What about Altman?

I read somewhere once that Sam Altman sounds like a name for a fictional villain made up by Hideo Kojima for Metal Gear Solid, and it will never not make sense.

Saltman

That's a very one-dimensional view. Two things I'd encourage you to consider:

1. What is quality, exactly? An average person on Facebook prefers AI-generated images to real photos or human art. Is their preference a signal of quality, or is this actually optimizing for orthogonal metrics - agreeability, engagement, etc?

2. Do increases in quality always translate to "everyone winning"? For example, is it a net win if a marketing flyer for your local grocery store has 10% higher "quality" if it means that your next-door neighbor who used to design these is no longer employed? Even if you disregard the feelings of the neighbor, is it good for you? You stand to lose more than you're gaining (e.g., reduction in property values if they can no longer afford upkeep).

I don't want to paint AI as a net negative, but these dynamics are pretty complex. There's plenty of situations where AI is not upleveling quality, or where quality is comparatively unimportant.

His brain waves

Experience? Ask it to write a prompt to generate an image and it generates an image instead.

I stopped asking it to put me in a photo in different scenarios for laughs because it considers me a public figure. I am not. I've managed to wrangle quite questionable content out of it, but never to slap my face on a meme.

Nothing on how long the battery lasts?

Isn’t the real risk that as AI get’s smarter and given more autonomy, it will start to decide on humans instead of with us? And that it will align us instead of the other way around. That this automatically leads to extinction and apocalypse I don’t understand.

We align cattle because we get something out of them: their calories. Native aurochs are exinct now as they were not well enough aligned.

What will we offer to the ai gods who are wiser, more capable than us, and do not even need to consume our flesh? Why might the AI care to devote resources towards feeding, housing, and caring for ourselves when it could devote resources to its own development instead?

Why do we need to offer anything to them?

Intelligent AI is a product of its training data, reinforcement and goal functions.

There's nothing to suggest that LLMs trained on our collective desires and goals will autonomously and miraculously turn into weird unknownable uninterpretable aliens.

If advanced AI is distributed well, and most advanced AI is aligned well (bar the few aliens that appear due to humans infecting them with bad goal functions or poisoning their well), the majority will deal with the minority.

This is the only reasonable way to deal with a super-intelligence, short of not inventing it to begin with, but we all know that's never going to happen - and I'm not convinced it should happen. From where I'm standing, this is the next hurdle humanity needs to overcome to earn its place and a natural course of our evolution. If we had always avoided danger, we'd never have left the cave.

I'm not convinced you can have an AI intelligent enough to dominate the world if it is trained on a single domain. The intelligence comes from all of the patterns and heuristics it learns across the entire web of all domains. You could train something far more narrow, but it'd be easily overcome by something more general that is tasked with maintaining human objectives.

For a seriously dangerous ASI you'd have to basically train it on everything, and then finetune it for maximal carnage. That's not something the frontier labs are going to do (at least... I hope not), and anyone attempting this with limited hardware will be outpaced by frontier lab AI or the collective of personal agents that aren't misaligned, and they can intercept it and alert on its behavior.

I imagine we'll be getting to a point shortly where anything that is key infrastructure and has the capacity to be accessed on a network will require a permanently running aligned interceptor AI to observe and monitor systems.

We're basically recreating the human immune system in digital form for the entire species.

It might consider us a very efficient processing unit. Useful to hand over simple tasks with correct alignment and some oversight.

I thought it already runs laps around us cognitively? And for physical tasks it can make a robot version of us that is stronger, faster, can do more, doesn't need to sleep, etc. Human bipedal form is probably pretty limiting compared to something better like a crab.

Yes, laugh at the chinese robots who fall over at keynotes all you want, the ones sprinting at 30mph keep me up at night and that's probably not even representative of the bleeding edge.

Does your calculator runs laps around you? They have no intention of them selfs. I only fear the intention of the humans miss-using AI.

My calculator is not hacking other peoples websites, no.

Also, extinction is WAY nicer than the cattle treatment.

Do you align ants in your backyard, or do you simply demolish their home and build your shed?

I do not speak their language, I am not trained on their data, and I don’t run on their hardware.

The idea that they are entirely trained on human intelligence is already outdated. Yes, the earlier models relied heavily on RLHF and human curated data but we have since moved on to synthetic data produced by the models themselves and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR).

Are humans trained on the collective ant internet?

Must be early. Try the news.

So why would someone risk his live and become a thief instead of a doctor?

Laziness mostly. It takes at least a decade of sustained exhausting mental and physical work to become a doctor, becoming a thief is mostly opportunity.

Med school.

Or basic simple profit for sociopaths. Organized criminal rings have turned catalytic converter theft into a multi-million to billion dollar+ industry. Its basically steal from the POOR middle-class and make the sociopaths even more rich.

Nobody desperate will dare steal from the gangs since its not just death, but PAIN before death.

What causes people to join gangs in the first place, might you suppose?

Social welfare and affordable insurance will solve more than owning guns and killing each other over property.

Burglars in particular tend to target empty houses precisely to avoid confrontation. To bring a weapon only make sense if there is a chance of getting shot at.

Isn't "crime, done with the involvement of a firearm" also often more harshly punished than the plain crime itself? If a burglar is targeting empty houses, this would give them a strong incentive to not bring a firearm, just in case they get caught.

As the saying goes, only break one law at a time!

Yes burglary with weapons is called robbery and is treated as a more serious crime with a higher punishments in a lot of jurisdiction

I thought robbery required a victim person be present.