Will Aldred comments on FLI open letter: Pause giant AI experiments

Will Aldred 30 Mar 2023 14:35 UTC
15 points
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Scott Aaronson, a prominent quantum computing professor who’s spent the last year working on alignment at OpenAI, has just written a response to this FLI open letter and to Yudkowsky’s TIME piece: “If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason”.
I don’t agree with everything Scott has written here, but I found these parts interesting:
People might be surprised about the diversity of opinion about these issues within OpenAI, by how many there have discussed or even forcefully advocated slowing down.
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Why six months? Why not six weeks or six years? [...] With the “why six months?” question, I confess that I was deeply confused, until I heard a dear friend and colleague in academic AI, one who’s long been skeptical of AI-doom scenarios, explain why he signed the open letter. He said: look, we all started writing research papers about the safety issues with ChatGPT; then our work became obsolete when OpenAI released GPT-4 just a few months later. So now we’re writing papers about GPT-4. Will we again have to throw our work away when OpenAI releases GPT-5? I realized that, while six months might not suffice to save human civilization, it’s just enough for the more immediate concern of getting papers into academic AI conferences.
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Look: while I’ve spent multiple posts explaining how I part ways from the Orthodox Yudkowskyan position, I do find that position intellectually consistent, with conclusions that follow neatly from premises. The Orthodox, in particular, can straightforwardly answer all four of my questions above [...]
On the other hand, I’m deeply confused by the people who signed the open letter, even though they continue to downplay or even ridicule GPT’s abilities, as well as the “sensationalist” predictions of an AI apocalypse. I’d feel less confused if such people came out and argued explicitly: “yes, we should also have paused the rapid improvement of printing presses to avert Europe’s religious wars. Yes, we should’ve paused the scaling of radio transmitters to prevent the rise of Hitler. Yes, we should’ve paused the race for ever-faster home Internet to prevent the election of Donald Trump. And yes, we should’ve trusted our governments to manage these pauses, to foresee brand-new technologies’ likely harms and take appropriate actions to mitigate them.”