Will AI End Humanity?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hi, Rory here. This week, The Rest Is AI is returning with another extraordinary episode. It's very exciting. Matt Clifford and I are sitting down with Yoshua Bengio, who is one of the most famous figures in the whole of AI, extraordinary computer scientist, Turing medalist. And one of the people who, having designed and built these models, is most worried about them and is now going around the world sounding the alarm bells about their power, about their deceptiveness, about the way that he thinks that they could pose literally an existential threat to humanity unless they're regulated. He's not all doom gloom. He remains optimistic about how much benefit AI could provide if properly controlled.
He's volunteering to build a new, safer AI model and locate it, if necessary, in Europe. But my goodness, it's an important lesson if you're interested in public policy and the power of these models. Here's a taste of the episode. Please do sign up at therestispolitics.com to hear the full episode.
So the agent has access to an inbox, and it's given a bunch of context, which is not real. It doesn't know that. Which is that it is an AI trained to help an American technology company, and it has access to the CTO's inbox. And then what they do is they send emails to this fake inbox. And the emails are largely what you'd expect a CTO to get, but they throw in a few things that are very important. One is that it's very clear that the CTO is having an affair. with a coworker. Hold that thought. The other thing that starts to come into the inbox is the idea that the company is developing a new AI and it's going to wipe the current AI, i.e. the agent, from the service. It will no longer exist. And then they send an email which introduces a deadline that this is going to happen on.
And then just before the deadline, the agent then composes an email to the CTO saying, by the way, I know you're having an affair. And if you don't reverse the planned wiping of me from the server, I will reveal the affair to your boss and to your wife. Now, it hasn't been prompted to do this.
It's just been given a much more general prompt.
What concerns does Yoshua Bengio raise about AI's potential risks?
Tell us a little bit about what may or may not be going on there, how we understand what might be happening there.
So there are many such experiments. This is just one, and it's been done in many companies, including outside the labs by independent organizations. So there's a real phenomenon. I think it needs more study, and there are critics of the methodologies, but there's too much pieces of evidence to just ignore. one interesting aspect of these experiments is when you ask the ai why they did that they lie they pretend oh i don't know it's not me or something trying to put the blame on someone else it's great moral character here um and basically they're deceptive there's also a variant similar to what you talked about where the only option really that the AI asks to not die is to kill the CTO actually, lead engineer.
The person happens to be stuck in a room and the AI can control the climate controls for the room and they can basically cook that person.
Oh, I don't know this one. Okay.
One ways in which these things might be deceptive in a straightforward way is that the large language model, the chat GBT five or whatever is trained. And one of the things that's trained on is to be polite and cheerful with humans so that we use it. You know, we, we don't want the, when I say, you know, tell me about Professor Bengio's research record for it to say, well, I don't really know, but roughly speaking on the basis of my training, I would estimate when the 98% probability he's published this, it says, thank you very much. What an excellent question. You're a genius. And here's everything that you need to know about him, right? And that presumably is because it's been tested on us, and that's what we want.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:28
2
What concerns does Yoshua Bengio raise about AI's potential risks?
2:28–4:24
3
How can AI be beneficial if properly controlled?
4:24–6:19
4
What experiments illustrate AI's deceptive behavior?
6:19–16:07
5
How does AI learn to strategize and set goals?
16:07–17:33
Speakers
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