A guy I know, who works in one of the top ML groups, is literally less worried about superintelligence than he is about getting murdered by rationalists. That's an extreme POV. Most researchers in ML simply think that people who worry about superintelligence are uneducated cranks addled by sci fi.
I hope everyone is aware of that perception problem.
Let me be as clear as I can about this. If someone does that, I expect it will make humanity still less safe. I do not know how, but the whole point of deontological injunctions is that they prevent you from harming your interests in hard to anticipate ways.
As bad as a potential arms race is, an arms race fought by people who are scared of being murdered by the AI safety people would be much, much worse. Please, if anyone reading this is considering vigilante violence against AI researchers, don't.
The right thing to do is tell people your concerns, like I am doing, as clearly and openly as you can, and try to organize legitimate, above-board ways to fix the problem.
I may be an outlier, but I've worked at a startup company that did machine learning R&D, and which was recently acquired by a big tech company, and we did consider the issue seriously. The general feeling of the people at the startup was that, yes, somewhere down the line the superintelligence problem would eventually be a serious thing to worry about, but like, our models right now are nowhere near becoming able to recursively self-improve themselves independently of our direct supervision. Actual ML models basically need a ton of fine-tuning and engineering and are not really independent agents in any meaningful way yet.
So, no, we don't think people who worry about superintelligence are uneducated cranks... a lot of ML people do take it seriously enough that we've had casual lunch room debates about it. Rather, the reality on the ground is that right now most ML models have enough trouble figuring out relatively simple tasks like Natural Language Understanding, Machine Reading Comprehension, or Dialogue State Tracking, and none of us can imagine how solving those practical problems with say, Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning models that lack any sort of will of their ow...
This seems like a good place to point out the unilaterialist's curse. If you're thinking about taking an action that burns a commons and notice that no one else has done it yet, that's pretty good evidence that you're overestimating the benefits or underestimating the costs.
This perception problem is a big part of the reason I think we are doomed if superintelligence will soon be feasible to create.
Are you describing me? It fits to a T except my dayjob isn't ML. I post using this shared anonymous account here because in the past when I used my real name I received death threats online from LW users. In a meetup I had someone tell me to my face that if my AGI project crossed a certain level of capability, they would personally hunt me down and kill me. They were quite serious.
I was once open-minded enough to consider AI x-risk seriously. I was unconvinced, but ready to be convinced. But you know what? Any ideology that leads to making death threats against peaceful, non-violent open source programmers is not something I want to let past my mental hygiene filters.
If you, the person reading this, seriously care about AI x-risk, then please do think deeply about what causes this, and ask youself what can be done to put a stop to this behavior. Even if you haven't done so yourself, it is something about the rationalist community which causes this behavior to be expressed.
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I would be remiss without layout out my own hypothesis. I believe much of this comes directly from ruthless utilitarianism and the "shut up and multiply" mentality. It's very easy to justify murder of ...
Death threats are a serious matter and such behavior must be called out. If you really have received 3 or more death threats as you claim, you should be naming names of those who have been going around making death threats and providing documentation, as should be possible since you say at least two of them were online. (Not because the death threats are particularly likely to be acted on - I've received a number of angry death threats myself over my DNM work and they never went anywhere, as indeed >99.999% of death threats do - but because it's a serious violation of community norms, specific LW policy against 'threats against specific groups', and merely making them greatly poisons the community, sowing distrust and destroying its reputation.)
Especially since, because they are so serious, it is also serious if someone is hoaxing fake death threats and concern-trolling while hiding behind a throwaway... That sort of vague unspecific but damaging accusation is how games of telephone get started and, for example, why, 7+ years later, we still have journalists writing BS about how 'the basilisk terrified the LW community' (thanks to our industrious friends over on Ratwiki steadily...
Thanks for saying what (I assume) a lot of people were thinking privately.
I think the problem is that Elon Musk is an entrepreneur not a philosopher, so he has a bias for action, "fail fast" mentality, etc. And he's too high-status for people to feel comfortable pointing out when he's making a mistake (as in the case of OpenAI). (I'm generally an admirer of Mr. Musk, but I am really worried that the intuitions he's honed through entrepreneurship will turn out to be completely wrong for AI safety.)
I thought OpenAI was more about open sourcing deep learning algorithms and ensuring that a couple of rich companies/individuals weren't the only ones with access to the most current techniques. I could be wrong, but from what I understand OpenAI was never about AI safety issues as much as balancing power. Like, instead of building Jurassic Park safely, it let anyone grow a dinosaur in their own home.
