- Big Tech is lying about some AI risks to shut down competition, a Google Brain cofounder has said.
- Andrew Ng told The Australian Financial Review that tech leaders hoped to trigger strict regulation.
- Some large tech companies didn’t want to compete with open source, he added.
Oh, you mean it wasn’t just concidence that the moment OpenAI, Google and MS were in position they started caving to oversight and claiming that any further development should be licensed by the government?
I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
I mean, I get that many people were just freaking out about it and it’s easy to lose track, but they were not even a little bit subtle about it.
Exactly. This is classic strategy for first movers. Once you hold the market, use legislation to dig your moat.
AI is going to change quite a bit but I couldn’t wrap my head around the end of the world stuff.
It won’t end the world because AI doesn’t work the way that Hollywood portrays it.
No AI has ever been shown to have self agency, if it’s not given instructions it’ll just sit there. Even a human child would attempt to leave room if left alone in there.
So the real risk is not that and AI will decide to destroy humanity it’s that a human will tell the AI to destroy their enemies.
But then you just get back around to mutually assured destruction, if you tell your self redesigning thinking weapon to attack me I’ll tell my self redesigning thinking weapon to attack you.
I’m an AI researcher at one of the world’s top universities on the topic. While you are correct that no AI has demonstrated self-agency, it doesn’t mean that it won’t imitate such actions.
These days, when people think AI, they mostly are referring to Language Models as these are what most people will interact with. A language model is trained on a corpus of documents. In the event of Large Language Models like ChatGPT, they are trained on just about any written document in existence. This includes Hollywood scripts and short stories concerning sentient AI.
If put in the right starting conditions by a user, any language model will start to behave as if it were sentient, imitating the training data from its corpus. This could have serious consequences if not protected against.
Imagine 9-11 with prions. MAD depends on everyone being rational self-interested without a very alien value system. It really only works in the case you got like three governments pointing nukes at each other. It doesn’t work if the group doesn’t care about tomorrow or thinks that they are going into heaven or is convinced that they can’t be killed or any other of the deranged reasons that motivate people to do these types of acts.
AI doesn’t work the way that Hollywood portrays it
AI does, but we haven’t developed AI and have no idea how to. The thing everyone calls AI today is just really good ML.
At some point ML (machine learning) becomes undistinguishable from BL (biological learning).
Whether there is any actual “intelligence” involved in either, hasn’t been proven yet.
The real risk is that humans will use AIs to asses the risk/benefits of starting a war… and an AI will give them the “go ahead” without considering mutually assured destruction from everyone else doing exactly the same.
It’s not that AIs will get super-human, it’s that humans will blindly trust limited AIs and exterminate each other.
At worst it’ll be a similar impact to social media and big data.
Try asking the big players what they think of heavily limiting and regulating THOSE fields.
They went all “oh, yeah, we’re totally seeing the robot apocalypse happening right here” the moment open source alternatives started to pop up because at that point regulatory barriers would lock those out while they remain safely grandfathered in. The official releases were straight up claiming only they knew how to do this without making Skynet, it was absurd.
Which, to be clear, doesn’t mean regulation isn’t needed. On all of the above. Just that the threat is not apocalyptic and keeping the tech in the hands of these few big corpos is absolutely not a fix.
Some days it looks to be a three-way race between AI, climate change, and nuclear weapons proliferation to see who wipes out humanity first.
But on closer inspection, you see that humans are playing all three sides, and still we are losing.
AI, climate change, and nuclear weapons proliferation
One of those is not like the others. Nuclear weapons can wipe out humanity at any minute right now. Climate change has been starting the job of wiping out humanity for a while now. When and how is AI going to wipe out humanity?
This is not a criticism directed at you, by the way. It’s just a frustration that I keep hearing about AI being a threat to humanity and it just sounds like a far-fetched idea. It almost seems like it’s being used as a way to distract away from much more critically pressing issues like the myriad of environmental issues that we are already deep into, not just climate change. I wonder who would want to distract from those? Oil companies would definitely be number 1 in the list of suspects.
Agreed. This kind of debate is about as pointless as declaring self-driving cars are coming out in 5 years. The tech is way too far behind right now, and it’s not useful to even talk about it until 50 years from now.
For fuck’s sake, just because a chatbot can pretend it’s sentient doesn’t mean it actually is sentient.
Some large tech companies didn’t want to compete with open source, he added.
Here. Here’s the real lead. Google has been scared of AI open source because they can’t profit off of freely available tools. Now, they want to change the narrative, so that the government steps in regulates their competition. Of course, their highly-paid lobbyists will by right there to write plenty of loopholes and exceptions to make sure only the closed-source corpos come out on top.
Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. Oldest fucking trick in the book.
When and how is AI going to wipe out humanity?
With nuclear weapons and climate change.
The two things experts said shouldn’t be done with AI, allow open internet access and teaching them to code, have been blithely ignored already. It’s just a matter of time.
I don’t think the oil companies are behind these articles. That is very much a wheels within wheels type thinking that corporations don’t generally invest in. It is easier to just deny climate change instead of getting everyone distracted by something else.
