Thank you for writing this up. I agree with just about everything said.
HiroSakuraba
Karma: 104
The majority of my response is in reducing our systems exposure vulnerabilities. As a believer in the power of strong cryptography no matter the intelligence involved, I am going to explain the value of removing or spinning down of the NSA/CIA program of back-doors, zero day exploits, and intentional cryptographic weaknesses that have been introduced into our hardware and software infrastructure.
Do you still hold this belief?
Language is one defining aspect of intelligence in general and human intelligence in particular. That an AGI wouldn’t utilize the capability of LLM’s doesn’t seem credible. The cross modal use cases for visual perception improvements (self-supervised labeling, pixel level segmentation, scene interpretation, casual inference) can be seen in recent ICLR/CVPR papers. The creation of github.com/google/BIG-bench should lend some credence that many leading institutions see a path forward with LLM’s.
If current trends hold, then large language models will be a pillar in creating AGI; which seems uncontroversial. I think one can then argue that after ignoring the circus around sentience means we should focus on the new current capabilities: reasoning, and intricate knowledge of how humans think and communicate. From that perspective there is a now a much stronger argument for manipulation. Outwitting humans prior to having human level intelligence is a major coup. PaLM’s ability to explain a joke and reason it’s way to understanding the collective human psyche is as impressive to me as Alphafold.
The goal posts have been moved on the Turing test and it’s important to point that out in any debate. Those in the liberal A.I. bias community have to at least acknowledge the particular danger of these LLM models that can reason positions. Naysayers need to have it thrown in their face that these lesser non-sentient, neural networks trained on a collection of words will eventually out debate them.
It is bizarre watching people like him and Gary Marcus embarrass themselves. It’s like watching Boomers saying they’ll never see another shooter as good as Larry Bird, all while Steph Curry is blasting through every NBA record of note.
As autonomous agents become more widespread, the risk becomes more obvious. Dyson and Tesla will be pumping out androids in 8 years. Starlink will provide the bandwidth to control any internet connected IoT device. Security Zero day back doors are discovered every month, that don’t even include the intentional nation state added ones. I personally thought the wake-up call would happen with the deployment of Ghost Drones (not fully autonomous but easily could be). Max Tegmark’s #banslaughterbots campaign is going nowhere as drones will continue to show combat effectiveness. At this point, the proverbial water is going to be near boiling and many people will still say “Sauna doesn’t have enough jets.”
Is anyone at MIRI or Anthropic creating diagnostic tools for monitoring neural networks? Something that could analyze for when a system has bit-flip errors versus errors of logic, and eventually evidence of deception.
It’s unfortunate we couldn’t have a Sword of Damocles deadman switch in case of AGI led demise. A world ending asteroid positioned to go off in case of “all humans falling over dead at the same time.” At least that would spare the Milky Way and Andromeda possible future civilizations. A radio beacon warning about building intelligent systems would be beneficial as well. “Don’t be this stupid” written in the glowing embers of our solar system.
An AGI could aquire a few tons of radioactive cobalt and disperse micro granules into the stratosphere in general and over populated areas in specific. Youtube videos describe various forms of this “dirty bomb” concept. That could plausibly kill most humanity over the course of a few months. I doubt an AGI would ever go for the particular scheme as bit flips are more likely to occur in the presence of radiation.
I agree with this line of thought regarding iterative developments of proto-AGI via careful bootstrapping. Humans will be inadequate for monitoring progress of skills. Hopefully, we’ll have a slew of diagnostic of narrow minded neural networks whose sole purpose is to tease out relevant details of the proto-super human intellect. What I can’t wrap my head around is whether super (or sub) human level intelligence requires consciousness. If consciousness is required, then is the world worse or better for it? Is an agent with the rich experience of fears, hopes, joys more or less likely to be built? Do reward functions reliably grow into feelings, which lead to emotional experiences? If they do, then perhaps an evolving intelligence wouldn’t always be as alien as we currently imagine it.
Recently this paper has discovered a prompt that can unlock a form of reasoning process for large language models (LLM). https://paperswithcode.com/paper/large-language-models-are-zero-shot-reasoners. These models are used for natural language processing and typically use a transformer architecture (https://paperswithcode.com/paper/the-annotated-transformer).
“Let’s think step by step” style prompts seems to unlock the ability for text generation that can give logically consistent answers to questions that have been out of the reach of most A.I. neural networks.
This might present an opportunity to test out ethical or moral questions on future LLMs that are multi-modal. Theorem proving might be particularly useful for MIRI type solutions. I am imagining a process where one could get answers to ethical questions, and use that feed back to create transparent teacher/critic learning paradigm. A dynamic interrogation where the A.I. could show its language AND math for why and how it came to its answers.
I believe a proto AGI like GATO likely will use the transformer architecture and this information could be used to structure better alignment tools. Perhaps train something that could help with utility functions.
It’s too bad we couldn’t just have the proverbial box be an isolated simulation and have you brain interface into it. The A.I. keeps winning in the Matrix, and afterwards we just reset it until we see improvements in alignment.
I think it’s possible the nutritional diet improved during this time as well. Additional vitamins and minerals at critical developmental stages are shown to be a standard deviation above average. https://www.adelaide.edu.au/news/news55161.html Another aspect in regards to the genetic diseases is that those sphingolipid issues involves electric signaling. Imagine a copper wire without a protective sheath. Not only does the signal degrade, it’s also slower. https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/myelin-a-specialized-membrane-for-cell-communication-14367205/ A healthy, richer diet could finally take advantage of the Jewish overly abundant myelin development. Leading to literally faster thinking: https://www.npr.org/2009/03/20/102169531/smart-people-really-do-think-faster#:~:text=The%20smarter%20the%20person%2C%20the%20faster%20information%20zips%20around%20the,participants%20took%20standard%20IQ%20tests.
OpenAI delivering an iterative update rather than a revolutionary one has lengthened many people’s timelines. My take is that this incentivizes many more players into trying for the frontier. Xai’s Grok has gone from non-existent in 2022 to a leading model. The rollout pace of improvements to the newest version of Grok are far more frequent than other leading companies. Nvidia has also recently begun releasing open larger source models as well as the accompanyin datasets. Meta is another player that is now all-in. The failure of Llama and moderate updates by OpenAI likely pushed Zuckerberg into realizing that his favored relentless A/B testing at scale could work. Twenty-nine billion for new datacenters and huge payout for top minds is like a beacon for sovereign wealth / hedge funds to notice that the science fiction reality is now here. When the prize is up for grabs much more captial will be thrown into the arena than if the winner was a foregone conclusion.
So, my timelines have shortened due to market sentiment conditions and dawning realizations rather than benchmarks improving. While tech stocks may fall, bubbles may burst, and benchmarks could stagnate; I still believe the very idea of taking the lead in AGI trumps all.