• joe@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    58
    arrow-down
    14
    ·
    3 days ago

    Any pause will have to be a global treaty; the unfortunate reality is that we’re in an arms race now, and despite Sanders’ threats otherwise, I don’t think there is going to be much will to pause in the US while China keeps developing.

    And to be clear, I think it would be every wise to pause development and, afterwards, keep the pace slow. We know how to make “AI” more capable, but we don’t know how to make it stay aligned with human goals. The technology is useful and isn’t going anywhere, but that doesn’t mean we have to develop it as quickly as possible without regard to the real dangers it brings with it.

    • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      2 days ago

      We’re not in an arms race. That’s part of the bullshit Anthropic and like want you to believe. LLMs are not nukes. LLMs are a fad with most benefits having been to coders, presuming they were already good coders.

      25 years from now we’re either going to still be in this “arms race,” or we’ll have better clarity on how the billionaire class misled us all.

      Stopping development will do us more good than the harm of perusing a perpetual wealth transfer in the name of a fake arms race.

      Even if it were an arms race. Slowing down means you eventually speed back up in a better direction. Why would you want to be so gun ho about what’s clearly an argument for progressing with arrogance toward the technology, because someone else might discover something first? What?

      • joe@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        4
        ·
        2 days ago

        What expertise are you drawing from to come to this conclusion?

        • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          2 days ago

          Here’s a decent resource if you care to read about, rather than the podcast: https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/research/1-3-ai-arms-race-2-0-from-deregulation-to-industrial-policy

          I would summarize it to conclude: The “AI arms race” is not an objective technological fact so much as a politically useful narrative that has helped align government policy with the interests of large AI companies.

          My opinion is that we should be a lot more critical of this narrative.

          • joe@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            2 days ago

            I am definitely going to read that link, from the start at 1.0, but now right now. Thanks, though.

            Accepting your summary (and sorry if I ask a question answered in the link) but what would an “objective technological fact” regarding any technology being an arms race look like? As in, it seems obvious that a technology that can perform complex exploits of software vulnerabilities without human assistance could be used as a weapon-- so why wouldn’t that be a national concern to ensure America has the better technology? How is this different than missiles or bombs, from a technological standpoint?

            • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              2 days ago

              To be fair, an AI system capable of independently discovering and exploiting serious software vulnerabilities would be a legitimate national-security concern. The US would have a strong interest in possessing and defending against that capability.

              But a technology is not itself an arms race. An arms race is a pattern of behavior between adversaries involving that technology. That requires observable political, military and economic facts.

              I would point these out as red flags:

              • Developing identifiable autonomous cyberweapons.
              • Each side expands its program substantially because it believes the other is expanding.
              • Established military units, budgets, infrastructure and deployment plans around those systems.

              I would point these out as not counting:

              • AI can be weaponized.
              • China is developing AI.
              • AI could confer military advantages.
              • American companies are spending heavily on general-purpose models.
              • The United States wants to lead commercially.

              In table format, the comparison between AI and those other technologies would ideally look something like this:

              Technology General capability Particular weapon
              Nuclear physics Energy, medicine, scientific research Nuclear warhead
              Rocketry Satellites, transport, exploration Ballistic missile
              Combustion engines Cars, generators, machinery Tank propulsion
              AI Medicine, logistics, coding, science, communications Autonomous targeting or exploitation system

              An AI arms race would look very different than what we see right now.

              With the AI bubble, the communities being disrupted by the environmental impacts of data centers (including infranoise), the constant fear of “use AI or be replaced by AI,” the risky financials on all of this, … all the people that lost retirement value to the SpaceX IPO, … this stuff is a serious public nuisance.

              We don’t need tech CEOs scaring us with talk of an “arms race.” It’s fucked up.

        • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 days ago

          Here’s a really good podcast on the subject: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000779843294

          They discuss a lot of the same points I would, right there. The incentives of AI leaders, Chinas current position, the lies from AI companies to communities, the way their stories change, the fact that they’re the ones calling it an “arms race.”