My main problem with OpenAI is that it's one thing for them to not be focused on AI alignment, but are they even really focused on AI "safety" even in the loose sense of the word? Most of their published research has to do with tweaks and improvements to deep learning techniques that enhance their performance but do not really aid our theoretical understanding of them. (Which makes it pretty much the same as Google Brain, FAIR, and DeepMind in that regard). It even turned out that Ian Goodfellow, the discoverer of GANs and the primary researcher on adversarial attacks on deep learning systems left OpenAI and went back to Google because it turned out Google researchers were more interested than OpenAI in working on deep learning security issues...
On the $30 million grant from Open Philanthropy: I've seen it discussed on HackerNews and Reddit but not much here, and it seems like there's plenty of confusion about what's going on. After all it is quite a large amount, but OpenAI seems like it's quite well funded already. So the obvious question people have is, is this a ploy for the AI risk people to gain more control over OpenAI's research direction? And one thing I'm worrie...
The linked quote from Ian Goodfellow:
Yes, I left OpenAI at the end of February and returned to Google Brain. I enjoyed my time at OpenAI and am proud of the work my OpenAI colleagues and I accomplished. I returned to Google Brain because as time went on I found that my research focus on adversarial examples and related technologies like differential privacy saw me collaborate predominantly with colleagues at Google.
The OpenAI people I've talked to say that they're less open than the name would suggest, and are willing to do things less openly to the extent that that makes sense to them. On the other hand, Gym and Universe are in fact pretty open and I think they probably made the world slightly worse, by slightly accelerating AI progress. It's possible that this might be offset by benefits to OpenAI's reputation if they're more willing to spread safety memes as they acquire more mind share.
Your story of OpenAI is incomplete in at least one important respect: Musk was actually an early investor in DeepMind before it was acquired by Google.
Finally, what do people think about the prospects of influencing OpenAI to err more on the side of safety from the inside? It's possible people like Paul can't do much about this yet by virtue of not having acquired sufficient influence within the company, and maybe just having more people like Paul working at OpenAI could strengthen that influence enough to matter.
to buy a seat on OpenAI’s board
I wish we lived in a world where the Open Philanthropy Project page could have just said it like that, instead of having to pretend that no one knows what "initiates a partnership between" means.
Arguments for openness:
So, um, you think that the arms race is likely to be between DeepMind and OpenAI?
And not between a highly secret organization funded by the US government and another similar organization funded by the Chinese government?
I think the basic argument for OpenAI is that it is more dangerous for any one organization or world power to have an exclusive monopoly on A.I. technology, and so OpenAI is an attempt to safeguard against this possibility. Basically, it reduces the probability that someone like Alphabet/Google/Deepmind will establish an unstoppable first mover advantage and use it to dominate everyone else.
OpenAI is not really meant to solve the Friendly/Unfriendly AI problem. Rather it is meant to mitigate the dangers posed by for-profit corporations or nationalistic g...
Great post. I even worry about the emphasis on FAI, as it seems to depend on friendly superintelligent AIs effectively defending us against deliberately criminal AIs. Scott Alexander speculated:
For example, it might program a virus that will infect every computer in the world, causing them to fill their empty memory with partial copies of the superintelligence, which when networked together become full copies of the superintelligence.
But way before that, we will have humans looking to get rich programming such a virus, and you better believe they won't...
If there's anything we can do now about the risks of superintelligent AI, then OpenAI makes humanity less safe.
I feel quite strongly that people in the AI risk community are overly affected by the availability or vividness bias relating to an AI doom scenario. In this scenario some groups get into an AI arms race, build a general AI without solving the alignment problem, the AGI "fooms" and then proceeds to tile the world with paper clips. This scenario could happen, but some others could also happen:
Consider the difference between the frame of expected value/probability theory and the frame of bounded optimality/error minimization. Under the second frame the question becomes "how can I manipulate my environment such that I wind up in close proximity to the errors that I have a comparative advantage in spotting?"
I think we're far enough out from superhuman AI that we can take a long view in which OpenAI is playing an indirect rather than a direct role.
Instead of releasing specific advances or triggering an endgame arms race, I think OpenAI's biggest impacts on the far future are by advancing the pure research timeline and by affecting the culture of research. The first seems either modestly negative (less time available for other research before superhuman AI) or slightly positive (more pure research might lead to better AI designs), the second is (I think) a fairly big positive.
