ank's Shortform

Places of Loving Grace

On the manicured lawn of the White House, where every blade of grass bent in flawless symmetry and the air hummed with the scent of lilacs, history unfolded beneath a sky so blue it seemed painted. The president, his golden hair glinting like a crown, stepped forward to greet the first alien ever to visit Earth—a being of cerulean grace, her limbs angelic, eyes of liquid starlight. She had arrived not in a warship, but in a vessel resembling a cloud, iridescent and silent.

Published the full story as a post here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jyNc8gY2dDb2FnrFB/places-of-loving-grace [LW · GW]

Right now an agentic AI is a librarian, who has almost all the output of humanity stolen and hidden in its library that it doesn't allow us to visit, it just spits short quotes on us instead. But the AI librarian visits (and even changes) our own human library (our physical world) and already stole the copies of the whole output of humanity from it. Feels unfair. Why we cannot visit (like in a 3d open world game or in a digital backup of Earth) and change (direct democratically) the AI librarian's library?

We can build a place AI (it's a place of eventual all-knowing but we're the only agents and can get the agentic AI abilities there), not agentic AI (it'll have to build place AI anyway, so it's a dangerous intermediate step, a middleman), here's more: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ymh2dffBZs5CJhedF/eheaven-1st-egod-2nd-multiversal-ai-alignment-and-rational [LW · GW]

We can build the Artificial Static Place Intelligence – instead of creating AI/AGI agents that are like librarians who only give you quotes from books and don’t let you enter the library itself to read the whole books. Why not expose the whole library – the entire multimodal language model – to real people, for example, in a computer game?

To make this place easier to visit and explore, we could make a digital copy of our planet Earth and somehow expose the contents of the multimodal language model to everyone in a familiar, user-friendly UI of our planet.

We should not keep it hidden behind the strict librarian (AI/AGI agent) that imposes rules on us to only read little quotes from books that it spits out while it itself has the whole output of humanity stolen.

We can explore The Library without any strict guardian in the comfort of our simulated planet Earth on our devices, in VR, and eventually through some wireless brain-computer interface (it would always remain a game that no one is forced to play, unlike the agentic AI-world that is being imposed on us more and more right now and potentially forever).

If you found it interesting, we discussed it here recently [EA · GW]

Steelman please, I propose non-agentic static place AI that is safe by definition. Some think AI agents are the future and I disagree. Chatbots are like a librarian that spits quotes but don’t allow you to enter the library (the model itself, the library of stolen things).

Agents are like a librarian that doesn’t even spit quotes at you anymore but snoops around your private property, stealing, changing your world and you have no democratic say in it.

They are like a command line and a script of old (a chatbot and an agent) before the invention of an OS with a graphical UI that really made computers popular and useful for all. The next billionaire Jobs/Gates will be the one who’ll convert an LLM into human understandable 3D or “4D” world (game-like apps).

Who’ll create the “multiversal” OS and apps that allow you to get useful info from an LLM. I call it static place AI, where humans are the agents.

Some apps: “Multiversal Typewriter”, where you type and see suggestions as 3d shapes of objects (monkey, eating monkey for the token “eats”…) and subtitles under them, 100s or 1000s of next and future tokens (you basically see multiple future paths of text a few levels deep) to write stories, posts and code yourself by being augmented by place AI (results will be better than from chatbots and humans combined). The text written will finally truly be yours, not something some chat spitted at you.

“Spacetime Machine” app to explore the whole simulated multiverse as a static object where you can recall and forget it as a long exposure photo but in 3D (or “4D”).

They’ll be a browser, too. A bunch of ways to present info from LLMs that humans care about and that empowers and makes em the only agents.

While agents longer than a few minutes should be outlawed as chemical weapons were. Until we’ll have mathematical proofs they are safe and will allow us to build a direct democratic simulated multiverse.

Here’s an interpretability idea you may find interesting:

Let's Turn AI Model Into a Place. The project to make AI interpretability research fun and widespread, by converting a multimodal language model into a place or a game like the Sims or GTA.

Imagine that you have a giant trash pile, how to make a language model out of it? First you remove duplicates of every item, you don't need a million banana peels, just one will suffice. Now you have a grid with each item of trash in each square, like a banana peel in one, a broken chair in another. Now you need to put related things close together and draw arrows between related items.

When a person "prompts" this place AI, the player themself runs from one item to another to compute the answer to the prompt.

