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0 pointsben_w1y ago0 comments

We just had a pandemic made from a non-living virus that was basically trying to eat us. To riff off the quote:

The virus does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms which it can use for something else.

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Non-living isn't a great way to describe a virus because they certainly become part of a living system once they get in your cells.

Models don't do that though, only if you run them in a loop with tools they can call, so mostly don't do that.

ben_wOP1y ago

> Models don't do that though, only if you run them in a loop with tools they can call, so mostly don't do that.

That's also a description of DNA and RNA. They're chemicals, not magic.

And there's loads of people all too eager to put any and every AI they find into such an environment[0], then connect it to a robot body[1], or connect it to the internet[2], just to see what happens. Or have an AI or algorithm design T-shirts[3] for them or trade stocks[4][5][6] for them because they don't stop and think about how this might go wrong.

[0] https://community.openai.com/t/chaosgpt-an-ai-that-seeks-to-...

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/group/autonomous-sy...

[2] https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/02/amazon-wi...

[4] https://intellectia.ai/blog/chatgpt-for-stock-trading

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_trading

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007–2008_financial_crisis

astrange1y ago

Those can certainly cause real problems. I just feel that to find the solutions to those problems, we have to start with real concrete issues and find the abstractions from there.

I don't think "AI safety" is the right abstraction because it came from the idea that AI would start off as an imaginary agent living in a computer that we'd teach stuff to. Whereas what we actually have is a giant pretrained blob that (unreliably) emits text when you run other text through it.

Constrained decoding (like forcing the answer to conform to JSON grammar) is an example of a real solution, and past that it's mostly the same as other software security.

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astrange1y ago

Non-living isn't a great way to describe a virus because they certainly become part of a living system once they get in your cells.

Models don't do that though, only if you run them in a loop with tools they can call, so mostly don't do that.

ben_wOP1y ago

> Models don't do that though, only if you run them in a loop with tools they can call, so mostly don't do that.

That's also a description of DNA and RNA. They're chemicals, not magic.

[0] https://community.openai.com/t/chaosgpt-an-ai-that-seeks-to-...

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/group/autonomous-sy...

[2] https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/02/amazon-wi...

[4] https://intellectia.ai/blog/chatgpt-for-stock-trading

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_trading

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007–2008_financial_crisis

astrange1y ago

Those can certainly cause real problems. I just feel that to find the solutions to those problems, we have to start with real concrete issues and find the abstractions from there.

Constrained decoding (like forcing the answer to conform to JSON grammar) is an example of a real solution, and past that it's mostly the same as other software security.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse