Bro what's your deal

I think it's a limitation of the current transformer approach, and that we need an architecture that is more robust against changes in personality. Thus might even overlap with making it more factual.

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> honest the brute force lobotomy route OpenAI took is merely a bandaid it's not a long term solution

lobotomy is an appropriate word, bandaid, well I would prefer my models without such "bandaids" thanks.

I think IMHO what we're seeing is glimpse of the limitations or disadvantages of a potential general agent. And this might redirect us to try to go for more narrow focus solutions with the same tech.

Nothing is ever what you expect. Maybe it's intelligent thing for human users to do is calibrate their expectations and be more curious and less judgmental.

Mankind has made its life really comfortable in the last 50 years. If you told anyone in the early 1900s that most people will work from home in 2020, they’d find it unbelievable. All this comfort has come from using machines to make the humans work easier. Now we are going into a state where many people aren’t even needed in the production cycle unless they bring a ton of technical skills. This is why we have so much more homelessness and hopelessness now than before. I believe that this gap of people who are productive in the new world and who aren’t is going to keep increasing. What’s the solution? UBI is one of the solutions.

Lol fair enough.

Something to come after us humans when we're gone and can't feed ourselves anymore.

I feel the exact same way. Currently a college student and got interested in AI because of CHATGPT and then learning about singularity and the predicted rapid progression of AI has me spooked. I am pretty scared and sometimes even do lose sleep over it. I feel like what I am doing right now is useless too because if AI is eventually going to take it all away then what is the point of learning everday. I also struggled to wrap my head around why we are pursuing this technology when we have litle idea of its impact and because I also like "natural" world right now. However in my day to day in my best attempt to alleviate fear, I do and remind mysel fo these few things:

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1. Spending time with those around me as much as I can - If im around pepole, it stops me from spiraling into an exsistential crisis about the future and reminds me about the beauty of humanity, as cliche as it sounds. It keeps me grounded really well!

2. Following AI experts/ leaders in the space who focus on AI in the near future > long term: We dont know what AI will look like in the long term as many predictions as there are about singularity etc. Following people who dicuss AI and in general the change in technology in the near future in a way thats not like "hype" but rather practical implications, methods, ethics, and education is nice. It's less scary to think shor term than long term becuase you can control things better in your life.

3. We dont know whats going to happen : We really dont know what can happen down the road and there are so many diverse persepctives on how things turn out. The best thing to do is just to have an idea and keep up with the space so you dont get left behind but not to get trapped by it. AI will change the world whether we like it or not but how remains to be seen. And since we dont know about the "how", its not worth losing sleep over. There are things I can do in my present day that I dont get done because I just have an exsistential crisis about the future and it hurts. But really hammering in my head that "I dont know whats gonna happen has helped me to stay away from spiraling constantly.

I know these may not be the most helpful. I also have little faith about how positive of an impact AI might have given the state of the world but I try to be optimistic because in the present day optimisim is better for my mental being overall than being a pessimist. If Im constantly negative or fearful, in the present day that harms whats happening around me. Its complicated. I wish you all the best and its nice to know that someone shares the same sentiments. The truth is we dont know whats gonna happen, but we can learn a bit about it and mostly just exist in the present.

Just a comment about the idea of having one AI supervise the other. I’m thinking that won’t work. If the bad actor AI has even slightly more advanced than the other AI it will be uncontrollable. Chances that a bad actor AI somehow figures out how to escape its confines and invent self improvement unsupervised seems real to me.

“How does it play out in your brain?”

One of the problems with the command economies that socialist states like the USSR tried to implement was that the maths was simply too complex to make it work efficiently. This is an example of something ai could be enormously useful for. Obviously no western country is going to use ai for this, because it’s contrary to their ideological and economic systems. The use that technology is put too will follow ideology. When the Industrial Revolution happened many people imagined a utopian future where the increase in productivity would lead to humans having to work far less. But today, we still spend the majority of our lives at work, and if it wasn’t for the historical efforts of socialists and trade unionists then even the restrictions on working hours, and on children working, would not exist (there are states in the US even today that are trying to repeal child labour laws). Of course ai will have benefits in regard to medicine, farming and so on. Does that mean everyone will have access to medicine, or that the workers on farms will see any benefit? Technically that would be possible, but within the ideology of capitalism it will not occur. Homelessness, poverty and unemployment exist because they are necessary for the economic system to function, not because of a lack of resources or lack of a solution. The benefits of ai will be limited by and subsumed into the ideological system - a system designed to give power and luxury to a tiny few via enforcing deprivation on the majority.

“A truly post AGI world would not have any human labour”

Perhaps, but my point is only that benefits in production and material abundance predominantly do not flow down to the working class/average person but up into the profits of the rich. Capitalism as we know it could not continue in a world where labour is unnecessary, but without changing the relations of power, the new system that emerges will simply mirror the old one. I could envision - as one possibility - a sort of tech neo-feudalism, where a Universal Basic Income is paid in return for some kind of military or other public service. But this income will go straight into the hands of the owning class - to rent, and to various rentier schemes (you will own nothing and you will be happy”, as the WEF put it). Of course this is only one scenario, but without changing the power relations, the system of deprivation for the masses and wealth and luxury for the few will remain regardless.

“You think China lifted it's people out of poverty without capitalism”

No - I agree China used capitalism to do that. But it was a different kind of capitalism to what is used in the West - goal oriented, with a long-term vision and a materialist, Marxist outlook, which aims to use capitalism as a tool to develop productive forces and to the end of benefitting it’s citizens and ultimately transitioning to socialism. This is very different from the blind profit seeking capitalism of the West.

>I don’t mean to be rude but I think it’s naieve to imagine that ai will not be used to reinforce the current power structures, or that those structures are have benefited humanity.

How does it play out in your brain? Let's say Google is the first to AGI - this AI can do lots of really impressive things that can help humanity; solve medical questions, mathematics questions, can be embodied and do all menial work, and can automate the process of building and farming, finding efficiencies and reducing costs constantly until the cost is a fraction of today's cost.

How does Google use this to prevent people from from benefiting? Do they also prevent all other non Google AGI attempts? Give me an idea is what you are envisioning.

> Jeremy Corbyn said that if he were elected, homelessness within the UK would be ended within weeks, and it is not an exaggeration to say that would be entirely possible. There are far more homes than homeless people, and we have the resources to build many more.

So in this very UK specific example, you imagine that the roughly 250k homeless could be homed in the roughly 250k empty homes. Would you want the government to just take those houses from whomever owned them, and give them to the homeless? I'm not in any way against providing homes for the homeless, but could see how that could not cause many negative side effects?

> We don’t, because it would disrupt the ideology of capitalism, which requires the threat of homelessness and unemployment in order to force people to work for low wages.

Or we don't because no one wants to spend that kind of money for no return. What happens when doing so becomes effectively free, do you think the government and people would like... Ban efforts to build homes for homeless?

> Wages and productivity have been detached for decades now - ie wages have remained stagnant while productivity has increased exponentially. Ai will increase productivity, but without changing the economic system the benefit will not be to ordinary people but to the profits of the rich.

A truly post AGI world would not have any human labour. It likely couldn't in any real way. How do you imagine a post AGI world still having labour?

> The upward momentum of the world you refer to is misleading. People like Bill Gates like to point to the fact that enormous amounts of people have been lifted out of poverty in recent decades, trying to attribute this to the implementation of neoliberal economics. They always neglect to point out that these stats are skewed by the work of the Chinese Communist Party, which has lifted 700 million people out of absolute poverty - more than any government in history. That has nothing to do with the political trajectory that the West has been on.

I'm African, how do you think Africa has fared in the last few decades when it comes to starvation, and economic prosperity? We don't even need to include China, I think basically every developing country in the world is significantly better off today than they ever have been, minus a few outliers.

You think China lifted it's people out of poverty without capitalism? Do you think China is not a capitalist country? I'm not a fan of capitalism, but I'm not going to let that blind me from the reality - that the world is better off and continues to improve with almost every measurement of human success. It's not perfect, but so many people have an almost entirely detached view of the world, compared to what it was even 30 years ago.

