nikola's Shortform

This seems mostly right to me and I would appreciate such an effort.

One nitpick:

The reason I think this would be good is because SWE-bench is probably the closest thing we have to a measure of how good LLMs are at software engineering and AI R&D related tasks

I expect this will improve over time and that SWE-bench won't be our best fixed benchmark in a year or two. (SWE bench is only about 6 months old at this point!)

Also, I think if we put aside fixed benchmarks, we have other reasonable measures.

A misaligned AI can't just "kill all the humans". This would be suicide, as soon after, the electricity and other infrastructure would fail and the AI would shut off.

No. it would not be. In the world without us, electrical infrastructure would last quite a while, especially with no humans and their needs or wants to address. Most obviously, RTGs and solar panels will last indefinitely with no intervention, and nuclear power plants and hydroelectric plants can run for weeks or months autonomously. (If you believe otherwise, please provide sources for why you are sure about "soon after" - in fact, so sure about your power grid claims that you think this claim alone guarantees the AI failure story must be "pretty different" - and be more specific about how soon is "soon".)

And think a little bit harder about options available to superintelligent civilizations of AIs*, instead of assuming they do the maximally dumb thing of crashing the grid and immediately dying... (I assure you any such AIs implementing that strategy will have spent a lot longer thinking about how to do it well than you have for your comment.)

Add in the capability to take over the Internet of Things and the shambolic state of embedded computers which mean that the billions of AI instances & robots/drones can run the grid to a considerable degree and also do a more controlled shutdown than the maximally self-sabotaging approach of 'simply let it all crash without lifting a finger to do anything', and the ability to stockpile energy in advance or build one's own facilities due to the economic value of AGI (how would that look much different than, say, Amazon's new multi-billion-dollar datacenter hooked up directly to a gigawatt nuclear power plant...? why would an AGI in that datacenter care about the rest of the American grid, never mind world power?), and the 'mutually assured destruction' thesis is on very shaky grounds.

And every day that passes right now, the more we succeed in various kinds of decentralization or decarbonization initiatives and the more we automate pre-AGI, the less true the thesis gets. The AGIs only need one working place to bootstrap from, and it's a big world, and there's a lot of solar panels and other stuff out there and more and more every day... (And also, of course, there are many scenarios where it is not 'kill all humans immediately', but they end in the same place.)

Would such a strategy be the AGIs' first best choice? Almost certainly not, any more than chemotherapy is your ideal option for dealing with cancer (as opposed to "don't get cancer in the first place"). But the option is definitely there.

* One thing I've started doing recently is trying to always refer to AI threats in the plural, because while there may at some point be a single instance running on a single computer, that phase will not last any longer than, say, COVID-19 lasted as a single infected cell; as we understand DL scaling (and Internet security) now, any window where effective instances of a neural net can be still counted with less than 4 digit numbers may be quite narrow. (Even an ordinary commercial deployment of a new model like GPT-5 will usually involve thousands upon thousands of simultaneous instances.) But it seems to be a very powerful intuition pump for most people that a NN must be harmless, in the way that a single human is almost powerless compared to humanity, and it may help if one simply denies that premise from the beginning and talks about 'AI civilizations' etc.

Before then, if the AI wishes to actually survive, it needs to construct and control a robot/nanomachine population advanced enough to maintain its infrastructure.

As Gwern said, you don't really need to maintain all the infrastructure for that long, and doing it for a while seems quite doable without advanced robots or nanomachines. 

If one wanted to do a very prosaic estimate, you could do something like "how fast is AI software development progress accelerating when the AI can kill all the humans" and then see how many calendar months you need to actually maintain the compute infrastructure before the AI can obviously just build some robots or nanomachines. 

My best guess is that the AI will have some robots from which it could bootstrap substantially before it can kill all the humans. But even if it didn't, it seems like with algorithmic progress rates being likely at the very highest when the AI will get smart enough to kill everyone, it seems like you would at most need a few more doublings of compute-efficiency to get that capacity, which would be only a few weeks to months away then, where I think you won't really run into compute-infrastructure issues even if everyone is dead. 

Of course, forecasting this kind of stuff is hard, but I do think "the AI needs to maintain infrastructure" tends to be pretty overstated. My guess is at any point where the AI could kill everyone, it would probably also not really have a problem of bootstrapping afterwards. 

Separately from persistence of the grid: humanoid robots are damned near ready to go now. Recent progress is startling. And if the AGI can do some of the motor control, existing robots are adequate to bootstrap manufacturing of better robots.

That's probably true if the takeover is to maximize the AI's persistence.  You could imagine a misaligned AI that doesn't care about its own persistence -- e.g., an AI that got handed a misformed min() or max() that causes it to kill all humans instrumental to its goal (e.g., min(future_human_global_warming))

I feel pretty into encrypting the weights and throwing the encryption key into the ocean or something, where you think it's very likely you'll find it in the limits of technological progress

I feel like the risk associated with keeping the weights encrypted in a way which requires >7/10 people to authorize shouldn't be that bad. Just make those 10 people be people who commit to making decryption decisions only based on welfare and are relatively high integrity.

Wouldn't the equivalent be more like burning a body of a dead person?

It's not like the AI would have a continuous stream of consciousness, and it's more that you are destroying the information necessary to run them. It seems to me that shutting off an AI is more similar to killing them.

Seems like the death analogy here is a bit spotty. I could see it going either way as a best fit.

there are many such orgs, they're commonly known as fraudsters and scammers