“Is it true that OpenAI has claimed that they aren’t making anything dangerous and aren’t likely to do so in the future? Where have they said this?”
Related > AFAICT they’ve also never said “We’re aiming to make the thing that has a substantial chance of causing the end of humanity”. I think that is a far more important point.
There are two obvious ways to be dishonest: tell a lie or not tell the truth. This falls into the latter category.
As our systems get closer to AGI, we are becoming increasingly cautious with the creation and deployment of our models. Our decisions will require much more caution than society usually applies to new technologies, and more caution than many users would like. Some people in the AI field think the risks of AGI (and successor systems) are fictitious; we would be delighted if they turn out to be right, but we are going to operate as if these risks are existential.
At some point, the balance between the upsides and downsides of deployments (such as empowering malicious actors, creating social and economic disruptions, and accelerating an unsafe race) could shift, in which case we would significantly change our plans around continuous deployment.
[...]
The first AGI will be just a point along the continuum of intelligence. We think it’s likely that progress will continue from there, possibly sustaining the rate of progress we’ve seen over the past decade for a long period of time. If this is true, the world could become extremely different from how it is today, and the risks could be extraordinary. A misaligned superintelligent AGI could cause grievous harm to the world; an autocratic regime with a decisive superintelligence lead could do that too.
[...]
Successfully transitioning to a world with superintelligence is perhaps the most important—and hopeful, and scary—project in human history. Success is far from guaranteed, and the stakes (boundless downside and boundless upside) will hopefully unite all of us.
The “Planning for AGI & Beyond” doc seems to me to be heavily inspired by a few other people at OpenAI at the time, mainly the safety team, and I’m nervous those people have less influence now.
At the bottom, it says:
Thanks to Brian Chesky, Paul Christiano, Jack Clark, Holden Karnofsky, Tasha McCauley, Nate Soares, Kevin Scott, Brad Smith, Helen Toner, Allan Dafoe, and the OpenAI team for reviewing drafts of this.
Since then, Tasha and Helen have been fired off the board, and I’m guessing relations have soured with others listed.
Sam seemed to oversell the relationship with this acknowledgement, so I don’t think we should read much into the other names except literally “they were asked to review drafts”.
sigh… Part of me wants to spend a bunch of time trying to determine which of the following might apply here:
1. This is what Sam really believes. He wrote it himself. He pinged these people for advice. He continues to believe it. 2. This is something that Sam quickly said because he felt pressured by others. This could either be direct pressure (they asked for this), or indirect (he thought they would like him more if he did this) 3. Someone else wrote this, then Sam put his name on it, and barely noticed it.
But at the same time, given that Sam has, what seems to me, like a long track record of insincerity anyway, I don’t feel very optimistic about easily being able to judge this.
At the time I thought that Nate feeling the need to post and clarify about what actually happened was a pretty strong indication that Sam was using this opportunity to pretend they are on better terms with these folks. (Since I think he otherwise never talks to Nate/Eliezer/MIRI? I could be wrong.)
But yeah it could be that someone who still had influence thought this post was important to run by this set of people. (I consider this less likely.)
I don’t think Sam would have barely noticed. It sounds like he was the one who asked for feedback.
In any case this event seems like a minor thing, though imo a helpful part of the gestalt picture.
“Is it true that OpenAI has claimed that they aren’t making anything dangerous and aren’t likely to do so in the future? Where have they said this?”
Related > AFAICT they’ve also never said “We’re aiming to make the thing that has a substantial chance of causing the end of humanity”. I think that is a far more important point.
There are two obvious ways to be dishonest: tell a lie or not tell the truth. This falls into the latter category.
OpenAI’s “Planning for AGI & Beyond” blog post includes the following:
Altman signed the CAIS AI Safety Statement, which reads:
In 2015 he wrote a blog post which begins:
I have bad feelings about a lot of this.
The “Planning for AGI & Beyond” doc seems to me to be heavily inspired by a few other people at OpenAI at the time, mainly the safety team, and I’m nervous those people have less influence now.
At the bottom, it says:
Thanks to Brian Chesky, Paul Christiano, Jack Clark, Holden Karnofsky, Tasha McCauley, Nate Soares, Kevin Scott, Brad Smith, Helen Toner, Allan Dafoe, and the OpenAI team for reviewing drafts of this.
Since then, Tasha and Helen have been fired off the board, and I’m guessing relations have soured with others listed.
Fwiw the relationship with Nate seemed mostly that Sam asked for comments, Nate gave some, and there was no back and forth. See Nate’s post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uxnjXBwr79uxLkifG/comments-on-openai-s-planning-for-agi-and-beyond
Sam seemed to oversell the relationship with this acknowledgement, so I don’t think we should read much into the other names except literally “they were asked to review drafts”.
sigh… Part of me wants to spend a bunch of time trying to determine which of the following might apply here:
1. This is what Sam really believes. He wrote it himself. He pinged these people for advice. He continues to believe it.
2. This is something that Sam quickly said because he felt pressured by others. This could either be direct pressure (they asked for this), or indirect (he thought they would like him more if he did this)
3. Someone else wrote this, then Sam put his name on it, and barely noticed it.
But at the same time, given that Sam has, what seems to me, like a long track record of insincerity anyway, I don’t feel very optimistic about easily being able to judge this.
These are good points!
At the time I thought that Nate feeling the need to post and clarify about what actually happened was a pretty strong indication that Sam was using this opportunity to pretend they are on better terms with these folks. (Since I think he otherwise never talks to Nate/Eliezer/MIRI? I could be wrong.)
But yeah it could be that someone who still had influence thought this post was important to run by this set of people. (I consider this less likely.)
I don’t think Sam would have barely noticed. It sounds like he was the one who asked for feedback.
In any case this event seems like a minor thing, though imo a helpful part of the gestalt picture.