Roman Yampolsky
speaker
257 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Roman Yampolsky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
At extreme, the systems which are narrow and less complex could be understood pretty well.
Any work in a safety direction right now seems like a good idea because we are not slowing down. I'm not for a second thinking that my message or anyone else's will be heard and will be a sane civilization which decides not to kill itself by creating its own replacements.
Again, it's always limited by either geographic constraints, pause in US, pause in China. So there are other jurisdictions as the scale of a project becomes smaller. So right now it's like Manhattan project scale in terms of costs and people. But if five years from now, compute is available on a desktop to do it, regulation will not help. You can't control it as easy.
Any kid in a garage can train a model. So a lot of it is, in my opinion, just safety theater, security theater, where we're saying, oh, it's illegal to train models so big. Okay.
Given that a lot of the terms are not well-defined and really cannot be enforced in real life, we don't have ways to monitor training runs meaningfully live while they take place. There are limits to testing for capabilities I mentioned, so a lot of it cannot be enforced. Do I strongly support all that regulation? Yes, of course.
Any type of red tape will slow it down and take money away from compute towards lawyers.
That's the big one.
So the smart thing is not to build something you cannot control, you cannot understand. Build what you can and benefit from it. I'm a big believer in personal self-interest. A lot of guys running those companies are young, rich people. What do they have to gain beyond billions we already have financially, right? It's not a requirement that they press that button. They can easily wait a long time.
They can... Just choose not to do it and still have amazing life. In history, a lot of times, if you did something really bad, at least you became part of history books. There is a chance in this case there won't be any history.
Well, either they have to prove that, of course, it's possible to indefinitely control godlike superintelligent machines by humans, and ideally let us know how, or agree that it's not possible and it's a very bad idea to do it, including for them personally and their families and friends and capital.
So again, I'm not inside. From outside, it seems like there is a certain filtering going on and restrictions and criticism and what they can say. And everyone who was working in charge of safety and whose responsibility it was to protect us said, you know what? I'm going home. So that's not encouraging.
Climate change?
Well, I think a lot of people who historically worked on AI never considered what happens when they succeed. Stuart Russell speaks beautifully about that. Let's look, okay, maybe superintelligence is too futuristic. We can develop practical tools for it. Let's look at software today. What is the state of safety and security of our user software? Things we give to millions of people.
There is no liability. You click, I agree. What are you agreeing to? Nobody knows, nobody reads, but you're basically saying it will spy on you, corrupt your data, kill your firstborn, and you agree and you're not going to sell the company. That's the best they can do for mundane software, word processor, text software.
No liability, no responsibility, just as long as you agree not to sue us, you can use it.
If this is a state of the art in systems which are narrow accountants, stable manipulators, why do we think we can do so much better with much more complex systems across multiple domains in the environment with malevolent actors, with, again, self-improvement, with capabilities exceeding those of humans thinking about it?
In many domains, we see car manufacturing, drug development. The burden of proof is on the manufacturer of product or service to show their product or service is safe. It is not up to the user to prove that there are problems. They have to do appropriate safety studies. They have to get government approval for selling the product, and they're still fully responsible for what happens.
We don't see any of that here. They can deploy whatever they want, and I have to explain how that system is going to kill everyone. I don't work for that company. You have to explain to me how it definitely cannot mess up.
I agree completely, but that's what scares me. The response is when they start to get dangerous, we'll really get it together. The politicians will pass the right laws. Engineers will solve the right problems. We are not that good at many of those things. We take forever and we are not early. We are two years away according to prediction markets. This is not a biased CEO fundraising.
This is what smartest people, super forecasters are thinking of this problem.
Showing 161–180 of 257 · page 9 of 13
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