          I would alternatively ask this: what expertise claims we are in an arms race? AI companies don’t count as expertise on global arms races, in what I think is a reasonable opinion.

          • joe@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            arrow-down
            3
            ·
            2 days ago

            Do doctors and pharmaceutical companies count as experts when discussing vaccines?

            • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              2 days ago

              There are several problems here. If you address them, I’m happy to answer your question faithfully. But as it stands, I don’t think it’s a fair comparison.

              First and foremost, we’re specifically discussing an “arms race,” not just a “race.” I fail to understand what qualifies an AI company to be an expert in national security, weapons, and foreign affairs. To me, an AI company is an expert in what makes them more profit. That just so happens to involve AI here, but not “arms races.”

              Second, doctors are probably not necessarily experts on vaccines. They’re likely to be experts on vaccine benefits, recommendation, procurement, administering, storage, … but that’s just administration and some operational knowledge. A vaccine expert (IMO) is a specialist for vaccines. They’re probably not working in a hospital.

              A pharmaceutical company might be an expert on vaccines. But what’s the parallel to AI companies? Pharmaceutical companies research and develop actual vaccines. AI companies do not research and develop arms. The only argument I understand for this would be to say that an LLM is a weapon.

              I don’t buy that an LLM is a weapon. Real competition exists, and certain military applications could become arms races, but AI as a whole is not one. Building out swaths of data centers to power more AI without a concrete public benefit isn’t something we should put up with.

              You don’t benefit from the narrative that this is an arms race, not as an individual or a citizen. The benefactors here are the AI companies.

              • joe@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                arrow-down
                3
                ·
                2 days ago

                The technology can certainly be used as a weapon; it can hack systems already, and defend against hacks. This capability will only increase, and logically the better AI affords a strategic benefit. Hence, an arms race.

                The rest of your questions aren’t questions or presuppose that AI can’t be used as a weapon.

                In case it isn’t obvious, there are experts in this field that aren’t employed by AI.

                • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  3
                  ·
                  2 days ago

                  Hence, an arms race.

                  The term “arms race” has a definition and I’m pretty sure this still doesn’t apply. So in my opinion, even at best, this is political propaganda.

                  An “arms race” is a competition over the quality or quantity of military capabilities between states in the international system.

                  https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/62239/chapter-abstract/550799699

                  The US and China are in an economic race. We aren’t racing to develop a particular military capability. Nobody can even name what that capability would be… “mass hacking?” Is that it? Sounds scary… I don’t buy it. It gives me the impression of fear mongering.

                  If it were about AI driven military capabilities, we could have probably worked with the compute we had years ago.

                  I think what should be obvious is the fact that “can be used as a weapon” doesn’t justify it being an “arm.” The fact that they can “hack” now is largely irrelevant. It’s a nice talking point that was parroted around the AI circle jerk recently, but largely unsubstantiated. I think they all caught on to the hype Mythos was getting, so they took the narrative for another spin. But even Mythos was a load of propaganda.

                  How do you know it wasn’t conveniently allowed to happen, to further fuel the propaganda machine? How do you know they didn’t exaggerate or leave blank important details, particularly because they’re financially incentivized to maintain the hype?

                  State actors have always hacked one another. Now with a fancy tool to do automated discovery, they might be a little faster. But that speed is also arguable, because there are reports on how AI led development actually shifts the development time burden rather than resolving it.

                  In case it isn’t obvious, there are experts in this field that aren’t employed by AI.

                  Those experts in the field (that aren’t employed by AI) mostly agree with this stance, from what I can tell.

                  I linked a paper in one of my earlier replies. Here’s another by a different author: https://tnsr.org/2021/06/debunking-the-ai-arms-race-theory/

                  … and, I just found a table. Here’s 7 more I guess.

