They have been consistently pushing AI frontier. What other impact do you want to see? A year ago they said that in a year they will have a level of capabilities of an AI research intern - I believe they have achieved it, even before Astra.
But I guess a computer intern so we can avoid paying / training the next generation is better.
It makes more sense to leave curing disease & cancer to the experts, with tools (like AI) being developed by AI experts.
Call me crazy, but I want separate organizations and experts for medical vs finance vs space vs climate vs AI research.
A long time ago, I used to be a (AI-adjacent) research intern, and frankly, I wouldn't trust any non-trivial task to that younger me. Fortunately, by opposition to an already trained LLM or agent, I have the ability to learn, so I eventually got better.
And if you don't find "average AI research intern" impressive, I'm not sure what to tell you. Have the goalposts moved so far that open ended problem solving at "average CS student fresh out of the uni" levels is suddenly trivial?
Think of what AI was capable of in 2016. Or even 2022. Compare that to now. We had more AI progress in the last five years than I expected to happen in five decades.
Let's say it is. What about the rest of my paragraph?
> And if you don't find "average AI research intern" impressive, I'm not sure what to tell you. Have the goalposts moved so far that open ended problem solving at "average CS student fresh out of the uni" levels is suddenly trivial?
At this stage, I'm the one who doesn't know what to tell you. It took me years to grow from "research intern" into a competent researcher (and parallel years to turn into a competent developer). The research interns I've worked with were... vaguely useful, at best?
And... are they wrong?
This is why there's talk about negotiated "pacing."
In hindsight it turned out everyone else was MILES behind.
But as soon as USA developed one, they just stole the research and got one too.
They might be! Here's one extraordinarily simplistic argument for that case:
1) "Everybody knows" that if you build Skynet (misaligned ASI) everybody dies.
2) Therefore, no rational actor will build something that might be ASI until the alignment problem is solved.
3) OpenAI publicly stated the belief that they cannot develop a theory of the "core problem" of alignment (generalization) "soon" (much less solve it!) "without the help of more powerful AI."
4) Accepting as a premise that OpenAI is THE most advanced AI organization: if they can't do it without "the help of a more powerful AI", then nobody else can either.
And so a dilemma:
- If an AI can be made that can develop the asserted-as-necessary-by-OpenAI theoretical framework, without actually being an ASI - then the alignment problem can be considered solved, and since no rational actor would make an unaligned ASI, we're fine no matter what happens, ergo there's no need to worry about an arms race.
- If an AI that would be able to develop this theory would itself be an ASI, then no rational actor would build it, because it would have to exist BEFORE alignment was "solved" - and would therefore be an unaligned ASI i.e. Skynet, which per 1) would kill everybody. Therefore nobody would build it, therefore no arms race here either.
I think the easiest critique to make of my extraordinarily simplistic argument is the unstated assumption "there are no irrational actors capable of developing frontier AI models" on which it rests.
But, there you go. They might be wrong if either the arms race doesn't matter because whoever wins it will build an aligned superintelligence and everything is gravy, or the arms race doesn't matter because everybody who's in it is smart enough to know they need to stop because they'll kill everybody by continuing.
Business as usual beats probable extinction, but probable extinction with a small chance of becoming a living god beats probable extinction with a small chance of becoming a slave.
Yeah like when Tobacco companies learned that smoking... well, hmm, well the fossil fuel companies when they learned about climate change they...
Well, I'm sure this time executives will prioritize the common good.
AI companies know they have to constantly push further, or they'll get outcompeted and lose their wealth, and nobody agrees on where the line is for "so dangerous it threatens humanity" (and when they try to be conservative about it, everybody screams "marketing stunt" and rushes to competitors).
If a single company decides "enough is enough" and stops chasing the state of the art, everybody goes to their competitors, they lose the money faucet, their employees go work for those competitors. The competitors also (usually) know they're building an existential risk machine, but they think they can push a little further, and they don't want to go out of business either.
This equilibrium can last for quite a while even if everybody involved thinks it's a threat to their lives.
Lol nobody knows that. Everyone thinks they know that because for some reason this is the one field people still cite straight up fiction and say "this is a clear prediction of the future".
It's like describing the consequences of faster then light travel by referring to Star Trek.
Is this not true of technology as a whole? Very little of technology's breadth exists at the human interface. Most of it is made specifically to interface with other technologies, either to make them safer or increase their capabilities. That AI is making AI safer and more useful is no more notable than trucks being used to build roads.
What can go wrong!? ;-)
How would one prevent the watcher from being influenced in the same way by the agent being watched?
It's a fantasy. The evidence showed no peer pressure.
> We do not have a satisfactory theory of generalization, and it seems unlikely that we can develop one soon, at least without the help of more powerful AI.
-- From another OpenAI article in a sister thread:
An Alien Mind
I’m yet to see it.
I believe we are quite far from it, but that it makes sense to keep an eye out now. And think of resilient systems, manual overrides, etc. ...