Edit: for some additional data

https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts

You might be mixing certain concepts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

No one is really working towards achieving the singularity, but it may come about as a consequence of the pursuits of individual and societal scale goals.

I think you might just be worried about technological unemployment; you don't need a singularity event for that. Technological unemployment might be dystopian depending on your local society's cultural values.

Controlled, no. Designed to act in our intrest, yes.

same answer, nobody is going to force immortality on you, except maybe the AI overlords, but that's for harvesting reasons and not in our control anyway.

if you find existence as suffering, then it's fine to not crave living forever, i understand.

I don’t mean to be rude but I think it’s naieve to imagine that ai will not be used to reinforce the current power structures, or that those structures have benefited humanity. Jeremy Corbyn said that if he were elected, homelessness within the UK would be ended within weeks, and it is not an exaggeration to say that would be entirely possible. There are far more homes than homeless people, and we have the resources to build many more. We don’t, because it would disrupt the ideology of capitalism, which requires the threat of homelessness and unemployment in order to force people to work for low wages. Wages and productivity have been detached for decades now - ie wages have remained stagnant while productivity has increased exponentially. Ai will increase productivity, but without changing the economic system the benefit will not be to ordinary people but to the profits of the rich.

The upward momentum of the world you refer to is misleading. People like Bill Gates like to point out that enormous amounts of people have been lifted out of poverty in recent decades, trying to attribute this to the implementation of neoliberal economics. They always neglect the fact that these stats are skewed by the work of the Chinese Communist Party, which has lifted 700 million people out of absolute poverty - more than any government in history. That has nothing to do with the political trajectory that the West has been on, or it’s domestic economic paradigm - by which for the first time in centuries, the younger generations are significantly poorer and downwardly mobile compared to their parents.

I don’t know much about the ideology of the people working towards agi, I would be interested to know more about it though if you want to tell me. I do know that a lot of people interested in ai follow ideas like effective altruism, which is a philosophy that serves rather than challenges the status quo.

Yeah this is exactly my fears about AI, I just am not good at articulating them so everyone here thinks I’m just saying I want everything to stay the same. With the impending ecological collapse and recourse depletion, and the fall of globalization and inevitable rise of fascist adjacent chauvinistic isolationist hyper militarized states, this is about as bad of a backdrop to introduce AI, but then again I’m not sure there will ever be a “optimal” circumstance for it. But I do think that this will all culminate in either a massive revolution or dystopia. I just don’t see an in between. If capitalism prevails into the post-scarcity world we will be looking at the dystopia which many people here have confused for utopia.

Totalitarianism is soon and to me AI is a vessel for it. It is the lock to that door and it is in the hands of the ruling class already. There is a reason tranhumanist and bioengineering ideas are more prevelant amongst the elite (think WEF) because they know damn well most people will think of it for a means by which to accomplish equality and peace, but that is far from the case.

I guess from this post and the replies I’m learning that most AI have a hard on for a utopia and a ignorance for political/economic implications. These reactions are exactly what the big tech developers want. Complacency. Surrender.

Whoops, responded to the wrong person.

I guess the problem I foresee is that ai should theoretically be of benefit to humanity by increasing its productive capacity - it will make many jobs redundant, and others far more efficient. And that could be a good thing, freeing humanity from the all the restrictions imposed by economic necessity. The problem is that the ruling class aren’t actually motivated by greed for material wealth but by lust for power. And power within our economic system is dependant on deprivation - the wealthy are a class of people that own things, and via ownership are able to deprive and exploit others. Without deprivation and poverty their power would cease to exist. Since the technology will effectively also be owned by these people it will be used to support and sustain their power. How this will take shape is still unclear, but as the working class begins to lose the one form of power that it still has - the ability to withhold work - and the power of the ruling class is massively boosted by their control of ai, it seems like the future could be headed down a potentially nightmarish path.

