But you don’t need to be worried about the former to be worried about alignment. To run large-scale AI experiments these days, you need a ton of computing power – more than 300,000 times what you needed a decade ago – as well as top technical talent. ” By one estimate, the size of the generative AI market alone could pass $100 billion by the end of the decade – and Silicon Valley is only too aware of the first-mover advantage on new technology. Let’s break down the three main ones, starting with the idea that rapid progress on AI is inevitable because of the strong financial drive for first-mover dominance in a research area that’s overwhelmingly private. You might believe that slowing down a new technology is possible but still think it’s not desirable. But if it’s saying that, it’s probably because lots of human beings say that, including the CEO of the company that created it. When an Amazon hiring algorithm picked up on words in resumes that are associated with women – “Wellesley College,” let’s say – and ended up rejecting women applicants, that algorithm was doing what it was programmed to do (find applicants that match the workers Amazon has typically preferred) but not what the company presumably wants (find the best applicants, even if they happen to be women).
There’s an understandable concern here: Given the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarianism and its horrific human rights abuses – sometimes facilitated by AI technologies like facial recognition – it makes sense that many are worried about China becoming the world’s dominant superpower by going fastest on what is poised to become a truly transformative technology. ’ It seems more like ‘Who’s going to use it in what ways, and who’s going to be able to deploy it and actually have it be in widespread use? Like riding a bicycle, the relevant knowledge is tacit, held in the body as much as the brain. In the meantime, society could get used to the very powerful systems we already have, and experts could do as much safety research on them as possible until they hit diminishing returns. Jeffrey Ding, an assistant professor of political science at George Washington University, told me that China has shown interest in regulating AI in some ways, though Americans don’t seem to pay much attention to that. But even if you think your country has better values and cares more about safety, and even if you believe there’s a classic arms race afoot and China is racing full speed ahead, it still may not be in your interest to go faster at the expense of safety.
These tools include processes for reliably testing AI models’ applicability to harmful tasks and deeper partnerships with institutions in industry, academia, and civil society capable of advancing research related to AI safety, security, and trustworthiness. “I don’t believe for a moment that the institutions we’re competing with in China will slow down simply because we decided we’d like to move more slowly. And does it feel like it takes shape when you look at it, or like it is a fluid thing, like it has to be squeezed? For one thing, remember that AI is not just one thing with one purpose, like the atomic bomb. So it releases a weapon of mass destruction to wipe us all out, like a perfectly engineered virus that kills everyone but leaves infrastructure intact. The Anthropic team offers several ideas, one of which gets at the heart of something that makes AI so different from past transformative technologies like nuclear weapons or bioengineering: the central role of private companies. Consider how Leo Szilard, the physicist who patented the nuclear chain reaction in 1934, arranged to mitigate the spread of research so it wouldn’t help Nazi Germany create nuclear weapons. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University – via Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Grace proposes another idea: We could alter the publishing system to reduce research dissemination in some cases. Imagine that we develop a super-smart AI system. Levi’s, for example, used Dataiku’s tools to create a machine learning-based recommendation system for its customers. Enhance the traditional level of intelligent infrastructure to form a smart economy, intelligent society and national defense needs of the infrastructure system. Within 180 days of the development of the guidance required under subsection 4.5(b) of this section, and updated periodically thereafter, the Director of OMB, in consultation with the Secretary of State; the Secretary of Defense; the Attorney General; the Secretary of Commerce, acting through the Director of NIST; the Secretary of Homeland Security; the Director of National Intelligence; and the heads of other agencies that the Director of OMB deems appropriate, shall – for the purpose of strengthening public confidence in the integrity of official United States Government digital content – issue guidance to agencies for labeling and authenticating such content that they produce or publish.