They are trying to guard against other people building ASI before they do because they think they are uniquely safety oriented relative to their competitors. Frankly, based on my knowledge of Anthropic and the people who work there, they are very possibly right. They care a ton about this in a way that is difficult for people outside this bubble to understand.
> guard against other people building ASI before they do because they think they are uniquely safety oriented relative to their competitors
All this longtermism though is harmful. There are real problems of data theft, bias, labor displacement, and environmental costs that are happening right now but every push for regulation and regulatory capture, and all the safety talk, is always focused on some speculative future machine god to distract from the current problems.
I'd have a higher opinion of these labs if the issues they openly talked about and worked toward where the real issues we face currently, not speculative defenses against some future AGI that may never happen in my lifetime. I'm less worried about "our new model might kill all humans in the future" and more worried about how we are going to address anti-competitive behavior, copyright protections, labor rights, and the energy impact.
I cannot overstate how much I think this take is wrong. Please please reconsider, look at the rate of progress being made, and consider that even if you only think ASI 'may' never happen in your lifetime it should still be one of your #1 concerns.
Honestly, that respect for 'copyright protections' has somehow become a leftist shibboleth is bizarre to me and indicative that something has become deeply warped in our discussions around this topic.
> I cannot overstate how much I think this take is wrong. Please please reconsider, look at the rate of progress being made, and consider that even if you only think ASI 'may' never happen in your lifetime it should still be one of your #1 concerns.
Frankly, this appeal comes across as the same kind of impassioned plea that a missionary might make when begging the faithless to repent and come to Christ before it's too late. This weird religiosity some people around here use to talk about AI, ASI and AGI is bizarre. Take what I've quoted and replace the words "progress" and "ASI" with "sinning" and "the Book of Revelations", and the zeal becomes apparent.
Maybe if you really squint. I'm asking them to reconsider their views because the cumulative result of many opinions is policy. And yes, I'm making moral claims. So perhaps that makes it religious? I don't really think so, but I recognize that comparing things to religion is an effective dismissal tactic on here.
There's nothing warped about it at all. Like it or not, it is a real issue. It's also an issue of license washing GPL code to privatize it. It's full scale theft of collective human knowledge, being sold back to us in a for profit private product.
Outside of that though, there are other issues right now that need addressed before we speculate about what might be possible with ASI in the future. If the potential for a harmful ASI is truly that near, and that great, then why push forward at all? Where's the push for a global stop order on development of this technology until regulation can catch up?
The talk of a potential future serves as a distraction from the very real problems people are facing in their lives today.
While Dario and team are worrying about ASI, real people are worrying about how they are going to continue to feed their family after wide spread layoffs set a very large portion of the population back into a lower quality lifestyle. Real people are concerned about water usage is draught stricken areas, the massive energy demand driving grid instability in their communities, or that the environmental and economic externalities of model training is being socialized while the profits continue to be strictly private.
What about the mass proliferation of misinformation at scale having a real effect on our democratic process?
Forgive me if I'd like to see those addressed first, and fast, before we start worrying about an unpromised future technology.
The "global stop order" is just generally perceived as an impossible coordination problem. So instead we see a mix of labs voluntarily putting in guardrails and regulatory efforts (which are not only aimed at hypothetical super-AIs of the future). Of course labs are also in a competitive race. And I actually think that it does make sense that the richest companies in the most dominant positions would in a better position to worry about safety than a startup that is just trying to survive at all. And just in general, it seems reasonable that the fewer companies have access to dangerous tech the better. This isn't really about some highly speculative future tech either -- current models already pose lots of risks, and the pace of model improvement is something wildly unprecedented. Whether or not you call it ASI, the capabilities we will have two years from now are hard to even imagine properly. Also, I don't think the issues that you are highlighting are all ones that Anthropic would dismiss as second-tier. In particular, mass unemployment from AI is how we will deal with a massive devaluation of human labor is one of the most serious concerns. And about other issues, reasonable people may differ. I'm more worried about biorisk than environmental damage, for example, but clearly we should be keeping an eye on both. Serious risks and problems, just because they aren't already harming people today, are not just a distraction.
I'll concede that a lot (most?) of the problems are not technically the responsibility of the AI labs to address, and it wouldn't entirely be their fault for our government failing to get ahead of the problem. Mass unemployment, for example, is nearly 100% a political problem.
