It’s darkly funny that the tech companies are posturing as if they
take alignment fears seriously… so that they can hype up their LLM as a
an AGI…
Given OpenAI’s origins… they might actually somewhat consider these
fears legitimate…. But it doesn’t stop them from using fear mongering to
hype their AI.
> I can not think of anything more likely to start “a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions” than the actions taken by OpenAI when authoring their Technical Report and System Card for GPT-4.
While the path they chose is counter to their stated objectives, at least they are releasing the base model to (select) researchers, and presumably that will come with some more detail which is likely to emerge in those third party studies.
Adding Charles Stross' [essay on corporations as slow AI](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html) here, since it walks a similar path
More practically, it's a sign that the party in silicon valley is coming to an end with that sort of data laundering; they're desperate for the one weird trick that keeps them going.
This is a start (diminished unfortunately by Chiang overrating basic income as a panacea) but a more thorough investigation would have to look at commodity fetishism, superprofits, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
I can understand the appeal of UBI (and to Chiang's credit he's too smart to fall for the UBI *instead* of basic safety nets) for a lot of people who think this economic system is just tuned wrong, and at least in the excerpt of his Klein Show appearance he's talking about a more limited set of issues than a full critique of Capital.
But yeah, he's got a little technosolutionism in him, which is right and proper for a science fiction writer, less so for a social commentator.
I mean, Nick Land would agree. The thing is reframing it as AI tells a different and I think more realistic story than the failed metanarratives of Marxism, which is intimately tied to capitalism as a concept.
Nick Land is the sort of accelerationist who'd kill off every brown person in the third world if it would break the current system. No one should listen to him.
It’s darkly funny that the tech companies are posturing as if they take alignment fears seriously… so that they can hype up their LLM as a an AGI…
Given OpenAI’s origins… they might actually somewhat consider these fears legitimate…. But it doesn’t stop them from using fear mongering to hype their AI.
Where’s that
Ken LieuTed Chiang article about AI fear being about capitalism when you need itEdit- I suck and confused Chiang and Lieu
Here it is
https://kottke.org/21/04/ted-chiang-fears-of-technology-are-fears-of-capitalism