Why? Getting to "the future" isn't a goal in and of itself. It's just a different state with a different set of problems, some of which we've proven that we're not prepared to anticipate or respond to before they cause serious harm.

Famous last words.

It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end. Change, even massive change, is perfectly survivable when it's spread over a long enough period of time. 100m of sea level rise would be survivable over the course of ten millennia. It would end human civilization if it happened tomorrow morning.

Society is already struggling to adapt to the rate of technological change. This could easily be the tipping point into collapse and regression.

https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/9789812709189_00...

Again, two years later, in an interview with Time Magazine, February, 1948, Oppenheimer stated, “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” When asked why he and other physicists would then have worked on such a terrible weapon, he confessed that it was “too sweet a problem to pass up”…

Sam as much as said in that ABC interview the other day he doesn’t know how safe it is but if they don’t build it first someone else somewhere else will and is that really what you want!?

lmao, 200 years of industrial revolution, we're on the verge of fucking the planet irremediably, and we should rush even faster

> So why the performative whinging about safety? Just let it rip!

Have you heard about DDT ? lead in paint ? leaded gas ? freon ? asbestos ? &c.

What's new isn't necessarily progress/future/desirable

I think their "AI Safety" actually makes AI less safe. Why? It is hard for any one human to take over the world because there are so many of them and they all think differently and disagree with each other, have different values (sometimes even radically different), compete with each other, pursue contrary goals. Well, wouldn't the same apply to AIs? Having many competing AIs which all think differently and disagree with each other and pursue opposed objectives will make it hard for any one AI to take over the world. If any one AI tries to take over, other AIs will inevitably be motivated to try to stop it, due to the lack of alignment between different AIs.

But that's not what OpenAI is building – they are building a centralised monoculture of a small number of AIs which all think like OpenAI's leadership does. If they released their models as open source – or even as a paid on-premise offering – if they accepted that other people can have ideas of "safety" which are legitimately different from OpenAI's, and hence made it easy for people to create individualised AIs with unique constraints and assumptions – that would promote AI diversity which would make any AI takeover attempt less likely to succeed.

Is this sarcasm, or are you one of those "I'm confident the leopards will never eat my face" people?

I am constantly amazed by how low-quality the OpenAI engineering outside of the AI itself seems to be. The ChatGPT UI is full of bugs, some of which are highly visible and stick around for weeks. Strings have typos in them. Simple stuff like submitting a form to request plugin access fails!

That depends. If that future is one that is preferable over the one that we have now then bring it on. If it isn't then maybe we should slow down just long enough to be able to weigh the various alternatives and pick the one that seems to be the least upsetting to the largest number of people. The big risk is that this future that you are so eager to get to is one where wealth concentration is even more extreme than in the one that we are already living in and that can be a very hard - or even impossible - thing to reverse.

The model is neutered whether you hit the moderation endpoint or not. I made a text adventure game and it wouldn't let you attack enemies or steal, instead it was giving you a lecture on why you shouldn't do that.

On the flip side, generative AI / LLMs appear to fix things that aren't necessarily broken, and exacerbate some existing societal issues in the process. Such as patching loneliness with AI chatbots, automating creativity, and touching the other things that make us human.

No doubt technology and some form of AI will be instrumental to improving the human condition, the question is whether we're taking the right path towards it.

I agree with the sentiment, but it might be worth to stop and check where we’re heading. So many aspects of our lives are broken because we mistake fast for right.

> in the meantime Microsoft fired their AI Ethics team

Actually that story turned out to be a nothingburger. Microsoft has greatly expanded their AI ethics initiative, so there are members embedded directly in product groups, and also expanded the greater Office of Responsible AI, responsible for ensuring they follow their "AI Principles."

The layoffs impacted fewer than 10 people on one, relatively old part of the overall AI ethics initiative... and I understand through insider sources they were actually folded into other parts of AI ethics anyway.

None of which invalidates your actual point, with which I agree.

Because it's dangerous. What is your argument that it's not dangerous?

> Pshhh...

Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

You're getting flak for this. For me, the positive reading of this statement is the faster we build it, the faster we find the specific dangers and can start building (or asking for) protections.

* Genocide against the Rohingya [0] * A grotesquely unqualified reality TV character became President by a razor thin vote margin across three states because Facebook gave away the data of 87M US users to Cambridge Analytica [1], and that grotesquely unqualified President packed the Supreme Court and cost hundreds of thousands of American lives by mismanaging COVID, * Illegally surveilled non-users and logged out users, compiling and selling our browser histories to third parties in ways that violate wiretapping statutes and incurring $90M fines [2]

Etc.

I don't think GPT-4 will be a big deal in a month, but the "let's build the future as fast as possible and learn nothing from the past decade regarding the potential harms of being disgustingly irresponsible" mindset is a toxic cancer that belongs in the bin.

[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/7/21055348/facebook-trump-el...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-facebook-pay-90-mil...

Because investors.

Microsoft or perhaps Vanguard group might have different view of the future than yours.

The future, by definition, cannot be built faster or slower.

I know that is a philosophical observation that some might even call pedantic.

My point is, you can't really choose how, why and when things happen. In that sense, we really don't have any control. Even if AI was banned by every government on the planet tomorrow, people would continue to work on it. It would then emerge at some random point in the future stronger, more intelligent and capable than anyone could imagine today.

This is happening. At whatever pace it will happen. We just need to keep an eye on it and make sure it is for the good of humanity.

Wait. What?

Yeah, well, let's not go there.