Will they really be determined by OpenAI? So far what Altman has accomplished with OpenAI is to push a lot of existing research tech out into the open world (with improvements, of course.) This has in turn forced the hands of the original developers at Google and Meta to push their own research out into the open world and further step up their internal efforts. And that in turn creates fierce pressure on OpenAI to move even faster, and take even fewer precautions.
Metaphorically, there was a huge pile of rocks perched at the top of a hill. Altman's push got the rocks rolling, but there's really no guarantee that anyone will have much say in where they end up.
Oh, and also imagine that nobody really knows what plutonium is, there is just one startup who had figured out how to turn uranium to plutonium.
Also that understanding of uranium for now is at the level when it was just discovered. So people are still handling it by bare hands. And trying to sell shiny uranium toys.
That’s quite the understatement, isn’t it? Neither Google nor Meta have been able to demonstrate something to the public that resonates even close the the altitude that OpenAI has.
But more critically, chat.openai.com is more of a tech demo than a serious product. So one can optimize the UX for "chatty and engaging" without being too concerned for accuracy. Bing, on the other hand, is intended to be a search product. It's noteworthy that adjusting the same model to provide a more accurate search experience seems to have snuffed out a lot of the magic.
There's still a kind of wilful blindness about AI really means. Essentially it's a machine that can mimic human behaviours more convincingly than humans can.
This seems like a paradox, but it really isn't. It's the inevitable end point of automatons like Eliza, chess, go, and LLMs.
Once you have a machine that can automate and mimic social, political, cultural, and personal interactions, that's it - that's the political singularity.
And that's true even the machine isn't completely reliable and bug free.
Because neither are humans. In fact humans seem predisposed to follow flawed sociopathic charismatic leaders, as long as they trigger the right kinds of emotional reactions.
Automate that, and you have a serious problem.
And of course you don't need sentience or intent for this. Emergent programmed automated behaviour will do the job just fine.
The machine can mimic, but it is still completely reactive in its nature. ChatGPT doesn't do anything of its own accord, it merely responds. It has no opinion, no agenda, and no real knowledge or understanding. All it can do is attempt to respond like a human would, but it cannot reason on its own. Ask it about its views on a political issue, and it won't think about its stance and the reasons for taking it, but it will just produce what it has trained an answer to that question ought to look like.
The panic about the machine takeover is completely overblown, driven by people who don't really understand that these machines are and how they work. We are still far, far away from points where AI would be capable of actually making political decisions.
Isn't this impossible by definition? Nothing can be more convincingly human than humans, or else it would be something else.
Perhaps you mean mimic charismatic or intelligent humans more than most, or the average, human?
> Once you have a machine that can automate and mimic social, political, cultural, and personal interactions, that's it - that's the political singularity.
Do you mean online only? Because I imagine we're still quite a ways from physical machines convincingly mimicking humans IRL.
> And that's true even the machine isn't completely reliable and bug free.
If the machine makes inhuman mistakes the humans will likely notice and adapt.
Why isn’t it theoretically possible for an AI to pass the Turing test so hard that more than 50% of the time humans think the AI is the real human? That would effectively be more convincingly human (to humans) than humans are.
Well, yeah, that's the point of regulation: to limit corporate behavior. There are plenty of other highly-regulated industries in the US; why shouldn't AI be one of them?
Delegated councils (like the FDA, FTC, FCC, etc.) and courts can be used to make decisions about edge and individual cases, and do so much closer to real time than Congress can act.
Governments regularly successfully define things much more vague than "is this AI?"
This is a necessary evil in the case of an industry like aviation where there's a massive and immediate risk to human life if you get it wrong.
If you see AGI as life threatening (in a physical sense) it's an understandable stance to take. However if AGI is threatening moreso in a social sense I don't think concentrating the power behind it is going to be a societal good.
I genuinely believe we as a society will get fucked by corporations for everything we can give if we don't either radically socially reform for incoming AGI, or have competitive open developments in the area not beholden to corporate interests.
For my money, the latter seems at least possible.
I'm not sure that AI is going to look that different. Is there any reason to believe that if OpenAI wins the majority share, that any competition is going to be able to dethrone them?
We could imagine a world where the US government broke up big tech companies in the late 2000s or early 2010s, and it sure seems like that world would be in a much better position today, due exactly to increased competition. Instead we have a bunch of big companies that don't take risks or release ambitious new products because they're too busy trying to defend their moats.
Aside from the issue of AGI being extremely difficult to capture in a proper definition, what leads you to believe this? Recent developments like LLMs and stable diffusion are impressive technology but I don't view them as remotely relevant to achieving AGI.
I agree government is useful and needed sometimes. But laws are slow, blunt instruments. Governments can’t micromanage every decision companies make. And if they tried, they would hobble the companies involved.
The government moves slowly. When AGI is invented (and I’m increasingly convinced it’ll happen in the next decade or two), what comes next will not be decided by a creaky federal government full of old people who don’t understand the technology. The immediate implications will be decided by Sam Altman and his team. I hope on behalf of us all that they’re up to the challenge.