For me, ChatGPT greatly increases the productivity of myself and my team, whereas the very modest effect of a small amount of money from my subscription I find very unlikely to be seriously furthering the acceleration of AI.
I suspect that the productivity of EAs generally is very valuable and if EAs benefit from the tool it is likely not a good idea for them to stop using it.
Given that there is so much less money going to AI safety than AI capabilities, I would think that a more sensible request would be that those using ChatGPT and thus funding OpenAI fund promising AI safety efforts⊠this would likely more than offset the harm caused by your funding and enable you to keep using a valuable tool. And if the benefits for you are not worth the cost of the subscription + the offset, then perhaps the benefit is not, in that case worth the harm. I would suggest that people who know more about this stuff than me recommend an AI safety fund for offsetting ChatGPT use.
how much better is chatgpt than claude, in your experience? I feel like it wouldnât be costly for me to drop down to free tier at openai but keep premium at anthropic, though I would miss the system prompt /â custom gpt features. (Iâm currently 20/âmonth at both)
Without rehashing the moral offsetting debate, I seriously doubt that there are any AI safety funding options that provide as much benefit as the harm of enabling OpenAI. This intuition comes from the fact that Open Phil funds a ton of AI safety work, so your money would only be marginal for AI safety work that falls below their funding bar, combined with my anecdotal (totally could be wrong) view that AI safety projects are more limited by manpower than by money.
This strikes me as remarkably counterintuitive, given the enormous disparity between funding between AI capabilities spending and AI safety spending. I was also under the impression that AI capabilities were not as funding-constrained.
AI companies are constrained by the risk that they might not be able to monetize their products effectively enough to recover the insane compute costs of training. As an extreme example, if everyone used free GPT but zero people were willing to pay for a subscription, then investors would become significantly less excited by AI companies, because the potential profits they would expect to recover would be lower than if people are willing to buy subscriptions at a high rate.
So I think itâs better to frame the impact of a subscription not as âyou give OAI $20â but rather âyou increase OAIâs (real and perceived) ability to monetize its products by 1/â(# of subscribers)â.
One observation here, which might not be useful: I think the people most effective at combating climate change do consume fossil fuels both directly (e.g. international flights) and indirectly (e.g. plastics in stuff they purchase). There are value too in those people that try to delineate themselves completelyâthey all play different roles. But they might try to limit their consumption. So perhaps I should not use GPT for e.g. entertainment, but only strictly for work.
Keep in mind that even if we stop our subscription, thousands of people in the supply chain of your goods will have subscriptions so you will still be indirectly funding OpenAI unless you go to the extreme length of only buying stuff from supply chains free of OpenAI.
I might well be biased here, I used to be working on climate and try to wean myself completely off fossil fuels and now I have greatly moderated/ârationalized my views.
I understand the sentiment, but for me it would be dangerously close to moral offsetting, which I am not fan of.
E.g. animal welfare activist might say âeating factory farm meat in random restaurants saves me some time, which I am using to help animalsâ. Or âeating meat is okay, because I am saving much more animals by donating to ACE recommended charities or somethingâ.
I think naive math checks out, but slightly broader conception of ethics would discourage such reasoning.
But to be more constructive, I subscribed to Antrophicâs Claude. Claude Opus should be on similar level as GPT4 and I have much more trust in the company (but I am ready to abandon them if they fail to live up my safety expectations).
But there is a lot of smaller companies that can do a lot with smaller models like Llama, like https://ââwww.phind.com/ââ, mainly targeted for coding. Companies like those donât have huge AI ambitions, they are just (very well) leveraging current technology provided by big players to make an useful product.
To be clear, I am in favor of promoting offsetting in both contexts, although the benefits of veganism in avoiding contributing to factory farming demand, increasing demand for pro-social vegan products, and sending an important moral signal make it difficult to calculate an appropriate sum. Further, I think a deontological or virtue ethics concern with killing or eating the flesh of sentient beings also naturally arises.
In the case here though, your choices cash out in terms of your effect on X and S risks re AGI. I think an appropriate offset for the funding effect is able to reverse or more than reverse your effect without moral complication.
For me, ChatGPT greatly increases the productivity of myself and my team, whereas the very modest effect of a small amount of money from my subscription I find very unlikely to be seriously furthering the acceleration of AI.
