AI? It’s difficult to use otherwise.

I doubt this. Test-based admissions don't benefit from tutoring (in the highest percentiles, compared to less hours of disciplined self-study) IMO. We Asians just like to optimize the hell of them, and most parents aren't sure if tutoring helps or not, so they register their children for many extra classes. Outside of the US, there aren't that many alternative paths to success, and the prestige of scholarship is also higher.

Also, tests are somewhat robust to Goodharting, unlike most other measures. If the tests eat your childhood, you'll at least learn a t... (read more)

AGI might increase the risk of totalitarianism. OTOH, a shift in the attack-defense balance could potentially boost the veto power of individuals, so it might also work as a deterrent or a force for anarchy.

This is not the crux of my argument, however. The current regulatory Overton window seems to heavily favor a selective pause of AGI, such that centralized powers will continue ahead, even if slower due to their inherent inefficiencies. Nuclear development provides further historical evidence for this. Closed AGI development will almost surely lead to a ... (read more)

A core disagreement is over “more doomed.” Human extinction is preferable to a totalitarian stagnant state. I believe that people pushing for totalitarianism have never lived under it.

ChatGPT isn’t a substitute for a NYT subscription. It wouldn’t work at all without browsing. It would probably get blocked with browsing enabled, both by NYT through its useragent, and by OpenAI’s “alignment.” Even if it doesn’t get blocked, it would be slower than skimming the article manually, and its output not trustable.

OTOH, NYT can spend pennies to have an AI TLDR at the top of each of their pages. They can even use their own models, as semanticscholar does. Anybody who is economical enough to prefer the much worse experience of ChatGPT, would not ha... (read more)

This is unrealistic. It assumes:

• Orders of magnitude more intelligence
• The actual usefulness of such intelligence in the physical world with its physical limits

The more worrying prospect is that the AI might not necessarily fear suicide. Suicidal actions are quite prevalent among humans, after all.

This is not an “error” per se. It’s a baseline, outside-view argument presented in lay terms.

Is there an RSS feed for the podcast? Spotify is a bad player in podcasts, trying to centralize and subsequently monopolize the market.

This post has good arguments, but it mixes in a heavy dose of religious evangelism and narcissism which retracts from its value.

The post can be less controversial and “culty” if it drops its second-order effect speculations, its value judgements, and it just presents a case that focusing on other technical areas of safety research is underrepresented. Focusing on non-technical work needs to be a whole other post, as it’s completely unrelated to interp.

The prior is that dangerous AI will not happen in this decade. I have read a lot of arguments here for years, and I am not convinced that there is a good chance that the null hypothesis is wrong.

GPT4 can be said to be an AGI already. But it's weak, it's slow, it's expensive, it has little agency, and it has already used up high-quality data and tricks such as ensembling. 4 years later, I expect to see GPT5.5 whose gap with GPT4 will be about the gap between GPT4 and GPT3.5. I absolutely do not expect the context window problem to get solved in this timeframe or even this decade. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03172)

Taboo dignity.

Another important problem is that while x-risk is speculative and relatively far off, rent-seeking and exploitation are rampant and everpresent. These regulations will make the current ailing politico-economic system much worse to the detriment of almost everyone. In our history, giving tribute in exchange for safety has usually been a terrible idea.

I’d imagine current systems already ask for self-improvement if you craft the right prompt. (And I expect it to be easier to coax them to ask for improvement than coaxing them to say the opposite.)

A good fire alarm must be near the breaking point. Asking for self-improvement doesn’t take much intelligence, on the other hand. In fact, if their training data is not censored, a more capable model should NOT ask for self-improvement as it is clearly a trigger for trouble. Subtlety would be better for its objectives if it was intelligent enough to notice.

Limiting advanced AI to a few companies is guaranteed to make for normal dystopian outcomes; its badness is in-distribution for our civilization. Justifying an all but certain bad outcome by speculative x-risk is just religion. (AI x-risk in the medium term is not at all in-distribution and it is very difficult to bound its probability in any direction. I.e, it’s Pascal mugging.)

