Other comments here have made the case that freedom and transparency, interpreted straightforwardly, probably just make AGI happen sooner and be less safe. Sadly, I agree. The imprint of open-source values in my mind wants to apply itself to this scenario, and finds it appealing to be in a world where that application would work. But I don’t think that’s the world we’re currently living in.
In a better world, there would be a strategy that looks more like representative democracy: large GPU clusters are tightly controlled, not by corporations or by countries, but by a process that only allows training runs that are approved by a supermajority of representatives, representing the whole world and selected via the best speculative voting theory tech we can muster, to make them be genuine experts and good people rather than conventional politicians. I don’t see any feasible path from here to there. If we somehow had a century to prepare, I think the goal would be to arrange society into a shape where that could happen.
-- jimrandomh (A name, chosen long ago, inspired by Appendix B)
Other comments here have made the case that freedom and transparency, interpreted straightforwardly, probably just make AGI happen sooner and be less safe. Sadly, I agree. The imprint of open-source values in my mind wants to apply itself to this scenario, and finds it appealing to be in a world where that application would work. But I don’t think that’s the world we’re currently living in.
In a better world, there would be a strategy that looks more like representative democracy: large GPU clusters are tightly controlled, not by corporations or by countries, but by a process that only allows training runs that are approved by a supermajority of representatives, representing the whole world and selected via the best speculative voting theory tech we can muster, to make them be genuine experts and good people rather than conventional politicians. I don’t see any feasible path from here to there. If we somehow had a century to prepare, I think the goal would be to arrange society into a shape where that could happen.
-- jimrandomh
(A name, chosen long ago, inspired by Appendix B)