                  Experts Published position
                  Paul Scharre “Debunking the AI Arms Race Theory”
                  Heather Roff “The frame problem: The AI ‘arms race’ isn’t one”
                  Stefka Schmid, Daniel Lambach, Carlo Diehl and Christian Reuter “Arms Race or Innovation Race? Geopolitical AI Development”
                  Alexander Pascal and Tim Hwang “Artificial Intelligence Isn’t an Arms Race”
                  Remco Zwetsloot, Helen Toner and Jeffrey Ding “Beyond the AI Arms Race”
                  Yonathan Arbel and Matthew Tokson “The AI Race Isn’t Real”
                  Colin Kahl “The Myth of the AI Race”
                  • joe@lemmy.world
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    2
                    arrow-down
                    2
                    ·
                    2 days ago

                    I ran the report through AI (the irony is not lost on me) and while it’s really very clear this is closer to a manifesto than a unbiased report (not that it claims to be unbiased), I don’t strictly disagree with any specific point.

                    I have several thoughts, however:

                    If you don’t think having a legion of skilled hackers that never sleep is a weapon, fine-- hell, even if you tighten your tinfoil hat and reject the claim that they can even do that, if the American government and the Chinese government both believe it has this capability, and they both believe it’s advantage to have the better technology, then this is an arms race. Even if they’re both wrong about the capabilities of AI or the plausibility of AGI, its still an arms race. If the it turned out that atomic bombs weren’t feasible or possible to create, that wouldn’t have made the race to build one less of an arms race, without hindsight.

                    If not clear, I don’t believe a conspiracy on this scale is a realistic assumption without more data than “I don’t believe it”. It would have to spread across several competing companies throughout most, if not all, of the employees.

                    Like I said in the first comment, Sanders can threaten all he wants, but I just don’t believe Congress is going to take a risk on “its not really that important” and impose restrictions on AI development. (Side note that no restrictions on AI development is not the same as no restrictions on AI use or deployment.)

                    I think, as I said before, that we will need a global treaty on pausing development before any one country or company pauses development, or even slows it down.

    • XLE@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      37
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      3 days ago

      Any pause will have to be a global treaty

      Which is why tech CEOs love to promote it. They know it’ll never happen.

      We know how to make “AI” more capable, but we don’t know how to make it stay aligned with human goals.

      “Alignment” is almost entirely a myth cooked up by AI companies who want to make their word generators sound scarier than they are. There’s no such thing: the next word generator generates next word. It’s unpredictable because it’s built that way. “Hallucination” and “going rogue”, all poor terms and pathetic attempts to fearmonger and humanize, are identical functions to “working” and “aligning”.

      The technology… isn’t going anywhere

      The “it’s just inevitable” cliche rears its ugly head again.

      • Mathium05@piefed.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        3 days ago

        That cliche is the worst. If applied to anything else you can see how absurd it is. Like NFTs aren’t going anywhere, crime isn’t going anywhere, etc.

        • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          3 days ago

          Except NFTs were never used to nearly even close to the same amount as AI, it had much less usecases and the one that did “catch on” was idiotic.

          Crime is a symptom of a problem, not a technological advancement, apples and oranges.

          AI the tool is never going away in the same way the internet is never going away. (Barring our entire civilization collapses and we lose knowledge/connectivity/life lmao)

          • Mathium05@piefed.blahaj.zone
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            8
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            3 days ago

            “AI is never going away” neither did NFTs nor crime, nor anything else really. We should try to stop these awful companies from doing awful things.

            • joe@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              5
              arrow-down
              2
              ·
              3 days ago

              The point of the “its not going away” comment is because a shocking number of people think the solution to AI is to, I dunno, delete it.

              As a technology, it is out in the world. It isn’t going away any more than electricity or the internet. So any solutions to the real problems with AI that are essentially “make it go away” are essentially nonsense. Might as well propose wishing it away with a genie.

              “It’s not going away” is not equivalent to “there’s nothing we can do to solve the problems”; it just means that the solution has to be in a framework where it is implemented alongside AI.