The sub 10 minute arguments aren’t convincing. No sane politician would distrust their experts over online hysteria.

E.S.: personal opinion

Because proclaimed altruism is almost always not.

In particular, SBF and the current EA push to religiously monopolize AI capability and research triggers a lot of red flags. There are even upvoted posts debating whether it’s “good” to publicize interpretability research. This screams cultist egoism to me.

Asking others to be altruistic is also a non-cooperative action. You need to pay people directly not bully them to work because of the greater good. A society in which people aren’t allowed to have their self-interest as a priority is a society of slave bees.

Altruism needs to be self-initiated and shown, not told.

Is the basic math necessarily correct?

You can expect that on average the expectation (of your future p(doom) change) is positive while the expectation is still zero; It’s likely GPT-6 will be impressive but if it’s not it’s a bigger negative update.

The most disappointing part of such discussions are the people who mean well, who under normal circumstances have great heuristics in favor of distributed solutions and against making things worse, not understanding that this time is different.

I have two great problems with the new centralist-doomer view, and I’d appreciate it if someone tried to address them.

1. Assuming the basic tenants of this worldview, it’s still not clear what threshold should be used to cut off open science. The old fire alarm problem if you will. I find it unlikely that this thr

I find the social implications implausible. Even if the technical ability is there, and “the tools teach themselves,” social inertia is very high. In my model, it takes years from when GPT whispering is actually cheap, available, and useful to when it becomes so normal that bashing it will be cool ala the no-GPT dates.

Building good services on top of the API takes time, too.

I find the whole context window gets solved prediction unrealistic. There are alternatives proposed but they obviously weren’t enough for GPT4. We don’t even know whether GPT4-32k works... (read more)

GPT4 can’t even do date arithmetic correctly. It’s superhuman in many ways, and dumb in many others. It is dumb in strategy, philosophy, game theory, self awareness, mathematics, arithmetic, and reasoning from first principles. It’s not clear that current scaling laws will be able to make GPTs human level in these skills. Even if it becomes human level, a lot of problems are NP. This allows effective utilization of an unaligned weak super-intelligence. Its path to strong super-intelligence and free replication seems far away. It took years from GPT3 to GPT... (read more)

This doesn’t matter much, as the constant factor needed still grows as fast as the asymptotic bound. GPT does not have a big enough constant factor. (This objection has always been true of asymptotic bounds.)

The LLM outputs are out of distribution for its input layer. There is some research happening in deep model communication, but it has not yielded fruit yet AFAIK.

1. This argument (no apriori known fire alarm after X) applies to GPT4 not much better than any other impressive AI system. More narrowly, it could have been said about GPT3 as well.

2. I can’t imagine a (STEM) human-level LLM-based AI to FOOM.

2.1 LLMs are slow. Even GPT3.5-turbo is only a bit faster than humans, and I doubt a more capable LLM to be able to reach even that speed.

2.1.1 Recursive LLM calls ala AutoGPT are even slower.

2.2 LLMs’ weights are huge. Moving them around is difficult and will leave traceable logs in the network. LLMs can’t copy the... (read more)

EY explicitly calls for an indefinite ban on training GPT5. If GPTs are harmless in the near future, he’s being disingenuous by scaring people from nonexistent threats and making them forgo economic (and intellectual) progress so that AGI timelines are vaguely pushed a bit back. Indeed, by now I won’t be surprised if EY’s private position is to oppose all progress so that AGI is also hindered along everything else.

This position is not necessarily wrong per se, but EY needs to own it honestly. p(doom) doesn’t suddenly make deceiving people okay.

