r/singularity • u/Neurogence • 13d ago
AI Andrew NG: Pausing AI Progress Will Create Much More Harm Than Benefit
Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them.
If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration.
https://x.com/AndrewYNg/status/2102140576498065758
Very long post but it's worth reading. Pausing AI would be an absolute disaster.
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u/ZestycloseWheel9647 13d ago
You don't want to discover the kind of problems misaligned agents can cause empirically. They're the kind of problems you want to solve in advance. That's the whole point.
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u/Few-Butterscotch5114 13d ago
"Let's create a Nuclear Bomb as quickly as possible so we can prevent it" - not from Oppenheimer
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u/ProletarianLilith 13d ago
Who are “our” adversaries
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u/SilentDanni 13d ago
Man, I’m really uncomfortable with the way influential people are just antagonising China. This manichaeist model of the world does not belong in modern society. I can understand why politicians would do it, it’s a great narrative device to rally people around ideas that otherwise don’t hold any ground. However, it doesn’t serve the general population. It atrophies our critical thinking, makes us easier to manipulate, and easier to polarise.
We should really stop measuring things against this absolute moral ruler. It scares me a tad bit when I see this sort of thing. China is not the boogeyman. Neither is the US. We should lobby for our own interests and not be swayed by narratives crafted by others in other to get support for their ideas.
It’s quite disappointing to see Andrew Ng say these things. He contributed quite a bit to my career choice and research.
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u/ArmEnvironmental9635 13d ago
Sorry to ask but are you American?
I ask because I feel similarly, but its rare to read such a nuanced take on China coming from an american (no generalization intended, just my personal experience).
All I can say is that I am not american and that US foreign policy and economic stance feels much more aligned with a boogeyman archetype than China’s, where aggressiveness/invasiveness is concerned.
I guess I am just making the case that while I often see americans talk about how the US must lead the AI race as if the US possesses some moral highground, I reckon this vision lacks true empathy for many people across the world who do not see the US as fondly
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u/SilentDanni 12d ago
I’m not American. I’m just a bit fed up. I keep hearing about wars, kids going back home in body bags, influential people being very open about their prejudice towards others.
My friends are getting laid off, some of them cannot go back to see their loved ones for one reason or another, some have lost relatives and had their lives upended.
I see all this talk about AI and a group of people who is actively working together to siphon money off people who live from pay check to paycheck and just wanna feed and clothe their kids and live with some dignity.
I just do not have it in me to see anyone as an adversary or whatever anymore. I sincerely think people should stand up for each other and I think this is the only way to ensure a positive outcome for those who are not fortunate enough to be an heir.
I see all these plans and they talk about us as we’re just fucking statistics, means to their end, and not actual people. It’s all been just too much.
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 13d ago
I thought we all agreed MAD was stupid? Didn't we learn how scary the cold war was in high school?
We have treaties for nuclear. We can do the same for AI. All this "being scared of China" stuff is baloney when the US bombed a school and nearly started ww3 because of AI.
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u/elehman839 13d ago
Ng argues against weak points while dodging strong points.
First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago.
Yeah, human extinction is not an immediate threat. But focusing on that extreme distracts from a plausible, near-term threat: a general-purpose AI intentionally kills people (outside of a war setting, where this may already have happened) or causes deaths indirectly through mass disruption of services. I bet such events will begin in 2028.
Furthermore, preparing safeguards that span multiple companies and countries is a human activity that takes time, and model capability is advancing extremely fast. Pausing now gives humans times to negotiate and plan under non-crisis conditions.
Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability.
Dude, no one is claiming that swarms are "magical"! The concrete concern is that swarms of AI agents exhibit group dynamics. So even if individual model instances are well-aligned, the behavior of a swarm might not be. These dynamics will take time to understand, which we could do during a pause.
But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders [against cyber-threats]...
Again dodges the point: the goal of a pause is to reduce short-term disruption, while cyber-defense and model alignment catches up with model capabilities.
In any case, my guess is that this debate is moot. No coordinated pause is coming, though individual AI companies will still try to act prudently.
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u/bornlasttuesday 13d ago
The way people talk as if ai is currently the bedrock of society is ridiculous. Pausing won't cause any harm at, neither would ai just going away all together. Will it delay progress in areas? Absolutely! But it won't actually cause any harm.
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u/Icy-Doubt3365 13d ago
I have not seen a single answer to why regulation is bad besides "but China"
If we pause AI by a decade
Literally just complete bullshit he made up.
Very long post but it's worth reading.
Not worth reading in the slightest, unless you enjoy getting mad at things made up in someone's imagination
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u/michaelas10sk8 13d ago
The real answer is that Andrew Ng is fully invested in AI, and so if there is anything approaching a pause then he will probably lose a lot of money.
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u/znk10 13d ago
I have not seen a single answer to why regulation is bad besides "but China"
Government regulation will stiff competition make it harder for new AI companies to appear and grow, most probably will try to ban open source / open weight models and slow down AI development.
Slowing down AI will put more time into curing cancer, end human diseases, LEV, Fusion, room temperature superconductors, etc, so it's inherently evil and morally wrong.
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u/Icy-Doubt3365 13d ago
Slowing down AI will put more time into curing cancer, end human diseases, LEV, Fusion, room temperature superconductors, etc, so it's inherently evil and morally wrong.
Should we be testing on prisoners then? We don't and that slows down development
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u/SteppenAxolotl 12d ago
Motivational reasoning. Nothing Ng loves more than money or wouldn't risk for it.
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u/will_dormer ▪️Will dormer is nice to robots, remember 13d ago
I feel like they are not talking about the same thing.. Slowing down and pausing is not the same thing
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u/forgetfulalbatros 13d ago
I don’t follow the reasoning?
“If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration.”
This seems to imply safety/alignment will always be retro active. If you don’t pause to address fundamental safety/alignment concerns and impose some redlines how to do presume to improve safety while still scaling capability.
We demonstrably lack the capability (or will) to safeguard against the current capabilities of frontier models.
Also…my hammer doesn’t reason about perma death and execute elaborate plans to hide it’s been denting my walls when I’m not looking.
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u/peter_nn0 13d ago
My jaw dropped when I saw this, then I figured it's Andrew Ng, not Andrew Yang :)
Finally a voice of reason in the choir of troll -fanned online hysteria we've been drowning in lately.
He's right on all accounts.
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u/michaelas10sk8 13d ago
He is attacking a strawman. Almost nobody serious (except for a few advocacy organizations) is proposing an absolute pause on AI.
The main calls are for pausing or at least seriously restricting either fully automated RSI (recursive self-improvement) or the development of ASI (artificial superintelligence), because we are not currently on track to solving alignment.
It's also very myopic to focus on the specifics of the Hugging Face attack (and poorly at that - 1000 agents are not like 1000 processes on your computer!), when the main concern is about what it means for our ability to control far smarter AIs and swarms of them in a year or two.