It’s not real an “as if”. It’s well understood that the combination of Bostrom’s Superintelligence, the Puerto Rico conference lead directly to Elon’s organizing the founding of Open AI.
I originally disagree-voted, though I changed my mind after reflecting on it just now and removed my disagree-vote. Here’s my thought process.
Musk thought that AI was going to be a huge deal in large part because of Bostrom and the AI safety community, and this contributed to Musk cofounding OpenAI when Altman and Brockman said to Musk that Hassabis couldn’t be trusted with AGI.
The Hassabis biography quoted Brockman’s 2018 email to Musk:
Put increasing effort into the safety/control problem, rather than the fig leaf you’ve noted in other institutions. It doesn’t matter who wins if everyone dies. Related to this, we need to communicate a “better red than dead” outlook — we’re trying to build safe AGI, and we’re not willing to destroy the world in a down-to-the-wire race to do so.
So the AI safety community definitely was a major influence in the creation of OpenAI.
But does that mean that it’s “as if the AI safety community created OpenAI”?
If Musk was part of the AI safety community and was acting on its behalf then sure, I think your statement would accurate.
But saying that it’s as if the AI safety community literally created OpenAI just because the AI safety community influenced its creation doesn’t seem accurate.
So was Musk acting for the AI safety community in his cofounding and funding of OpenAI?
Well, at the end of Life 3.0 (which I read this week after The Infinity Game) Tegmark tells of how he asked Musk to donate to fund FLI when it first got started and how Musk agreed to donate $10M and how Musk went on stage at MIT in 2014 to make the announcement at an AI safety event.
But of course Tegmark may have just been fundraising from Musk as a sympathetic person with money who might donate. This doesn’t mean that the rest of Musks actions related to AI were necessarily endorsed by Tegmark or the rest of the AI safety community.
But in fact, when Tegmark is painting a positive picture of AI safety community progress at the end of his book (2017 publication) one thing he says is how the nonprofit OpenAI was created with a beneficial humanitarian mission (paraphrasing from memory). That was the part of Life 3.0 that seemed to stand the test of time the worst. Tegmark in his book seemed to think OpenAI’s creation was clearly a positive, suggesting that the creation of OpenAI was in fact endorsed at the time by a significant part of the AI safety community.
Of course the AI safety community isn’t a monolith, but I now think this is enough to make your statement that it’s as if the AI safety community created OpenAI true enough in the sense that Musk could be said to have been a part of the AI safety community, cofounding OpenAI with the endorsement of other members of the AI safety community such as Tegmark.
Though to push back on this, (1) it was always the case that AI would eventually be a big deal (even though most people throughout history didn’t recognize this). And similarly, (2) in a market economy it was probably also pretty inevitable that there would eventually be multiple firms competing to create increasingly powerful AI. And (3) people see themselves as good people, so competitors to existing AI firms would presumably have said they were doing it for good reasons (e.g. to prevent a monopolist from getting all the power).
Essentially I’m trying to say that even without Bostrom or the AI safety community pre-OpenAI, it was probably the case that some competing firms to DeepMind would have sprung up. Maybe the billionaires like Musk would have had to have been pitched a different message to persuade them to cofound the new competing firm, but it probably would have happened anyways, maybe just on a different timeline.
So the upshot would be that the AI safety community helped create OpenAI, but that the help was not necessary—a company like OpenAI probably would have been created at some point regardless. The race to AGI by multiple competing firms that we are on now just seems like the default path in retrospect.
It’s not real an “as if”. It’s well understood that the combination of Bostrom’s Superintelligence, the Puerto Rico conference lead directly to Elon’s organizing the founding of Open AI.
Sure—why am I getting disagreement?
I originally disagree-voted, though I changed my mind after reflecting on it just now and removed my disagree-vote. Here’s my thought process.
Musk thought that AI was going to be a huge deal in large part because of Bostrom and the AI safety community, and this contributed to Musk cofounding OpenAI when Altman and Brockman said to Musk that Hassabis couldn’t be trusted with AGI.
The Hassabis biography quoted Brockman’s 2018 email to Musk:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5jjk4CDnj9tA7ugxr/openai-email-archives-from-musk-v-altman
So the AI safety community definitely was a major influence in the creation of OpenAI.
But does that mean that it’s “as if the AI safety community created OpenAI”?
If Musk was part of the AI safety community and was acting on its behalf then sure, I think your statement would accurate.
But saying that it’s as if the AI safety community literally created OpenAI just because the AI safety community influenced its creation doesn’t seem accurate.
So was Musk acting for the AI safety community in his cofounding and funding of OpenAI?
Well, at the end of Life 3.0 (which I read this week after The Infinity Game) Tegmark tells of how he asked Musk to donate to fund FLI when it first got started and how Musk agreed to donate $10M and how Musk went on stage at MIT in 2014 to make the announcement at an AI safety event.
But of course Tegmark may have just been fundraising from Musk as a sympathetic person with money who might donate. This doesn’t mean that the rest of Musks actions related to AI were necessarily endorsed by Tegmark or the rest of the AI safety community.
But in fact, when Tegmark is painting a positive picture of AI safety community progress at the end of his book (2017 publication) one thing he says is how the nonprofit OpenAI was created with a beneficial humanitarian mission (paraphrasing from memory). That was the part of Life 3.0 that seemed to stand the test of time the worst. Tegmark in his book seemed to think OpenAI’s creation was clearly a positive, suggesting that the creation of OpenAI was in fact endorsed at the time by a significant part of the AI safety community.
Of course the AI safety community isn’t a monolith, but I now think this is enough to make your statement that it’s as if the AI safety community created OpenAI true enough in the sense that Musk could be said to have been a part of the AI safety community, cofounding OpenAI with the endorsement of other members of the AI safety community such as Tegmark.
Though to push back on this, (1) it was always the case that AI would eventually be a big deal (even though most people throughout history didn’t recognize this). And similarly, (2) in a market economy it was probably also pretty inevitable that there would eventually be multiple firms competing to create increasingly powerful AI. And (3) people see themselves as good people, so competitors to existing AI firms would presumably have said they were doing it for good reasons (e.g. to prevent a monopolist from getting all the power).
Essentially I’m trying to say that even without Bostrom or the AI safety community pre-OpenAI, it was probably the case that some competing firms to DeepMind would have sprung up. Maybe the billionaires like Musk would have had to have been pitched a different message to persuade them to cofound the new competing firm, but it probably would have happened anyways, maybe just on a different timeline.
So the upshot would be that the AI safety community helped create OpenAI, but that the help was not necessary—a company like OpenAI probably would have been created at some point regardless. The race to AGI by multiple competing firms that we are on now just seems like the default path in retrospect.