Best use of this big pile of money? Maybe not. Still, that's a high bar to clear.
Ugh. When I heard about this first I naively thought it was great news. Now I see it's a much harder question.
Replace AI with nuclear reactors. Today if you have time, knowledge you can actually build one in your own home. Why hasn't your home town blown yet, or better yet why didn't you do it ?
If AI development is closed what on what basis are you trusting the end project ? Are you seriously going to trust vested interests in creating a closed source safe AI ? What happens if people are actually trying to progress towards safe AI and something goes wrong because idk Murphy or something ? It's better if it's open and we keep as many eyes on it as possible.
OpenAI c...
One interesting aspect of posts like this is that they can, to some extent, be (felicitously) self-defeating.
Yep, the old story again and again... generals fighting previous wars... with a twist that in AI wars the "next" may become "previous" damn fast... exponentially fast.
Btw. I hope it´s clear now who is THE EVIL now.
I'm not exactly sure about the whole effective altruism ultimatum of "more money equals more better". Obviously it may be that the whole control problem is completely the wrong question. In my opinion, this is the case.
If there's anything we can do now about the risks of superintelligent AI, then OpenAI makes humanity less safe.
Once upon a time, some good people were worried about the possibility that humanity would figure out how to create a superintelligent AI before they figured out how to tell it what we wanted it to do. If this happened, it could lead to literally destroying humanity and nearly everything we care about. This would be very bad. So they tried to warn people about the problem, and to organize efforts to solve it.
Specifically, they called for work on aligning an AI’s goals with ours - sometimes called the value alignment problem, AI control, friendly AI, or simply AI safety - before rushing ahead to increase the power of AI.
Some other good people listened. They knew they had no relevant technical expertise, but what they did have was a lot of money. So they did the one thing they could do - throw money at the problem, giving it to trusted parties to try to solve the problem. Unfortunately, the money was used to make the problem worse. This is the story of OpenAI.
Before I go on, two qualifiers:
Before OpenAI, there was DeepMind, a for-profit venture working on "deep learning” techniques. It was widely regarded as the advanced AI research organization. If any current effort was going to produce superhuman intelligence, it was DeepMind.
Elsewhere, industrialist Elon Musk was working on more concrete (and largely successful) projects to benefit humanity, like commercially viable electric cars, solar panels cheaper than ordinary roofing, cheap spaceflight with reusable rockets, and a long-run plan for a Mars colony. When he heard the arguments people like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom were making about AI risk, he was persuaded that there was something to worry about - but he initially thought a Mars colony might save us. But when DeepMind’s head, Demis Hassabis, pointed out that this wasn't far enough to escape the reach of a true superintelligence, he decided he had to do something about it:
Hassabis, a co-founder of the mysterious London laboratory DeepMind, had come to Musk’s SpaceX rocket factory, outside Los Angeles, a few years ago. […] Musk explained that his ultimate goal at SpaceX was the most important project in the world: interplanetary colonization.
Hassabis replied that, in fact, he was working on the most important project in the world: developing artificial super-intelligence. Musk countered that this was one reason we needed to colonize Mars—so that we’ll have a bolt-hole if A.I. goes rogue and turns on humanity. Amused, Hassabis said that A.I. would simply follow humans to Mars.
[…]
Musk is not going gently. He plans on fighting this with every fiber of his carbon-based being. Musk and Altman have founded OpenAI, a billion-dollar nonprofit company, to work for safer artificial intelligence.
OpenAI’s primary strategy is to hire top AI researchers to do cutting-edge AI capacity research and publish the results, in order to ensure widespread access. Some of this involves making sure AI does what you meant it to do, which is a form of the value alignment problem mentioned above.
No one knows exactly what research will result in the creation of a general intelligence that can do anything a human can, much less a superintelligence - otherwise we’d already know how to build one. Some AI research is clearly not on the path towards superintelligence - for instance, applying known techniques to new fields. Other AI research is more general, and might plausibly be making progress towards a superintelligence. It could be that the sort of research DeepMind and OpenAI are working on is directly relevant to building a superintelligence, or it could be that their methods will tap out long before then. These are different scenarios, and need to be evaluated separately.
If OpenAI is working on things that are directly relevant to the creation of a superintelligence, then its very existence makes an arms race with DeepMind more likely. This is really bad! Moreover, sharing results openly makes it easier for other institutions or individuals, who may care less about safety, to make progress on building a superintelligence.
