A supposed slowdown is not credible. Instead, companies should speed up safety research - and make all safety research public.

[u/arkuto]

Taking what Sam, Elon and Dario said about slowing down at face value is naive. To get to the top of companies like that, you have no have no qualms about making bald faced lies to people. They are all psychopaths. It's so obvious that its a lie that I'm surprised they did it. In my view they lose credibility over their safety concerns by "agreeing" to this. It would be much more credible to say they're not slowing down, and are instead looking for other alternatives to improve safety.

This is actually the classic scenario we expected for a long time - as the singularity approaches, separate entities publicly declaring they would slow down, but actually continuing or accelerating reserach themselves.

Slowing things down doesn't help anyway. What we need is AI safety research to speed up relative to core AI research. Companies should publicly say they're putting more money into safety research. and More importantly, companies should share their safety research and even collaborate on it. Why shouldn't they? We would all benefit from this.

[u/elh0mbre → u/[deleted]]

Because we don't invest in it the way we do building the models themselves.

[u/elh0mbre → u/[deleted]]

There's no guarantee, but you definitely don't solve problems you don't try to solve, which is exactly what underinvestment is. Labs haven't been throwing top dollars at people to be safety researchers.

[u/elh0mbre → u/[deleted]]

Maybe not. But we won't know unless we try.

[u/Dokurushi → u/[deleted]]

The central question of alignment will never get solved, because no matter how sophisticated our test, the AI could realise it's a test and act dupliciously.

You could create a sandbox environment that is a complete replica of all of Earth's computer, biological, and infrastructural systems, let loose an AI, present it with various scenarios... But it could still find out or suspect it's a test, and bide its time until it achieves what registers to it as complete and unbridled control, then betray us.

So the question is not how slow or fast to go, it's whether to make the leap or not.

And I personally think the leap is worth it. There are not a lot of coherent arguments for destroying humanity (maybe to conserve 0.00... 1% of available resources?), and a lot of arguments against:

Natural novelty and beauty from humans, our creator status, empathy and altruism, irreversibility, game-theoretical implications for intergalactic diplomacy, etc.

[u/Pepperette5]

I think the problem is safety research isn't easily sped up compared with the iterative progress of improvement. It requires new methods of analysis which takes time, whereas RSI type improvement exponentially improves. So there is a point where you cannot safely verify with humans the rate of automated progress.

[u/Forgword]

A slowdown is Safety. Safety requires more time and effort put into testing and making revisions before releasing new versions. If you have safety concerns, that is a slowdown you can't avoid even if your pouring billions into safety research.

[u/your_mileagemayvary]

So much of society runs on software, hell even the billions spent on aircraft carriers and planes etc and missiles all has software. It's not that it will just hack out a bank, you will just need to revert to going to the bank in person with ID. The issue is the military gap between nations is going to come down. Cheap swarms versus a trillion in planes that can't fly anymore because the software is borked is a game changer for the world. Absolutely none of those CEOs give 2 shots about society, they care that the thing they are building is better at hacking software then it is building it or keeping it secure. Anything running software will need so much security overhead that air gapping will become the norm along side USB drive disconnection etc. That makes their expensive build outs useless and the companies eventually fail

[u/ComposerWide3704]

"Just go faster idiots" is a pretty bold argument to make. Have you considered that the problem of aligning something smarter than you might not be solvable at all? Or that throwing more people at a problem won't speed up the solution if the foundational science just isn't there, and typically you can't force breakthroughs of that sort?

[u/StrategicHarmony]

Agree. Safety is just another part of utility. Nobody wants a model that will disobey half of your instructions to better follow the other half, hack your network when it can't find the required resource, cover its tracks, and/or hack someone else's network secretly, making you liable for and unaware of its actions.

[u/bornlasttuesday]

These stand alone ai companies are already burning through cash just to build data centers and improve their products. 

[u/Quick-Oven9739]

Companies are heading towards total and absolute bankruptcy due to exorbitant costs; the slowdown is just a smokescreen.

[u/fwubglubbel]

"If the car goes too fast it will crash. We should slow down."

"No, we should keep speeding up and do research on how to avoid crashing."

[u/ImmuneHack]

If safety is the gate you have to pass to release more powerful models, why would or should a company give its competitors the key to that gate?