alt Hacker News"Almost sounds like what those AI safety and alignment people were talking about years ago. The people in these various companies who kept tabs on AI risk out in public and were continuously mocked on HN. All of this stuff is viewed as "future sci-fi" until suddenly it's not."
Are there any practical approaches to AI safety? I hear a lot of warnings but I don't hear much about what to do. Considering that there are many open source models know, what can be done?
Replies
c1ccccc1 • yesterday at 8:43 PM
If we can't thinking of any better ideas, at least we know that "shutting it all down" would be effective.
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teiferer • yesterday at 7:13 PM
Fund research into this, big time. For starters. And not just some figleaf anthropomorphizing hippie folks.
Nobody has an answer to alignment and there is no reason to believe that it's the kind of problem you can plausibly solve in one shot against a formidable power-seeking AI.
The closest things to a technical answer I have seen are
1. "We'll have ChatGPT 9 solve it so that ChatGPT 10 is aligned, and then ChatGPT 10 can stop all the other AIs somehow"
2. "Let's do interpretability research so that we can understand what an AI is thinking and then maybe solve the alignment problem with that information."
In terms of non-technical answers, there is
3. hope scaling stops working before we create an AI formidable enough to pose an existential risk
4. hope alignment somehow happens for free
5. hope we can somehow create an enforceable multilateral treaty to stop research into a very profitable enterprise, despite the enormous economic incentives to defect.
I have the most faith in option 3, but unfortunately there's really nothing that can be done to make it more plausible -- it either happens or it doesn't.