LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I'm aware and I don't disagree. However, in xrisk, many (not all) of those who are most worried are also most bullish about capabilities. Reversely, many (not all) who are not worried are unimpressed with capabilities. Being aware of the concept of AGI, that it may be coming soon, and of how impactful it could be, is in practice often a first step towards becoming concerned about the risks, too. This is not true for everyone unfortunately. Still, I would say that at least for our chances to get an international treaty passed, it is perhaps hopeful that the power of AGI is on the radar of leading politicians (although this may also increase risk through other paths).

The usual plan for control as I understand it is that you use control techniques [LW · GW] to ensure the safety of models that are sufficiently good at themselves doing alignment research that you can then leverage your controlled human-ish-level models to help you align future superhuman models.

I would add that convincing Musk to take action against Altman is the highest ROI thing I can think of in terms of decreasing AI extinction risk.

I would expect, the issue isn't about convincing Musk to take action but about finding effective actions that Musk could take. 

I do get that point that you are making, but I think this is a little bit unfair to these organizations. Articles like Machines of Loving Grace, The Intelligence Age and Planning for AGI and Beyond are implicit public justifications for building AGI.

These labs have also released their plans on "safe development". I expect a big part of what they say to be the usual business marketing, but it's not like they completely ignoring the issue. In fact, taking one example, Anthropic's research papers on safety are often discussed on this site as genuine improvements on this or that niche of AI Safety.

I don't think that money alone would've convinced CEOs of big companies to run this enterprise. Altman and Amodei, they both have families. If they don't care about their own families, then they at least care about themselves. After all, we are talking about scenarios where these guys would die the same deaths as the rest of us. No amounts of hoarded money would save them. They would have little motivation to do any of this if they believed that they would die as the result of their own actions. And that's not mentioning all of the other researchers working at their labs. Just Anthropic and OpenAI together have almost 2000 employees. Do they all not care about their and their families' well-being?

I think the point about them not engaging with critics is also a bit too harsh. Here [LW · GW] is DeepMind's alignment team response to concerns raised by Yudkowski. I am not saying that their response is flawless or even correct, but it is a response nonetheless. They are engaging with this work. DeepMind's alignment team also seemed to engage with concerns raised by critics in their (relatively) recent work [AF · GW].

It's not clear to me that there was actually an option to build a $100B company with competent people around the world who would've been united in conditionally shutting down and unconditionally pushing for regulation. I don't know that the culture and concepts of people who do a lot of this work in the business world would allow for such a plan to be actively worked on.

This elides the original argument by assuming the conclusion: that countermanding efforts remain cheap relative to the innovations. But the whole point is that significant shifts in costs associated with defense of a certain level can change behaviors and which plans and supply chains are economically defensible a lot.

While you nod to 'politics is the mind-killer', I don't think the right lesson is being taken away, or perhaps just not with enough emphasis. 

Whether one is an accelerationist, Pauser, or an advocate of some nuanced middle path, the prospects/goals of everyone are harmed if the discourse-landscape becomes politicized/polarized. All possible movement becomes more difficult. 

"Well we of course don't want that to happen, but X ppl are in power, so it makes sense to ask how X ppl tend to think and cater our arguments to them" 

If your argument is taking advantage of features of {group of ppl X} qua X, then that is almost unavoidably going to run counter to some Y qua Y, (either as a direct consequence of the arguments and/or because Nuance cannot survive public exposure) and if it isn't, then why couldn't the argument have been made completely apolitically to begin with? 

I just continue to think that any mention, literally at all, of ideology or party is courting discourse-disaster for all, again no matter what specific policy one is advocating for. Do we all remember what happened with covid masks? Or what is currently happening with discourse surrounding elon? Nuance just does not survive public exposure, and nobody is going to fix that in the few years we have left. (and this is a public document). The best way forward continues to be apolitical good arguments. Yes those arguments are going to be sent towards those who are in power at any given time, but you can do that without routing through ideology.  

To touch, even in passing reference, ideology/alliance (ex: the c word included in the title of this post) is to risk the poison/mindkill spreading in a way that is basically irreversible, because to correct it (other than comments like this just calling to Stop Referencing Ideology) usually involves Referencing An Ideology. Like a bug stuck in a glue trap, it places yet another limb into the glue in a vain attempt to push itself free. 

Absolutely true. 

But also Altman's actions since are very clearly counter to the spirit of that email. I could imagine a version of this plan, executed with earnestness and attempted cooperativeness, that wasn't nearly as harmful (though still pretty bad, probably). 

Part of the problem is that "we should build it first, before the less trustworthy" is a meme that universalizes terribly. 

Part of the problem is that Sam Altman was not actually sincere in the the execution of that sentiment, regardless of how sincere his original intentions were.

Offering $7,500 total is likely on the high end of what is practical before people start inefficiently gaming the system.

What does that mean? The wikipedia article Child benefit lists several examples of child benefit systems that yield more than $7,500.

Nobody admitted to trying repeated data at scale yet (so we don't know that it doesn't work), which from the tiny experiments can 5x the data with little penalty and 15x the data in a still-useful way. It's not yet relevant for large models, but it might turn out that small models would greatly benefit already.

There are 15-20T tokens in datasets whose size is disclosed for current models (Llama 3, Qwen 2.5), plausibly 50T tokens of tolerable quality can be found (pretraining only needs to create useful features, not relevant behaviors). With 5x 50T tokens, even at 80 tokens/parameter^[1] we can make good use of 5e27-7e27 FLOPs^[2], which even a 1 gigawatt 500K B200s system of early 2026 would need 4-6 months to provide.

The isoFLOP plots (varying tokens per parameter for fixed compute) seem to get loss/perplexity basins that are quite wide, once they get about 1e20 FLOPs of compute. The basins also get wider for hybrid attention (compare 100% Attention isoFLOPs in the "Perplexity scaling analysis" Figure to the others). So it's likely that using a slightly suboptimal tokens/parameter ratio of say 40 won't hurt performance much at all. In which case we get to use 9e27-2e28 FLOPs by training a larger model on the same 5x 50T tokens dataset. The data wall for text data is unlikely to be a 2024-2026 issue.