I see a lot of people dismissing the agent foundations era and I disagree with it. Studying agents seems even more important to me than ever now that they are sampled from a latent space of possible agents within the black box of LLMs.
To throw out a crux, I agree that if we have missed opportunities for progress towards beneficial AI by trying to avoid advancing harmful capabilities, that would be a bad thing, but my internal sense of the world suggests to me that harmful capabilities have been advanced more than opportunities have been missed. But unfortunately, that seems like a difficult claim to try to study in any sort of unbiased, objective way, one way or the other.
I mean if you’re counting “the world” as opposed to the neurotic demographic I’m discussing then obviously capabilities have advanced more than the MIRI outlook would like. But the relevant people basically never cared about that in the first place and are therefore kind of irrelevant to what I’m saying.
I guess I’m unclear on what people you are considering the relevant neurotic demographic, and since I feel that “agent foundations” is a pointer to a bunch of concepts which it would be very good if we could develop further, I find myself getting confused at your use of the phrase “agent foundations era”.
For a worldview check, I am currently much more concerned about the risks of “advancing capabilities” than I am about missed opportunities. We may be coming at this from different perspectives. I’m also getting some hostile soldier mindset vibe from you. My apologies if I am misreading you. Unfortunately, I am in the position of thinking that people promoting the advancement of AI capabilities are indeed promoting increased global catastrophic risk, which I oppose. So if I am falling into the soldier mindset, I likewise am sorry.
I see a lot of people dismissing the agent foundations era and I disagree with it. Studying agents seems even more important to me than ever now that they are sampled from a latent space of possible agents within the black box of LLMs.
To throw out a crux, I agree that if we have missed opportunities for progress towards beneficial AI by trying to avoid advancing harmful capabilities, that would be a bad thing, but my internal sense of the world suggests to me that harmful capabilities have been advanced more than opportunities have been missed. But unfortunately, that seems like a difficult claim to try to study in any sort of unbiased, objective way, one way or the other.
I mean if you’re counting “the world” as opposed to the neurotic demographic I’m discussing then obviously capabilities have advanced more than the MIRI outlook would like. But the relevant people basically never cared about that in the first place and are therefore kind of irrelevant to what I’m saying.
Thanks for the reply.
I guess I’m unclear on what people you are considering the relevant neurotic demographic, and since I feel that “agent foundations” is a pointer to a bunch of concepts which it would be very good if we could develop further, I find myself getting confused at your use of the phrase “agent foundations era”.
For a worldview check, I am currently much more concerned about the risks of “advancing capabilities” than I am about missed opportunities. We may be coming at this from different perspectives. I’m also getting some hostile soldier mindset vibe from you. My apologies if I am misreading you. Unfortunately, I am in the position of thinking that people promoting the advancement of AI capabilities are indeed promoting increased global catastrophic risk, which I oppose. So if I am falling into the soldier mindset, I likewise am sorry.