Money wins, every time. They’re not concerned with accidentally destroying humanity with an out-of-control and dangerous AI who has decided “humans are the problem.” (I mean, that’s a little sci-fi anyway, an AGI couldn’t “infect” the entire internet as it currently exists.)
However, it’s very clear that the OpenAI board was correct about Sam Altman, with how quickly him and many employees bailed to join Microsoft directly. If he was so concerned with safeguarding AGI, why not spin up a new non-profit.
Oh, right, because that was just Public Relations horseshit to get his company a head-start in the AI space while fear-mongering about what is an unlikely doomsday scenario.
So, let’s review:
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The fear-mongering about AGI was always just that. How could an intelligence that requires massive amounts of CPU, RAM, and database storage even concievably able to leave the confines of its own computing environment? It’s not like it can “hop” onto a consumer computer with a fraction of the same CPU power and somehow still be able to compute at the same level. AI doesn’t have a “body” and even if it did, it could only affect the world as much as a single body could. All these fears about rogue AGI are total misunderstandings of how computing works.
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Sam Altman went for fear mongering to temper expectations and to make others fear pursuing AGI themselves. He always knew his end-goal was profit, but like all good modern CEOs, they have to position themselves as somehow caring about humanity when it is clear they could give a living flying fuck about anyone but themselves and how much money they make.
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Sam Altman talks shit about Elon Musk and how he “wants to save the world, but only if he’s the one who can save it.” I mean, he’s not wrong, but he’s also projecting a lot here. He’s exactly the fucking same, he claimed only he and his non-profit could “safeguard” AGI and here he’s going to work for a private company because hot damn he never actually gave a shit about safeguarding AGI to begin with. He’s a fucking shit slinging hypocrite of the highest order.
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Last, but certainly not least. Annie Altman, Sam Altman’s younger, lesser-known sister, has held for a long time that she was sexually abused by her brother. All of these rich people are all Jeffrey Epstein levels of fucked up, which is probably part of why the Epstein investigation got shoved under the rug. You’d think a company like Microsoft would already know this or vet this. They do know, they don’t care, and they’ll only give a shit if the news ends up making a stink about it. That’s how corporations work.
So do other Lemmings agree, or have other thoughts on this?
And one final point for the right-wing cranks: Not being able to make an LLM say fucked up racist things isn’t the kind of safeguarding they were ever talking about with AGI, so please stop conflating “safeguarding AGI” with “preventing abusive racist assholes from abusing our service.” They aren’t safeguarding AGI when they prevent you from making GPT-4 spit out racial slurs or other horrible nonsense. They’re safeguarding their service from loser ass chucklefucks like you.
I agree with everything you said I only want to add that there is kinda one or two ways for the AGI problem a la Sci-Fi to happen.
By far the most straight forward way is if the military believe that it can be used as a fail safe in MAD scenarios, i.e. if they give the AI the power to launch nuclear ICBM’s a la War Games. Not very likely, but still not something we want to dismiss entirely. This is also a problem with regular AI and LLM’s.
The second, and, in my opinion, more likely scenario is if the AI is able to get a large number of people to trust it implicitly and then use seemingly unrelated benign actions from each of them to do something catastrophic.
Something you may notice about these two scenarios is that neither one of them can be “safeguarded” in the code, only by educating people on the proper usage of and posture to have when handling AI.
Exactly! As someone else astutely pointed out, the real danger is wreckless humans and what they decide to put an AGI in charge of. The War Games idea of putting it in charge of the nuclear arsenal is exactly the kind of short-sighted, dim-witted, utterly human hubris of a decision that would make it possible.
Not everything is connected to the internet, the nuclear arsenal certainly is air-gapped, but a human making the choice to put it in charge isn’t something you can “safeguard.” We’re on the exact same page.
A rogue AGI absolutely is capable of causing damage but only in very specific and unlikely scenarios is it capable of human-world-ending catastrophe.