I suspect that the productivity of EAs generally is very valuable and if EAs benefit from the tool it is likely not a good idea for them to stop using it.
Given that there is so much less money going to AI safety than AI capabilities, I would think that a more sensible request would be that those using ChatGPT and thus funding OpenAI fund promising AI safety efforts⊠this would likely more than offset the harm caused by your funding and enable you to keep using a valuable tool. And if the benefits for you are not worth the cost of the subscription + the offset, then perhaps the benefit is not, in that case worth the harm. I would suggest that people who know more about this stuff than me recommend an AI safety fund for offsetting ChatGPT use.
how much better is chatgpt than claude, in your experience? I feel like it wouldnât be costly for me to drop down to free tier at openai but keep premium at anthropic, though I would miss the system prompt /â custom gpt features. (Iâm currently 20/âmonth at both)
For the tasks I use it for (mainly writing help), Claude Opus is often better than GPT-4
I honestly donât have much experience other than using GPT4, which I have found to be very helpful.
Without rehashing the moral offsetting debate, I seriously doubt that there are any AI safety funding options that provide as much benefit as the harm of enabling OpenAI. This intuition comes from the fact that Open Phil funds a ton of AI safety work, so your money would only be marginal for AI safety work that falls below their funding bar, combined with my anecdotal (totally could be wrong) view that AI safety projects are more limited by manpower than by money.
This strikes me as remarkably counterintuitive, given the enormous disparity between funding between AI capabilities spending and AI safety spending. I was also under the impression that AI capabilities were not as funding-constrained.
AI companies are constrained by the risk that they might not be able to monetize their products effectively enough to recover the insane compute costs of training. As an extreme example, if everyone used free GPT but zero people were willing to pay for a subscription, then investors would become significantly less excited by AI companies, because the potential profits they would expect to recover would be lower than if people are willing to buy subscriptions at a high rate.
So I think itâs better to frame the impact of a subscription not as âyou give OAI $20â but rather âyou increase OAIâs (real and perceived) ability to monetize its products by 1/â(# of subscribers)â.
Fair enough.
I still suspect that you may be underestimating marginal AI Safety funding opportunities.
One observation here, which might not be useful: I think the people most effective at combating climate change do consume fossil fuels both directly (e.g. international flights) and indirectly (e.g. plastics in stuff they purchase). There are value too in those people that try to delineate themselves completelyâthey all play different roles. But they might try to limit their consumption. So perhaps I should not use GPT for e.g. entertainment, but only strictly for work.
Keep in mind that even if we stop our subscription, thousands of people in the supply chain of your goods will have subscriptions so you will still be indirectly funding OpenAI unless you go to the extreme length of only buying stuff from supply chains free of OpenAI.
I might well be biased here, I used to be working on climate and try to wean myself completely off fossil fuels and now I have greatly moderated/ârationalized my views.
I understand the sentiment, but for me it would be dangerously close to moral offsetting, which I am not fan of. E.g. animal welfare activist might say âeating factory farm meat in random restaurants saves me some time, which I am using to help animalsâ. Or âeating meat is okay, because I am saving much more animals by donating to ACE recommended charities or somethingâ.
I think naive math checks out, but slightly broader conception of ethics would discourage such reasoning.
But to be more constructive, I subscribed to Antrophicâs Claude. Claude Opus should be on similar level as GPT4 and I have much more trust in the company (but I am ready to abandon them if they fail to live up my safety expectations).
But there is a lot of smaller companies that can do a lot with smaller models like Llama, like https://ââwww.phind.com/ââ, mainly targeted for coding. Companies like those donât have huge AI ambitions, they are just (very well) leveraging current technology provided by big players to make an useful product.
To be clear, I am in favor of promoting offsetting in both contexts, although the benefits of veganism in avoiding contributing to factory farming demand, increasing demand for pro-social vegan products, and sending an important moral signal make it difficult to calculate an appropriate sum. Further, I think a deontological or virtue ethics concern with killing or eating the flesh of sentient beings also naturally arises.
In the case here though, your choices cash out in terms of your effect on X and S risks re AGI. I think an appropriate offset for the funding effect is able to reverse or more than reverse your effect without moral complication.