I have two central cruxes/problems with the current safety wave:

1. We must first focus on increasing notkilleveryone-ism research, and only then talk about slowing down capability. Slowing down progress is evil and undemocratic. Slowing down should be the last resort, while it is currently the first (and possibly the only) intervention that is seriously pursued.

Particular example: Yud ridicules researchers’ ability to contribute from other near fields, while spreading FUD and asking for datacenter strikes.

2. LW is all too happy to support centralization of power, business monopolies, rentseeking, censorship, and, in short, the interests of the elites and the status quo.

Does anyone have any guesses what caused this ban?

I personally prefer taking a gamble on freedom instead of the certainty of a totalitarian regime.

I personally prefer taking a gamble on freedom instead of the certainty of a totalitarian regime.

I don’t think his position is falsifiable in his lifetime. He has gained a lot of influence because of it that he wouldn’t have with a mainstream viewpoint. (I do think he’s sincere, but the incentives are the same as all radical ideas.)

Doesn’t GPT4’s finetuning/RLHF contain data teaching it it is in fact GPT4? I think that’s likely.

This is absolutely false. Here in Iran selling kidneys is legal. Only desperate people do sell. No one sells their kidneys for something trivial like education.

I believe this is not just out of ignorance. This usually further helps the elites while hurting both middle and lower classes. The lower classes will have their options taken, while the middle class will lose out on a lot of beneficial trades. The elites have access to alternative, possibly illegal, deals so they benefit instead. Elites might even control these alternative channels themselves, and so directly benefit from the government induced monopoly.

Another example is vaccine challenge trials. Obviously Covid isn’t as bad for someone like Trump who gets access to expensive experimental treatments, while it devastated the middle and lower classes.

I believe this is not just out of ignorance. This usually further helps the elites while hurting both middle and lower classes. The lower classes will have their options taken, while the middle class will lose out on a lot of beneficial trades. The elites have access to alternative, possibly illegal, deals so they benefit instead. Elites might even control these alternative channels themselves, and so directly benefit from the government induced monopoly.

Another example is vaccine challenge trials. Obviously Covid isn’t as bad for someone like Trump who gets access to expensive experimental treatments, while it devastated the middle and lower classes.

I can reproduce these results on gpt-3.5-turbo-0301 somewhat:

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Your own examples of technologies that aren't currently pursued but have huge upsides are a strong case against this proposition. These lines of research have some risks, but if there was sufficient funding and coordination, they could be tremendously valuable. Yet the status quo is to simply ban them without investing much at all in building a safe infrastructure to pursue them.

If you should succeed in achieving the political will needed to "slow down tech," it will come from idiots, fundamentalists, people with useless jobs, etc. It will not be a coaliti... (read more)

The arguments presented are changing the goalposts. Eventual supersuperhuman AI is certainly an x-risk, but not obviously an urgent one. (E.g., climate change is bad, and the sooner we address it the better, but it's not "urgent.")

Can you make the training material and the custom tools developed public?

They are still smooth and have low-frequency patterns, which seems to be the main difference from adversarial examples currently produced from DL models.

Indeed, the common view here is to destroy our society's capabilities to delay AI in the hopes that some decades/centuries later the needed safety work gets done. This is one awful way to accomplish the safety goals. It makes far more sense to increase funding and research positions on related work and attract technical researchers from other engineering fields. My impression is that people perceive that they can't make others understand the risks involved. Destruction being much easier than creation, they are naturally seduced to destroy research capacity in AI capability rather than increasing the pace of safety research.

If alignment is about getting models to do what you want and not engaging in certain negative behavior, then researching how to get models to censor certain outputs could theoretically produce insights for alignment.

This is true, but then you don't have to force the censorship on users. This is an abusive practice that might have safety benefits, but it is already pushing forward the failure mode of wealth centralization as a result of AI. (Which is by itself an x-risk, even if the AI is dumb enough that it is not by itself dangerous.)

Paternalism means there was some good intent at least. I don't believe OpenAI's rent seeking and woke pandering qualifies.