The Mask Comes Off: At What Price?

[-]jbash1y95

OpenAI charges headfirst to AGI, and succeeds in building it safely. [...] The world transforms, and OpenAI goes from previously unprofitable due to reinvestment to an immensely profitable company.

You need a case where OpenAI successfully builds safe AGI, which may even go on to build safe ASI, and the world gets transformed... but OpenAI's profit stream is nonexistent, effectively valueless, or captures a much smaller fraction than you'd think of whatever AGI or ASI produces.

Business profits (or businesses) might not be a thing at all in a sufficiently transformed world, and it's definitely not clear that preserving them is part of being safe.

In fact, a radical change in allocative institutions like ownership is probably the best case, because it makes no sense in the long term to allocate a huge share of the world's resources and production to people who happened to own some stock when Things Changed(TM). In a transformed-except-corporate-ownership-stays-the-same world, I don't see any reason such lottery winners' portion wouldn't increase asymptotically toward 100 percent, with nobody else getting anything at all.

Radical change is also a likely case^[1]. If an economy gets completely restructured in a really fundamental way, it's strange if the allocation system doesn't also change. That's never happened before.

Even without an overtly revolutionary restructuring, I kind of doubt "OpenAI owns everything" would fly. Maybe corporate ownership would stay exactly the same, but there'd be a 99.999995 percent tax rate.

Contingent on the perhaps unlikely safe and transformative parts coming to pass. ↩︎

[-]Thane Ruthenis1y60

In a transformed-except-corporate-ownership-stays-the-same world, I don't see any reason such lottery winners' portion wouldn't increase asymptotically toward 100 percent, with nobody else getting anything at all.

Well yeah, exactly.

Even without an overtly revolutionary restructuring, I kind of doubt "OpenAI owns everything" would fly. Maybe corporate ownership would stay exactly the same, but there'd be a 99.999995 percent tax rate.

Taxes enforced by whom?

[-]jbash1y61

Taxes enforced by whom?

Well, that's where the "safe" part comes in, isn't it?

I think a fair number of people would say that ASI/AGI can't be called "safe" if it's willing to wage war to physically take over the world on behalf of its owners, or to go around breaking laws all the time, or to thwart whatever institutions are supposed to make and enforce the laws. I'm pretty sure that even OpenAI's (present) "safety" department would have an issue if ChatGPT started saying stuff like "Sam Altman is Eternal Tax-Exempt God-King".

Personally, I go further than that. I'm not sure about "basic" AGI, but I'm pretty confident that very powerful ASI, the kind that would be capable of really total world domination, can't be called "safe" if it leaves really decisive power over anything in the hands of humans, individually or collectively, directly or via institutions. To be safe, it has to enforce its own ideas about how things should go. Otherwise the humans it empowers are probably going to send things south irretrievably fairly soon, and if they don't do so very soon they always still could, and you can't call that safe.

Yeah, that means you get exactly one chance to get "its own ideas" right, and no, I don't think that success is likely. I don't think it's technically likely to be able to "align" it to any particular set of values. I also don't think people or insitutions would make good choices about what values to give it even if they could. AND I don't think anybody can prevent it from getting built for very long. I put more hope in it being survivably unsafe (maybe because it just doesn't usually happen to care to do anything to/with humans), or on intelligence just not being that powerful, or whatever. Or even in it just luckily happening to at least do something less boring or annoying than paperclipping the universe or mass torture or whatever.

[-]RogerDearnaley1y20

Yeah, that means you get exactly one chance to get "its own ideas" right, and no, I don't think that success is likely.

Not if you built a model that does (or on reflection decides to do) value learning: then you instead get to be its research subject and interlocutor while it figures out its ideas. But yes, you do need to start the model off close enough to aligned that it converges to value learning.

[-]jbash1y30

... assuming the values you want are learnable and "convergeable" upon. "Alignment" doesn't even necessarily have a coherent meaning.

Actual humans aren't "aligned" with each other, and they may not be consistent enough that you can say they're always "aligned" with themselves. Most humans' values seem to drive them toward vaguely similar behavior in many ways... albeit with lots of very dramatic exceptions. How they articulate their values and "justify" that behavior varies even more widely than the behavior itself. Humans are frequently willing to have wars and commit various atrocities to fight against legitimately human values other than their own. Yet humans have the advantage of starting with a lot of biological commonality.

The idea that there's some shared set of values that a machine can learn that will make everybody even largely happy seems, um, naive. Even the idea that it can learn one person's values, or be engineered to try, seems really optimistic.

Anyway, even if the approach did work, that would just mean that "its own ideas" were that it had to learn about and implement your (or somebody's?) values, and also that its ideas about how to do that are sound. You still have to get that right before the first time it becomes uncontrollable. One chance, no matter how you slice it.

[-]RogerDearnaley1y20

Actual humans aren't "aligned" with each other, and they may not be consistent enough that you can say they're always "aligned" with themselves.

Completely agreed, see for example my post 3. Uploading which makes this exact point at length.

