Thanks very much for this dose of reality. So maybe a western analogy for the attitude to “AI safety” at Chinese companies, is that at first, it will be comparable to the attitude at Meta. What I mean by this: Microsoft works with OpenAI, and Google works with Anthropic, so they both work with organizations that at least talk about the danger of AI takeover, alongside more mundane concerns. But as far as I can tell, Meta does not officially acknowledge AI takeover as a real risk at all. The closest thing to an official Meta policy on the risk of AI takeover, is Yann LeCun on Twitter, telling Eliezer that it’s a fantasy.
I found an article from the “National Business Daily”, from the start of this April, in which a few Chinese academics comment on the petition calling for a 6-month pause on advanced AI. They say things like: GPT-4 just does what humans tell it to do; self-awareness is the crucial threshold, and GPT-4 is nowhere near self-awareness; and even one who says that the human level of intelligence is like “the speed of light” for Turing-machine IQ, a threshold that cannot be passed… Again, I actually find that rather similar to how western researchers react to questions like, can AI surpass us, and what will happen if it does? Unlike more mundane questions of computer science, there’s no consensus of verified knowledge that can reliably answer those questions for us, so people just fall back on their individual intuitions and private theories.
Nonetheless, AI is fast-moving and I think that, as Chinese systems approach the performance of GPT-3 and GPT-4, it will unavoidably dawn on some of the people involved, that this is potentially creating autonomous intelligent beings that can equal or surpass any human; and so they will start to take public positions on what that means, the desirability of it, the inevitability of it, and so on. I can, for example, imagine a vigorous public debate over the creation of artificial persons, with some saying, just don’t do it at all, others saying, they should have the rights of a citizen, still others saying, we should enforce Asimov laws and not feel bad about doing so, and so on.
Thanks very much for this dose of reality. So maybe a western analogy for the attitude to “AI safety” at Chinese companies, is that at first, it will be comparable to the attitude at Meta. What I mean by this: Microsoft works with OpenAI, and Google works with Anthropic, so they both work with organizations that at least talk about the danger of AI takeover, alongside more mundane concerns. But as far as I can tell, Meta does not officially acknowledge AI takeover as a real risk at all. The closest thing to an official Meta policy on the risk of AI takeover, is Yann LeCun on Twitter, telling Eliezer that it’s a fantasy.
I found an article from the “National Business Daily”, from the start of this April, in which a few Chinese academics comment on the petition calling for a 6-month pause on advanced AI. They say things like: GPT-4 just does what humans tell it to do; self-awareness is the crucial threshold, and GPT-4 is nowhere near self-awareness; and even one who says that the human level of intelligence is like “the speed of light” for Turing-machine IQ, a threshold that cannot be passed… Again, I actually find that rather similar to how western researchers react to questions like, can AI surpass us, and what will happen if it does? Unlike more mundane questions of computer science, there’s no consensus of verified knowledge that can reliably answer those questions for us, so people just fall back on their individual intuitions and private theories.
Nonetheless, AI is fast-moving and I think that, as Chinese systems approach the performance of GPT-3 and GPT-4, it will unavoidably dawn on some of the people involved, that this is potentially creating autonomous intelligent beings that can equal or surpass any human; and so they will start to take public positions on what that means, the desirability of it, the inevitability of it, and so on. I can, for example, imagine a vigorous public debate over the creation of artificial persons, with some saying, just don’t do it at all, others saying, they should have the rights of a citizen, still others saying, we should enforce Asimov laws and not feel bad about doing so, and so on.