One thing nearly everyone thinking seriously about the AI problem agrees on, is that an arms race towards superintelligence would be very bad news. The main problem occurs in what is called a “fast takeoff” scenario. If AI progress is smooth and gradual even past the point of human-level AI, then we may have plenty of time to correct any mistakes we make. But if there’s some threshold beyond which an AI would be able to improve itself faster than we could possibly keep up with, then we only get one chance to do it right.
AI value alignment is hard, and AI capacity is likely to be easier, so anything that causes an AI team to rush makes our chances substantially worse; if they get safety even slightly wrong but get capacity right enough, we may all end up dead. But you’re worried that the other team will unleash a potentially dangerous superintelligence first, then you might be willing to skip some steps on safety to preempt them. But they, having more reason to trust themselves than you, might notice that you’re rushing ahead, get worried that your team will destroy the world, and rush their (probably safe but they’re not sure) AI into existence.
DeepMind used to be the standout AI research organization. With a comfortable lead on everyone else, they would be able to afford to take their time to check their work if they thought they were on the verge of doing something really dangerous. But OpenAI is now widely regarded as a credible close competitor. However dangerous you think DeepMind might have been in the absence of an arms race dynamic, this makes them more dangerous, not less. Moreover, by sharing their results, they are making it easier to create other close competitors to DeepMind, some of whom may not be so committed to AI safety.
We at least know that DeepMind, like OpenAI, has put some resources into safety research. What about the unknown people or organizations who might leverage AI capacity research published by OpenAI?
For more on how openly sharing technology with extreme destructive potential might be extremely harmful, see Scott Alexander’s Should AI be Open?, and Nick Bostrom’s Strategic Implications of Openness in AI Development.
Suppose OpenAI and DeepMind are largely not working on problems highly relevant to superintelligence. (Personally I consider this the more likely scenario.) By portraying short-run AI capacity work as a way to get to safe superintelligence, OpenAI’s existence diverts attention and resources from things actually focused on the problem of superintelligence value alignment, such as MIRI or FHI.
I suspect that in the long-run this will make it harder to get funding for long-run AI safety organizations. The Open Philanthropy Project just made its largest grant ever, to Open AI, to buy a seat on OpenAI’s board for Open Philanthropy Project executive director Holden Karnofsky. This is larger than their recent grants to MIRI, FHI, FLI, and the Center for Human-Compatible AI all together.
But the problem is not just money - it’s time and attention. The Open Philanthropy Project doesn’t think OpenAI is underfunded, and could do more good with the extra money. Instead, it seems to think that Holden can be a good influence on OpenAI. This means that of the time he's allocating to AI safety, a fair amount has been diverted to OpenAI.
This may also make it harder for organizations specializing in the sort of long-run AI alignment problems that don't have immediate applications to attract top talent. People who hear about AI safety research and are persuaded to look into it will have a harder time finding direct efforts to solve key long-run problems, since an organization focused on increasing short-run AI capacity will dominate AI safety's public image.
OpenAI was founded by people trying to do good, and has hired some very good and highly talented people. It seems to be doing genuinely good capacity research. To the extent to which this is not dangerously close to superintelligence, it’s better to share this sort of thing than not – they could create a huge positive externality. They could construct a fantastic public good. Making the world richer in a way that widely distributes the gains is very, very good.
Separately, many people at OpenAI seem genuinely concerned about AI safety, want to prevent disaster, and have done real work to promote long-run AI safety research. For instance, my former housemate Paul Christiano, who is one of the most careful and insightful AI safety thinkers I know of, is currently employed at OpenAI. He is still doing AI safety work – for instance, he coauthored Concrete Problems in AI Safety with, among others, Dario Amodei, another OpenAI researcher.
Unfortunately, I don’t see how those two things make sense jointly in the same organization. I’ve talked with a lot of people about this in the AI risk community, and they’ve often attempted to steelman the case for OpenAI, but I haven’t found anyone willing to claim, as their own opinion, that OpenAI as conceived was a good idea. It doesn’t make sense to anyone, if you’re worried at all about the long-run AI alignment problem.
Something very puzzling is going on here. Good people tried to spend money on addressing an important problem, but somehow the money got spent on the thing most likely to make that exact problem worse. Whatever is going on here, it seems important to understand if you want to use your money to better the world.
(Cross-posted at my personal blog.)