Anyway, even if the approach did work, that would just mean that "its own ideas" were that it had to learn about and implement your (or somebody's?) values, and also that its ideas about how to do that are sound. You still have to get that right before the first time it becomes uncontrollable. One chance, no matter how you slice it.

True. Or, as I put it just above:

But yes, you do need to start the model off close enough to aligned that it converges to value learning.

The point is that you now get one shot at a far simpler task: defining "your purpose as an AI is to learn about and implement the humans' collective values" is a lot more compact, and a lot easier to get right first time, than an accurate description of human values in their full large-and-fairly-fragile details. As I demonstrate in the post linked to in that quote, the former, plus its justification as being obvious and stable under reflection, can be described in exhaustive detail on a few pages of text.

As for the the model's ideas on how to do that research being sound, that's a capabilities problem: if the model is incapable of performing a significant research project when at least 80% of the answer is already in human libraries, then it's not much of an alignment risk.

[-]Noosphere891y20

I definitely agree that under the more common usage of safety that an AI doing what a human ordered in taking over the world or breaking laws for their owner would not be classified as safe, but in an AI safety context, alignment/safety does usually mean that these outcomes would be classified as safe.

My own view is that the technical problem is IMO shaping up to be a relatively easy problem, but I think that the political problems of advanced AI will probably prove a lot harder, especially in a future where humans control AIs for a long time.

[-]jbash1y20

I'm not necessarily going to argue with your characterization of how the "AI safety" field views the world. I've noticed myself that people say "maintaining human control" pretty much interchangeably with "alignment", and use both of those pretty much interchangeably with "safety". And all of the above have their own definition problems.

I think that's one of several reasons that the "AI safety" field has approximately zero chance of avoiding any of the truly catastrophic possible outcomes.

[-]Noosphere891y21

I agree that the conflation between maintaining human control and alignment and safety is a problem, and to be clear I'm not saying that the outcome of human-controlled AI taking over because someone ordered to do that is an objectively safe outcome.

I agree at present the AI safety field is poorly equipped to avoid catastrophic outcomes that don't involve extinction from uncontrolled AIs.

[-]eggsyntax1y*33

I realize this ship has sailed, but: I continue to be confused about how the non-profit board can justify giving up control. Given that their mandate^[1] says that their 'primary fiduciary duty is to humanity' and to ensure that AGI 'is used for the benefit of all', and given that more control over a for-profit company is strictly better than less control, on what grounds can they justify relinquishing that control?

[EDIT: I realize that in reality they're just handing over control because Altman wants it, and they've been selected in part for willingness to give Altman what he wants. But it still seems like they need a justification, for public consumption and to avoid accusations of violating their charter and fiduciary duty.]

Am I just being insufficiently cynical here? Does everyone tacitly recognize that the non-profit board isn't really bound by that charter and can do whatever they like? Or is there some justification that they can put forward with a straight face?

Is it maybe something like, 'We trust that OpenAI the for-profit is primarily dedicated to the general well-being of humanity, and so nothing is lost by giving up control'? (But then it seems like more control is still strictly better in case it turns out that in some shocking and unforeseeable way the for-profit later has other priorities). Or is it, 'OpenAI the for-profit is doing good in the world, and they can do much more good if they can raise more money, and there's certainly no way they could raise more money without us giving up control'?

^{^}
I'm assuming here that their charter is the same as OpenAI's charter, since I haven't been able to find a distinct non-profit charter.

[-]gwern1y105

Or is it, 'OpenAI the for-profit is doing good in the world, and they can do much more good if they can raise more money, and there's certainly no way they could raise more money without us giving up control'?

Basically, yes, that is what the argument will be. The conditionality of the current investment round is also an example of that: "we can only raise more capital on the condition that we turn ourselves into a normal (B-corp) company, unencumbered by our weird hybrid structure (designed when we thought we would need OOMs less capital than it turns out we do), and free of the exorbitant Board control provisions currently governing PPUs etc. And if we can't raise capital, we will go bust soon and will become worthless and definitely lose the AGI race, and the Board achieves none of its fiduciary goals at all. Better a quarter of a live OA than 100% of a dead one."

[-]eggsyntax1y20

Possibly too cynical, but I find myself wondering whether the conditionality was in fact engineered by OAI in order to achieve this purpose. My impression is that there are a lot of VCs shouting 'Take my money!' in the general direction of OpenAI and/or Altman who wouldn't have demanded the restructuring.

[-]gwern1y712

No, that's what I think too: they were turning down investors, even, excluding them from the upround. The conditionality was probably not necessary at all. But it does serve a valuable purpose for the inevitable lawsuit.

[-]Amalthea1y10

I believe the confusion comes from assuming the current board follows rules rather than doing whatever is most convenient.

The old board was trying to follow the rules, and the people in question were removed (technically were pressured to remove themselves).

[-]eggsyntax1y10

I agree that that's presumably the underlying reality. I should have made that clearer.

But it seems like the board would still need to create some justification for public consumption, and for avoiding accusations of violating their charter & fiduciary duty. And it's really unclear to me what that justification is.