That being said, I can't help but experience a bit of Deja Vu over arguments like those around biorisk. I've seen the same exact things said in the early 2000s over widespread access to broadband and Google. When the anarchist cookbook spread around online and everyone was super paranoid about democratized terrorism, and we had big regulatory pushes for ISP level censorship and user tracking. Telecoms frequently argued that only they can keep the web safe, with strict and expensive regulations that naturally only those large heavily capitalized companies can afford to go through. Like the early internet and search, its just another way to lower the latency required for a human to find already existing public data
Well, very little of that played out. Turns out the math, for now, is the same, and information retrieval doesn't directly correlate to democratized weaponization. In 2001, a bad actor still needed a physical lab, precursor chemicals, etc to build a physical threat. Those same exact physical constraints exist today. The software cannot yet cross the digital-to-physical divide.
Keep an eye on the risk, by all means, but I don't see it yet as justification to cement a monopoly or oligopoly, nor do I see it as a reason to prioritize a risk of information availability over the climate and environmental risks that are far more likely to end the species.
If you have a sizeable bucket of money, it's so, so easy to get folks so distracted by (or invested in) movie plot threats that they totally fail to (or have a "plausible" excuse to fail to) notice the actual, lasting harm that you're doing to society at scales both small and large.
If Anthropic had pushed hard and nonstop since their founding to ensure that all LLM companies in the world were legally bound to stop all LLM development the minute any one of them called for a halt to work, then I'd give their claims about safety some credit. They've been screaming about "safety" and "alignment" for years, but -because LLMs are impossible to secure against code injection- their products are fundamentally unsafe and always have been... I just don't trust their claims about a commitment to actual safety.
My read on their recent calls for a global "stop work" emergency cord is that they're very soon to (if they haven't already) reach a point where they will not be able to produce products that are sufficiently improved over the previous versions to justify the level of investment required for their development.
My prediction is that Anthropic and OpenAI will get serious barriers to entry of new competitors enshrined in Federal law, they will call for a "pause" or a "slowdown" in new research for "safety" reasons, and the US will attempt to engage in economic warfare with any countries that don't agree to force their domestic LLM companies to stop working on those LLMs.
> the capabilities we will have two years from now are hard to even imagine properly.
unless the bitter pill is gone, extraordinarily not this. The capabilities will be limited by the training data we can create to pull information and patterns from
and then we will still be limited by compute, space, and power
mass devaluing of labour isnt particularly believable when everyones predicting that all the big labs are gonna go under trying to subsidize tokens.
power consumption and global climate change should
ASI should be in the top 10k concerns maybe, but way below what to eat for dinner.
much higher on the fears is some hype guy pretending he has made this thing, and giving it access to too much stuff, which it then randomly deletes or misuses
it should also be in thes same range as "what if the dinosaurs came back and ate everyone"
theres tons of progress on that too. same with finding aliens
there are real present concerns to worry about, like genocides, concentration camps for immigrants, food costs next winter, ongoing wars in the middle east and europe, etc
all kinds of actually pressing stuff, that doesnt first require burning a couple trillion dollars and forcing poor people to pay through the teeth for their electricity
ASI? We are nowhere near even human-like AGI. We have no idea if ASI is even physically possible, but going by the usual scaling laws and the capabilities of existing models, it would require raw compute and storage on an extreme scale, at the very minimum rivaling the existing AI datacenter deployments. (When Dario talks about hosting "a country of geniuses in a datacenter" at some point - which is not even ASI yet as generally projected - the operating word there is datacenter. That's the scale of buildouts you should be thinking about.) This is nowhere near a serious concern at present.
Its not difficult to understand, they where fine with Claude being used to plan the murder of people around the world for Trump's war on peace, and the spying on any person as long as they are not from the USA. I don't see this any different then a company that makes missiles at this point, the blood is on their hands already.
What FTX decisively disproved was the idea that people's origin stories involving apparently sincere desire to do good in the world and them constantly broadcasting that should be used as a reason to unquestioningly trust them when their notion of greater good happens to align perfectly with them accumulating enormous quantities of wealth and power.
