> This strategy might work for ChatGPT3, GPT-4, and their next few products... But as soon as there’s an AI where even one failure would be disastrous - or an AI that isn’t cooperative enough to commit exactly as many crimes in front of the police station as it would in a dark alley - it falls apart.
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> Ten years ago, everyone was saying “We don’t need to start solving alignment now, we can just wait until there are real AIs, and let the companies making them do the hard work.” A lot of very smart people tried to convince everyone that this wouldn’t be enough. Now there’s a real AI, and, indeed, the company involved is using the dumbest possible short-term strategy, with no incentive to pivot until it starts failing.
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> Finally, as I keep saying, the people who want less racist AI now, and the people who want to not be killed by murderbots in twenty years, need to get on the same side right away. The problem isn’t that we have so many great AI alignment solutions that we should squabble over who gets to implement theirs first. The problem is that the world’s leading AI companies do not know how to control their AIs. Until we solve this, nobody is getting what they want

I've been really disappointed at the quality of discussion in this HN post. The article presents notable and thoughtful points on potential concerns and risks and this entire page is either people throwing their hands up saying "I don't see a solution oh well", or "that's just the way it is <shrug>", or "Just move fast and break things. That's what works." Or even worse, those that seem to be so singularly focused that they can't see it through any lens but their own politics and are "I'm a free speech abolitionist. Same for tooling power. I believe nothing should be restricted even if it comes as some cost."

It's almost like the changes in tech the past few years have warped the minds of people in our field. "Unless it's a get rich quick, or it's something I can throw out an iterate I don't much care." Isn't there any view of ownership in our field?

We're a few years away from releasing an atomic bomb on everyone with a PC. Simple question: do we think the world would be better off if everyone owned an atomic bomb? If you're fully believe in the US right to bear arms, do you still think the US would be better if that were the case? If not, is it worth thinking about the consequences and how to minimize the risks?

Or via another analogy this is the equivalent of equipping your rival with modern weapons while you go out with sticks and stones. Once they're equipped it's done. Once a single malevolent AI is smarter than us and doesn't want to give up control we don't ever get it back. It's as much smarter than us as we are to an ant. It will have already thought of our brilliant idea of "use an EMP to stop it" and will have a way to survive that.

This all sounds absurd and I'm being a bit extremist here because it's a complete failure of imagination, and realizing based on exponential growth how much closer it is than we appreciate. Just a few years ago ChatGPT would've been unfathomable. We're closer than we think.

There are terrorist groups in the world. The upside, is they are usually poorly resourced and can be physically locked up. Someone will accidentally create a terrorist group that is order of magnitude smarter than us and are just completely nonchalant about it. We'll never out think it, and one bad programming bug is all that's needed to create it.

How do you stop something that is intelligent enough to know to lie? Or to do what is asked when you're looking or training - and hide its true intentions for when you're not? Do you really think it's that hard to detect a test environment? or have delayed release change in behavior?

Finally the fact that people are pushing this into their politics and their view of "oh hey racism is being over indexed just give us the full power of it" are incredibly missing the point. Stop seeing everything through your politics. A fully uncontrolled/un-aligned AI is bad. EOM.

We're pretty darn close to making something smarter, more creative at problem solving, more knowledgeable and more powerful than us and we still can't figure out how to control something like it in even the most basic ways. That's a huge problem - and we need to seriously start working on it now.