AI Alignment & AGI Fire Alarm - Connor Leahy

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Recorded01 Nov 2020

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This week Dr. Tim Scarfe, Alex Stenlake and Yannic Kilcher speak with AGI and AI alignment specialist Connor Leahy a machine learning engineer from Aleph Alpha and founder of EleutherAI. Connor believes that AI alignment is philosophy with a deadline and that we are on the precipice, the stakes are astronomical. AI is important, and it will go wrong by default. Connor thinks that the singularity or intelligence explosion is near. Connor says that AGI is like climate change but worse, even harder problems, even shorter deadline and even worse consequences for the future. These problems are hard, and nobody knows what to do about them. 00:00:00 Introduction to AI alignment and AGI fire alarm 00:15:16 Main Show Intro 00:18:38 Different schools of thought on AI safety 00:24:03 What is intelligence? 00:25:48 AI Alignment 00:27:39 Humans dont have a coherent utility function 00:28:13 Newcomb's paradox and advanced decision problems 00:34:01 Incentives and behavioural economics 00:37:19 Prisoner's dilemma 00:40:24 Ayn Rand and game theory in politics and business 00:44:04 Instrumental convergence and orthogonality thesis 00:46:14 Utility functions and the Stop button problem 00:55:24 AI corrigibality - self alignment 00:56:16 Decision theory and stability / wireheading / robust delegation 00:59:30 Stop button problem 01:00:40 Making the world a better place 01:03:43 Is intelligence a search problem? 01:04:39 Mesa optimisation / humans are misaligned AI 01:06:04 Inner vs outer alignment / faulty reward functions 01:07:31 Large corporations are intelligent and have no stop function 01:10:21 Dutch booking / what is rationality / decision theory 01:16:32 Understanding very powerful AIs 01:18:03 Kolmogorov complexity 01:19:52 GPT-3 - is it intelligent, are humans even intelligent? 01:28:40 Scaling hypothesis 01:29:30 Connor thought DL was dead in 2017 01:37:54 Why is GPT-3 as intelligent as a human 01:44:43 Jeff Hawkins on intelligence as compression and the great lookup table 01:50:28 AI ethics related to AI alignment? 01:53:26 Interpretability 01:56:27 Regulation 01:57:54 Intelligence explosion Discord: https://discord.com/invite/vtRgjbM EleutherAI: https://www.eleuther.ai Twitter: https://twitter.com/npcollapse LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connor-j-leahy/

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