(and Sam, bless him, originally wanted to help animals rather than own the machine god. And probably sincerely believed he was going to do great things for humanity from all the misappropriated funds he was definitely going to win back against a backdrop of EAs and VCs queueing up to glaze him and his commitment to the greater good)
I don't think people are objecting to the EA idea that some charities are more evidence based than others so much as the distinctly EA idea that it would be more effective still to donate to charities like OpenAI
todays EA is not about giving to charities, that was the original mission with 40k hours and ethereum (i think vitalik still believes in this version). then the yudkowsky xrisk/ai safety crowd took over lesswrong and turned it into a cult.
now its utilitarianism taken to the extreme. if you believe a skynet scenario killing everyone on earth is plausible then the "logical" thing to do is allow literally anything in the name of stopping it. that includes mass murder and dictatorship. the only thing that can balance the infinite negative value from an evil machine god is the infinite positive value from a good machine god.
thats the main difference today, one faction around sam and dario believes in creating the good ASI first and sacrificing all the world resources to do it before someone makes the bad one, the more pessimistic like yud want to stop all ai development to reduce the risk that an evil god is made to zero.
Just friggin tax carbon. The notion that we pick disfavored new industries and require them to bear the brunt of our renewable buildout is absurd and effectively a tax on the 'new'.
I see no reason we should grandfather in 'heritage carbon emitters' when we are emitting way more than we ought to.
Leaving aside whether a carbon tax would be an effective solution to CO2 (I genuinely don't know), there's no reason to suspect it would be an effective solution to our water crisis, particularly given the huge growth in solar recently.
Datacenters don't need cooling because they're burning gas for their power. They need cooling because computation produces heat. Even if they were feeding as much clean solar power back into the grid as they were using, we would still need to find a solution to their voracious thirst.
Ultimately 'profit' is the result of transitive dependencies on things people want fulfill what they are willing to pay for. But I agree that we should subsidize residential water and electricity usage. But the base price before subsidy should reflect the externalities.
Georgists have figured this out long ago. To make a regressive tax progressive all you need to do is turn the revenue gained from it into a flat per capita tax rebate. Also residential water use is tiny. Maybe your water bill goes up $400 a year but that doesnt matter when you get a $1000 rebate because most of the tax is paid by agriculture.
I don’t think it’s performative. That seems really uncharitable. Seems like most “performative“ accusations are.
I think a ton of people were REALLY misinformed about how much water AI data centers use. I know I was at one point.
Now there may be people pushing that narrative still on purpose because it clearly works. But I don’t think the average person who uses that talking point is doing anything other than expressing a concern based on the (terrible) information they got somewhere.
I stand by it. If you only care about the climate for things that are socially rewarded (being anti-AI is, telling your friends to about the impact of eating beef or taking flights or other day to day activities is boooo you're being a buzzkill), you are being performative.
There's a reason certain types of misinformation become popular and others fizzle. The environmental concerns around AI are starting from the goal 'disliking AI' and going in search of a reason for many people. The environment is a convenient reason because it links to an existing left-wing cause & doesn't require conceding the frame of AI rapidly becoming extremely capable (scary! don't like to think about that!) so it's all comfort and outrage without stakes.
What angers me on the other hand is calling something "performative" while completely ignoring the facts. Have you checked the projected impact of new data centers on CO2 emmissions?
Yes, I'm extremely climate conscious and change my behavior around many things that I think have particularly high climate externalities. But ultimately, most of the people I know who are really concerned about this engage in extremely high externality behavior (flights, beef eating, etc.) regularly without even thinking about it. AI doesn't even come close and beyond that potentially enables a lot of solutions.
This is not true. Batteries are cheaper than peaker power plants using fossil fuel. They also allow the operator to fulfill market demands at the minute level versus the hours previously that it took to turn on a peaker plant.
This is being done at scale in California and Texas.
Fore more than 2 hours capacity, batteries are expensive than most other and cost keeps increasing as more hours of capacity needed. Without gas or coal to burn when 1hr battery capacity runs out, battery storage is expensive.
It's simple power vs energy equations. Let's say you need to supply steady 1MW to town for 1hr, 2hr or 10hr. This needs total of 1MWh 2Mwh or 10Mwh respectively. Let's say battery would cost $200/kwh, then this would cost 200k, 400k or 2M resp. Battery storage is generally used for less than 2hr duration currently where they are price competitive. For the rest, either gas peaker, coal or hydro is used.
I'm on your side, but I would argue many of the first computer discovered proofs might be called original proofs without intelligence, as they rely on massive programmatic case checking.
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