alt Hacker NewsThey're aligned with humans. This is why I think the alignment problem has a very very important "non-visible" portion that is not considered deeply enough. We should not want a super intelligent being that can act in the world to also inherit all human traits. Those behaviors will get amplified and could be even more unpredictable (e.g. applying a behavior in a context where doing so is very dangerous).
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I can't take the alignment people seriously. Because if humanity has shown anything, it's that a lot of people are, euphemistically, are bad individuals. Alignment assumes that the person dictating the outcomes desire healthy outcomes, aren't self serving and don't want any subgroups dead and that morality is held as a universal set of beliefs that unify everyone. And that so long as the AI delivers on exactly what they are tasked with, it will all be fine and nothing bad will ever happen.
It's like these dorks never met humanity. One mans safe pure society, is another mans dead ethnic group.
Every fear about AI, is a veiled fear that a human somewhere now has the tool to enact his desires at scale. Biological warfare, nuclear megadeaths, copyright infringement, job replacement, it's all reflections on what we know humans may do if given the option and lack of societal controls on the problem space. AI just is accelerating the route to delivering on those options.
Some people need to watch Oppenheimer a bit more, the researchers don't get to determine alignment, they just build the tool. The powerful person at the top of the org chart decides where the overall alignment points, whether it's Musk, Trump, Altman or Amodei. Whoever wins out.
And the problem with distillation and local llms, isn't that it's theft or anything hypocritical like that, it's that if you give a million people a million models they fully control and get to align, inevitably, The same percentage of those million as there are shady businessmen, shortcut takers, misandrists, criminals, supremacists and general idiots in the general population, will not seek to wrought outcomes positive for society. And by those personality statistics, we're pretty hosed.
They imitate humans. Alignment is about shaping their behavior towards safety.
Definitely. A human can be manipulated with threats or emotional appeals, has a drive for self-preservation, can be pressured by peers. All traits that seem to be difficult to entirely suppress in the models…