I didn’t think I’d sit and watch this whole thing but it is a very interesting conversation. Near the end the author says something like “I know people I’m the industry who work in these labs who act like they’ve seen a ghost. They come home from work and struggle with the work they do and ask me what they should do. I tell them they should quit then, and then they stop asking me for advice.”
I do wonder at times if we would even believe a whistleblower should one come to light, telling us about the kind of things they do behind closed doors. We only get to see the marketable end product. The one no one can figure out how it does what it does exactly. We don’t get to see the things on the cutting room floor.
Also, its true. These models are more accurately described as grown not built. Which in a way is a strange thing to consider. Because we understand what it means to build something and to grow something. You can grow something with out understanding how it grows. You cant build something without understanding how you built it.
And when you are trying to control how things grow you sometime get things you didn’t intend to get, even if you got the things you did intend to get.
Someone promote this ensign, and get him a different coloured shirt…
These things are ordinary, their harms are ordinary. Wasted resources, polluted information streams, scams, exploitation, unregulated exposure to vulnerable people.
Even if we make a machine that does something like thinking there is no particularly reason to believe a machine that does something like thinking would be some sort of skynet. Ants do something like thinking, we do something like thinking, orange cats do something like thinking. It seems like there’s a huge spectrum of something like thinking, with often limited domains, and lots of room for stupidity. It’s just not particularly plausible that a machine would be able to usefully modify itself in some way as to create a runaway feedback cycle, nor that a sort of intelligence that conveys godlike powers of charmisma and foresight is possible, even ignoring practical concerns like: manipulating the physical world.