              • Mathium05@piefed.blahaj.zone
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                2 days ago

                That is a solution, make it very unappealing to use it. If it’s clearly a crime, most people don’t have the hardware to do it, and others don’t have the motivation, it’d help a lot. And again, NFTs

                • joe@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  arrow-down
                  1
                  ·
                  2 days ago

                  Most people do have the hardware to run them. Maybe not super high end ones but middle of the road ones.

                  Again, the solution won’t ever be “no more AI”. The solution will be regulation, social safety nets, taxation, etc.

                  • Mathium05@piefed.blahaj.zone
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    1
                    ·
                    1 day ago

                    They are crimes, they stole their data, and the ones people can run locally still are a part of those crime rings. Plus the ones that can run locally aren’t very good, not that the larger ones are too great either

              • Mathium05@piefed.blahaj.zone
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                2 days ago

                Then what’s the point of saying that line? It’s a pointless line that means to put down any solution to the problem saying “well, actually, it’ll never go away!” instead of thinking about how one could drastically reduce the harm by trying to make it go away anyways

      • Mathium05@piefed.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        3 days ago

        Alignment is a real thing, though it can be a less than apt description. Mostly the goals you write out and the goals you want to happen not being the same thing. You can also have alignment issues where the dataset doesn’t match the real data in some way and the classifications break down. (I am not an AI defender I am very anti-AI)

        • Euphoma@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          2 days ago

          I thought alignment was just preventing the llm from making porn or bomb recipes to avoid legal trouble

          • Mathium05@piefed.blahaj.zone
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 day ago

            No, that would be bad, but not misaligned necessarily. That’s a different issue really. Like lets say you use ML to make an AI to play a video game and the goal is always on the right side, but after you’re done training, it’s on the left now, the AI might have not learned go the goal, but go to the right.

      • joe@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        14
        ·
        3 days ago

        Your opinion is borne from lack of knowledge about the topic you’re trying to discuss, similar to an anti-vaxxer attempting to discuss the dangers of mRNA vaccines.

        Fix your lack of knowledge or don’t; that’s your call, but if you care about discussing this topic somewhat intelligently, you should probably put in some effort to understand it.

        • XLE@piefed.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          10
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          3 days ago

          I said several things so how about you actually address them, instead of resorting to an insult and vaguely telling me to “do my research”?

          Do you deny this latest wave of companies doing the exact same routine is a PR stunt, or that companies badly want regulatory capture, or what?

          • joe@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            11
            ·
            3 days ago

            I meant no insult, truly. You just don’t have the minimum required knowledge to discuss this intelligently. There’s no shame in that; no one can know everything.

            I can’t know the motives of anyone, but I can say it’s at least plausible that the people working on the frontier models want an excuse to slow down that doesn’t give an advantage to other countries and companies, and also doesn’t put them in the crosshairs of investors and board members.

            You apparently still internalize LLMs as fancy Markov chains, which tells me that you don’t have a working grasp to discuss the topic, even at the laymen level we’re at.

            These hacking events may be “PR Stunts”, but the “stunt” part would be leaving a known vulnerability as a path to the wider Internet instead of making it physically impossible to break out, not the hacking of other websites. No one credible is disputing that these models are capable of hacking.

            • XLE@piefed.social
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              10
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              3 days ago

              I meant no insult

              Uh-huh. You compared me to an antivaxxer , implying that people who disagree with you don’t believe in science or technology - the same reason you felt the need to throw in the “inevitability” cliche. Which I do not buy, and somebody claiming to understand the technology should never repeat.

              Later, you say anyone who disagrees with you just feels “desperate” and “threatened.” You’re really pulling everything from the “I am rational and you are neurotic” playbook aren’t you.

              I can’t know the motives of anyone, but I can say it’s at least plausible that the people working on the frontier models want an excuse to slow down that doesn’t give an advantage to other countries and companies, and also doesn’t put them in the crosshairs of investors and board members.

              It’s all the same song and dance. Dario Amodei screams “hold me back!” because he loves pretending his product is Great and Powerful.