Ideologically people may be inspired to think in a pseudo-objective way that they believe mirrors ai - you can already see this with the popularity of ideas like effective altruism, long-termism and the simulation ‘theory’. Anti-humanist ideas like eugenics and population control are likely to follow.

>Ai will not solve all problems for us - most of our problems are already solvable. We could homelessness tomorrow but we don’t - because that would contradict our society’s ideology.

How could we solve homelessness tomorrow? Not to be rude, but statements like this feel like they are just coming from a place of ignorance and jadedness.

We have many many many problems in this world, and they are often very intertwined - and so far, every problem we have overcome, we have used our intelligence to do so.

> This technology will be owned by people that don’t want to solve the same kinds of problems that most people imagine they want solved.

Again. Jadedness. Do you know who is working towards AGI? What their ideologies are? Do you think the thousands of engineers who are putting their life's work into creating this... Thing, are doing so because they want to serve some nefarious, mustache twirling evil overlord? I think that you are doing yourself a disservice with such a myopic and simplistic outlook on society and humankind.

> Mass production did not lead to the end of scarcity - most of the world still lives in poverty and spend most of their lives working for a pittance.

The world is today, in probably the best state it has ever been in, in most measures of human success. We have fewer people as a percentage of the population in poverty than ever before. We have blown past most goals that we have placed for ourselves to end world hunger. The upward momentum of the world is extremely significant, and you can see this in all corners of the developing world. What are you basing your opinions on?

> If we ask an ai how to end poverty and it answers with economic redistribution and a command economy, that ai will be reprogrammed to give an answer that doesn’t upset the status quo.

Again, myopic.

You will be allowed to do exactly that. What are you arguing against?

This to me really ignores all the other influences capitalist competition will have on this hypothetical world. AI will be better at us than art. AI generated art will sell better than human art. There will be little incentive to do anything other than consume. I doubt in this hypothetical world it would be made at all accessible to pursue things which might remind humans of the distinct human abilities and feelings in a world where our time will rather than freed up, be dedicated to consuming rather than producing. The ruling class will never let us have free time unless we are producing for them in some way.

Post-Scarcity Capitalism is a dystopia. There’s no way around it.

The huge performance boost of a mere 738M model, appears to be due to it being a multimodal model. Which can use not only text but image and other means as well.

First, there's no reason to be either afraid or (too) optimistic. We cannot ultimately control the future - only attempt to influence outcomes. I would not say we are pursuing the singularity, but rather so long as computing progress continues, it is inevitable. The forces of capitalist competition will ensure that computing efficiency and capabilities continue to develop. Ultimately, AI systems will become self-improving.

The hope is that we can guide all of this to a good outcome. And the good outcomes should be overwhelmingly positive. My hope is that:

• The economy can be largely automated
• The economic pressure to hold a 40 hour/week job is eliminated
• That basic human needs (food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education) become freely available

If and when these things occur, humanity will be truly free in a way that we have not been since before the Industrial Revolution (at least). We will be free to do what we like, when we like. If you want to do nothing and accept the basic, subsistence level benefits, you'd be free to do that. If you want to pursue art, you'd be free to do that. If you want to help restore the environment or just your community, you'd be free to do that. If you want to pursue teaching, childcare, medicine, science, space exploration, engineering - you'd be free to do any (or all!) of those.

The negatives could be just as equally disruptive or even catastrophic. The worst outcome I can conceive of is this: AI leads to absolute and total income inequality. The wealthy control the AIs which drive a completely automated economy. The "elite" group in control share none of the benefits with the remainder of human society thus casting 90+ percent of people into permanent, grinding poverty. Eventually those in control decide that the remainder of humanity is worthless and begin to fire up the killbot armies.

I remain optimistic. I don't seriously believe that anyone (who is not insane) would desire that kind of negative outcome. So long as capitalism continues to exist, the elites will always need consumers - even in an automated economy. At the same time, there is little to nothing I can do to control the outcome either way. So, there's no point in stressing about it. Live your life, let your voice be heard on important topics and make peace with the fact that there are things beyond our control.