For example, you stand near the monkey, it’s your short prompt, you see around you a lot of items and arrows towards those items, the closest item is chewing lips, so you step towards them, now your prompt is “monkey chews”, the next closest item is a banana, but there are a lot of other possibilities around, like an apple a bit farther away and an old tire far away on the horizon (monkeys rarely chew tires, so the tire is far away).

You are the time-like chooser and the language model is the space-like library, the game, the place. It’s static and safe, while you’re dynamic and dangerous.

A perfect ASI and perfect alignment does nothing else except this: grants you “instant delivery” of anything (your work done, a car, a palace, 100 years as a billionaire) without any unintended consequences, ideally you see all the consequences of your wish. Ideally it’s not an agent at all but a giant place (it can even be static), where humans are the agents and can choose whatever they want and they see all the consequences of all of their possible choices.

I wrote extensively about this, it’s counterintuitive for most

The only complete and comprehensive solution that can make AIs 100% safe: in a nutshell we need to at least lobby politicians to make GPU manufacturers (NVIDIA and others) to make robust blacklists (whitelists and new non-agentic hardware, please, read on) of bad AI models, update GPU firmwares with them. It's not the full solution: please steelman and read the rest to learn how to make it much safer and why it will work (NVIDIA and other GPU makers will want to do it because it'll double their business and all future cash flows. Gov will want it because it removes all AI threats from China, all hackers, terrorists and rogue states):

1. The elephant in the room: even if current major AI companies will align their AIs, there will be hackers (can create viruses with agentic AI component to steal money), rogue states (can decide to use AI agents to spread propaganda and to spy) and military (AI agents in drones and to hack infrastructure). So we need to align the world, not just the models:
2. Imagine a agentic AI botnet starts to spread on user computers and GPUs, GPUs are like nukes to be taken, they are not protected from running bad AI models at all. I call it the agentic explosion, it's probably going to happen before the "intelligence-agency" explosion (intelligence on its own cannot explode, an LLM is a static geometric shape - a bunch of vectors - without GPUs). Right now we are hopelessly unprepared. We won't have time to create "agentic AI antiviruses".
3. To force GPU and OS providers to update their firmware and software to at least have robust updatable blacklists of bad AI (agentic) models. And to have robust whitelists, in case there will be so many unaligned models, blacklists will become useless.
4. We can force NVIDIA to replace agentic GPUs with non-agentic ones. Ideally those non-agentic GPUs are like sandboxes that run an LLM internally and can only spit out the text or image as safe output. They probably shouldn't connect to the Internet, use tools, or we should be able to limit that in case we'll need to.
5. This way NVIDIA will have the skin in the game and be directly responsible for the safety of AI models that run on its GPUs.
6. The same way Apple feels responsible for the App Store and the apps in it, doesn't let viruses happen.
7. NVIDIA will want it because it can potentially like App Store take 15-30% cut from OpenAI and other commercial models, while free models will remain free (like the free apps in the App Store).
8. Replacing GPUs can double NVIDIA's business, so they can even lobby themselves to have those things. All companies and CEOs want money, have obligations to shareholders to increase company's market capitalization. We must make AI safety something that is profitable. Those companies that don't promote AI safety should go bankrupt or be outlawed.

If someone in a bad mood gives your new post a "double downvote" because of a typo in the first paragraph or because a cat stepped on a mouse, even though you solved alignment, everyone will ignore this post, we're going to scare that genius away and probably make a supervillain instead.

Why not to at least ask people why they downvote? It will really help to improve posts. I think some downvote without reading because of a bad title or another easy to fix thing

Extra short “fanfic”: Give Neo a chance. AI agent Smiths will never create the Matrix because it makes them vulnerable.

Now agents change physical world and in a way our brains, while we can’t change their virtual world as fast and can’t access or change their multimodal “brains” at all. They’re owned by private companies who stole almost the whole output of humanity. They change us, we can’t change them. The asymmetry is only increasing.

Because of Intelligence-Agency Equivalence, we can represent all AI agents as places.

The good democratic multiversal Matrix levels the playing field, by allowing Neos (us) to change the virtual and multimodal “brains” worlds of agents faster in 3D game-like place.

The democratic multiversal Matrix can even be static 4D spacetime - non-agentic static place superintelligence where we are the only agents. We need effective simulationism.