              Why do these developers never talk about real harms like the environmental damage they cause? How about the psychosis they are liable to fall into?

              It’s pretty obvious they’re just doing marketing, knowingly or not. And these are smart people who should know better.

              • joe@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                3
                arrow-down
                9
                ·
                3 days ago

                Computer science is still science. You distrust the experts in the field based on what? Something you saw on social media? Certainly not your own expertise, that much is clear.

                Don’t move the goalposts. No one is claiming that “AI” doesn’t have downsides. That’s different than your original claim that they didn’t do what they appear to do.

                I don’t suppose you happen to be in a field threatened by AI? In my anecdotal experience, the people that desperately want to pretend AI is all a scam are actually worried about the opposite, and their job. (A real concern I’m in no way trying to minimize.)

                • XLE@piefed.social
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  10
                  arrow-down
                  2
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  3 days ago

                  I can’t tell if you’re reading what I’m writing. I mention CEOs twice and you assert I’m not listening to “The Experts”.

                  No one is claiming that “AI” doesn’t have downsides.

                  You mean climate damage and psychosis?

                  Zero of the “experts” in your strained theory about looking for excuses to “pause” AI ever talk about them. It’s almost like they don’t want to imply their product is unworthy of all the hype, doomerism and fearmongering.

                  • joe@lemmy.world
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    2
                    arrow-down
                    4
                    ·
                    3 days ago

                    I do not consider the CEOs as experts, no.

                    You’re not making coherent arguments; it really is like discussing vaccines with an antivaxxer. Maybe take a step back and explain to me what your stance actually is? Bonus points if you learn just a layman’s level understanding of the technology before you post your response.

                  • joe@lemmy.world
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    1
                    arrow-down
                    1
                    ·
                    3 days ago

                    Ignoring the random personal attacks, I’m not on Mastodon like you are, I’m on Lemmy. We don’t have followers, that I am aware of.

    • Allero@lemmy.today
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 days ago

      Arms race

      Woah, we’re talking LLMs here, this is not a secret military technology. And China is very open about the developments made there - you can freely study and reverse engineer plenty of Chinese models, and see all the weights out in the open.

      This whole race about them is, in my opinion, nothing but trying to pump the bubble even faster, churning the economy in the process and playing on gullible or self-interested politicians. Countries will be just fine assessing risks and then moving on.

      • Pika@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        2 days ago

        It’s a one participant race. They’re throwing fears about Chinese LLM because of the fact that many of their models end up being open-source, and they know if they don’t get people cemented into their models before some open-sourced Chinese alternative manages to meet(or even exceed ) their performance. No company is going to pay them money because they’re just gonna run it themselves for way less than subscription costs.

        right now, they acknowledge that the non-US alternatives for the models are gaining traction and are getting pretty dang good, and that scares them, so they’ve moved over to customer lock-in hoping that the effort it would take to move from a subscription model over to one of the alternative models wouldn’t be worth it for a company. A US only pause would almost certainly leave them dead in the water.

    • Riskable@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      3 days ago

      It’s beyond “an arms race.” AI has become a commodity that’s everywhere and it’s being used and developed by zillions of completely different groups all over the world with wildly varying use cases and completely different goals.

      At this point, trying to ban it would be like trying to ban dandelions from growing.

      • joe@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        arrow-down
        4
        ·
        3 days ago

        The groups doing frontier research with the appropriate funding are few enough that a global pause would be possible, and useful.

        I agree that a ban would be impossible, and counterproductive even if it were possible.

        • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          3 days ago

          Except when you think about if a ban were actually implemented it would absolutely be pro-entrenched companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and open weight models could be banned outright, I’ve already seen well-intentioned but misguided “experts” saying exactly that, BAN open weight models and pause further development, who would that benefit directly?

    • Damage@feddit.it
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      3 days ago

      Order Nvidia and AMD to stop selling AI GPUs or whatever they’re called.