You’re probably right, but I just wonder where all this AI panic is coming from. There was a story on the Washington Post a few weeks back saying that millions are being invested into university groups that are studying the risks of AI. It just seems that something is afoot that doesn’t look like just a natural reaction or overreaction. Perhaps this story itself explains it: the Big Tech companies trying to tamp down competition from startups.
It is coming from ratings and click based economy. Panic sells so they sell panic. No one is going to click an article titled “everything mostly fine”.
52-yo American dude here, no longer worried about nuclear apocalypse. Been there, done that, ain’t seeing it. If y’all think geopolitics are fucked up now, 🎵"You should have seen it in color."🎶
We can close a time or three, but no one’s insane enough to push the button, and no ONE can push the button. Even Putin in his desperation will be stymied by the people who actually have to push MULTIPLE buttons.
AI? IDGAF. Computers have power sources and plugs. Absolutely disastrous events could unfold, but enough people pulling enough plugs will kill any AI insurgency. Look at Terminator 2 and ask yourself why the AI had to have autonomous machines to win. I could take out the neighborhood power supply with a couple of suitable guns. I’m sure smarter people than I could shut down DCs.
Climate change? Sorry kids, it’s too late and you are righteously fucked. Not saying we shouldn’t go full force on mitigation efforts, but y’all haven’t seen the changes I’ve seen in 50 years. Winters are clearly warmer, summers hotter, and I just got back from my camp in the swamp. The swamp is dry for the first time in 4 years.
And here’s one you might not have personally experienced; The insects are disappearing. I could write an essay on bugs alone. And don’t start me on wildlife populations.
Nukes are becoming a problem, because China is ramping up production. It will be just natural for India to do the same. From a two-way MAD situation, we’re getting into a 4-way Mexican standoff. That’s… really bad.
There won’t be an “AI insurgency”, just enough people plugging in plugs for some dumb AIs to tell them they can win the standoff. Let’s hope they don’t also put AIs in charge of the multiple nuclear launch buttons… or let the people in charge check with their own, like on a smartphone, dumb AIs telling them to go ahead.
Climate change is clearly a done thing, unless we get something like unlimited fusion power to start some terraforming projects (seems unlikely).
You have a point with insects, but I think that’s just linked to climate change; populations will migrate wherever they get something to eat, even if that turns out to be Antarctica.
Then the errant gamma ray burst sneaks in for the kill.
An ai will detonate nuclear weapons to change the climate into an eternal winter. Problem solved. All the win at the same time. No loosers… oh. Wait, no…
I’m sitting here hoping that they all block each other out because they are all trying to fit through the door at the same time.
three-way race between AI, climate change, and nuclear weapons proliferation
Bold of you to assume that people behind maximizing profits (high frequency trading bot developers) and behind weapons proliferation (wargames strategy simulation planners) are not using AI… or haven’t been using it for well over a decade… or won’t keep developing AIs to blindly optimize for their limited goals.
First StarCraft AI competition was held in 2010, think about that.
I will appeal to my previous ignorance. I had no idea that AI saw that much usage over 10 years ago!
We used to run “machine learning”, “neural networks”, over 25 years ago. The “AI” term has always been kind of a sci-fi thing, somewhere between a buzzword, a moving target, and undefined since we lack a fixed comprehensive definition of “intelligence” to begin with. The limiting factors of the models have always been the number of neurons one could run in real-time, and the availability of good training data sets. Both have increased over a million-fold in that time, progressively turning more and more previously untractable problems into solvable ones to the point where the results are equal or better and/or faster than what people can do.
Right now, there are supercomputers out there orders of magnitude more capable than what runs stuff like ChatGPT, DallE, or all the public facing "AI"s that made the news. Bigger ones keep getting built… and memristors are coming, to become a game changer the moment they can be integrated anywhere near current GPU/CPU levels.
For starters, a supercomputer with the equivalent neural network processing power of a human brain, is expected for 2024… that’s next year… but it won’t be able to “run a human brain”, because we lack the data on how “all of” the human brain works. It will likely become obsoleted by ones with several orders of magnitude more processing power, way before we can simulate an actual human brain… but the question will be: do we need to? Does a neural network need to mimick a human brain, in order to surpass it? A calculator already does, and it doesn’t use a neural network at all. At what point the integration of what size and kind of neural network, with what kind of “classical” computer, can start running circles around any human… or all of humanity taken together?
And of course we’ll still have to deal with the issue of dumb humans telling/trusting dumb "AI"s to do things way over their heads… but I’m afraid any attempt at “regulation”, is going to end up like the case with “international law”: those who want, obey it; those who should, DGAF.
Even if all tech giants with all lawmakers got to agree on the strictest of regulations imaginable, like giving all "AI"s the treatment of weapons of mass destruction, there is a snowflake’s chance in hell that any military in the world will care about any of it.
Why do you think Sam Altman is always using FUD to push for more AI restrictions? He already got his data collection, so he wants to make sure "“Open”"AI is the only game in town and prevent any future competition from obtaining the same amount of data they collected.
Still, I have to give Zuck his credit here, the existence of open models like LLaMa 2 that can be fine-tuned and ran locally has really put a damper on OpenAI’s plans.
“Ng said the idea that AI could wipe out humanity could lead to policy proposals that require licensing of AI”
Otherwise stated: Pay us to overregulate and we’ll protect you from extinction. A Mafia perspective.
Right?!?!! Lines are obvious. Only if they thought they could get away with it, and they might, actually, but also what if?!?!
they don’t want to copete with open source. Yeah that is not new.
Lol how? No seriously, HOW exactly would AI ‘wipe out humanity’???
All this fear mongering bollocks is laughable at this point, or it should be. Seriously there is no logical pathway to human extinction by using AI and these people need to put the comic books down.
The only risks AI pose are to traditional working patterns, which have been always exploited to further a numbers game between Billionaires (and their assets).These people are not scared about losing their livelihoods, but losing the ability to control yours. Something that makes life easier and more efficient requiring less work? Time to crack out the whips I suppose?
Working in a corporate environment for 10+ years I can say I’ve never seen a case where large productivity gains turned into the same people producing even more. It’s always fewer people doing the same amount of work. Desired outputs are driven less by efficiency and more by demand.
Let’s say Ford found a way to produce F150s twice as fast. They’re not going to produce twice as many, they’ll produce the same amount and find a way to pocket the savings without benefiting workers or consumers at all. That’s actually what they’re obligated to do, appease shareholders first.
I mean I don’t want an AI to do what I do as a job. They don’t have to pay the AI and food and housing, in a lot of places, aren’t seen as a human right, but a privilege you are allowed if you have money to buy it.
Just wait and see
Remindmebot! 10 years
When Google’s annual revenue from its search engine is estimated to be around $70 to $80 billion, no wonder there is great concern from big tech about the numerous A.I tools out there, that would spell an end to that fire hose of sweet sweet monetization.
Well it’s not like that money will just go away someone’s still going to be monetizing everything.
All the biggest tech/IT consulting firms that used to hire engineering college freshers by the millions each year have declared they either won’t be recruiting at all this month, or will only be recruiting for senior positions. If AI were to wipe out humanity it’ll probably be through unemployment-related poverty thanks to our incompetent policymakers.
A technological revolution which disrupts the current capitalist standard through the elimination of labor scarcity, ultimately rendering the capital class obsolete isn’t far off from Marx’s original speculative endgame for historical materialism. All the other stuff beyond that is kind of wishy washy, but the original point about technological determinism has some legs imo
Enforce privacy friendliness & open source through regulation and all three of those points are likely mood.
These dudes are convinced AI is gonna wipe us out despite the fact it can’t even figure out the right number of fingers to give us.
We’re so far away from this being a problem that it never will be, because climate change will have killed us all long before the machines have a chance to.
People may argue that AI is quickly improving on this but it will take a massive leap between a perfect diffusion model an Artificial General Intelligence. Fundamentally, those aren’t even the same kind of thing.
But AI as it is today can already cause a lot of harm simply by taking over jobs that people need to make a living, on the lack of something like UBI.
Some people say this kind of Skynet fearmongering is nothing but another kind of marketing for AI investors. It makes its developments seem much more powerful than they actually are.
I’m not saying it’s not a problem that we will have to deal with, I’m just saying the apocalypse is gonna happen before that, and for different reasons.
Even with the terrible climate-based disasters our recklessness will bring to our future, humanity won’t face complete extermination. I don’t think we get to escape our future issues so easily.
That’s the point, they don’t believe it’s gonna wipe us out, it’s just a convenient story for them
File this under duuuuuuhhhhh
The tech companies did not invent the AI risk concept. Culturally, it emerged out of 1990s futurism.
Karel Čapek wrote about it in 1920
Yeah, but I mean the AI risk stuff that people like Steve Omohundro and Eliezer Yudkowsky write about.
The Google Brain cofounder is not Big Tech?
Imo, Andrew Ng is actually a cool guy. He started coursera and deeplearning.ai to teach ppl about machine/deep learning. Also, he does a lot of stuff at Stanford.
I wouldn’t put him in the corporate shill camp.
I took several of his classes. At the very least he’s an excellent instructor.
He really is. He’s one of those rare instructors that can take the very complex and intricate topics and break them down into something that you can digest as a student, while still giving you room to learn and experiment yourself. In essence, an actual master at his craft.
I also agree with the comment that he doesn’t come across as the corporate shill type, much more like a guy that just really loves ML/AI and wants to spread that knowledge.
Same, I went from kind of understanding most of the concepts to grokking a lot of it pretty well. He’s super good at explaining things.
There was a lot of controversy about him exploiting the people working for him and he publicly doubled down on admitting the need to overwork them.
Edito: here is a source where they warn the new hires about 70hours per week being normal unfortunately i did not find another source, it’s from xitter: https://twitter.com/betaorbust/status/908890982136942592
This looks like it’s from the aifund thing he is a part of, but it seems like they took that part out. I have never worked for of those companies so idk 🤷♂️.
meanwhile, capitalism is setting the world on fire
The way capitalism may use current AI to cut off a lot of people from any chance at a livelihood is much more plausible and immediately concerning than any machine apocalypse.
Not just that, but also that.
