OpenAI loses another senior figure, disperses safety research team he led
- Reference: 1729837508
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/10/25/open_ai_readiness_advisor_leaves/
- Source link:
The departing exec is Miles Brundage who on Friday will cease working as senior advisor for AGI readiness. AGI – artificial general intelligence – is the term used to describe AI that appears to have the same cognitive abilities as a human. Like people, AGIs could theoretically learn almost anything. Preparing for the arrival of AGI is regarded as an important and responsible action, given the possibility AGIs could do better than humans in some fields.
AI may remove the obligation to work for a living
Brundage revealed his departure in a [1]Substack post in which he explained his decision as a desire to contemplate OpenAI's AGI readiness, and the world, without having his view biased by being an employee.
In his post, he wrote that Open AI has "gaps" in its readiness – but so does every other advanced AI lab.
"Neither OpenAI nor any other frontier lab is ready, and the world is also not ready," he wrote, adding "To be clear, I don't think this is a controversial statement among OpenAI's leadership, and notably, that's a different question from whether the company and the world are on track to be ready at the relevant time (though I think the gaps remaining are substantial enough that I'll be working on AI policy for the rest of my career)."
[2]
Despite that state of unreadiness, his post reveals that OpenAI's AGI readiness team will be dispersed among other teams, as part of a re-org.
[3]
[4]
Brundage also opined that "AI and AGI benefiting all of humanity is not automatic and requires deliberate choices to be made by decision-makers in governments, non-profits, civil society, and industry, and this needs to be informed by robust public discussion." Those efforts need to consider both safety and equitable distribution of benefits, he suggested.
"I think AI capabilities are improving very quickly and policymakers need to act more urgently," he noted, but suggested recent experience in fields such as pandemic preparedness mean action won't happen unless leaders can communicate a sense of urgency.
[5]
"I think we don't have all the AI policy ideas we need, and many of the ideas floating around are bad or too vague to be confidently judged," he added.
Brundage wrote that one idea he disagrees with "is for democratic countries to race against autocratic countries."
"I think that having and fostering such a zero-sum mentality increases the likelihood of corner-cutting on safety and security," he suggested, before urging "academics, companies, civil society, and policymakers [to] work collaboratively to find a way to ensure that Western AI development is not seen as a threat to other countries' safety or regime stability, so that we can work across borders to solve the very thorny safety and security challenges ahead."
[6]
He affirms that collaboration is important – despite his belief that it is very likely "Western countries continue to substantially outcompete China on AI."
The Middle Kingdom and other autocratic nations have enough tech to "build very sophisticated capabilities," so failing to engage on safety manage risk would be dangerously short-sighted.
[7]OpenAI's rapid growth loaded with 'corner case' challenges, says Fivetran CEO
[8]Major publishers sue Perplexity AI for scraping without paying
[9]Voice-enabled AI agents can automate everything, even your phone scams
[10]OpenAI says Chinese gang tried to phish its staff
While Brundage sees many reasons to consider AI safety, he also sees plenty of upside.
"I think it's likely that in the coming years (not decades), AI could enable sufficient economic growth that an early retirement at a high standard of living is easily achievable," he wrote. "Before that, there will likely be a period in which it is easier to automate tasks that can be done remotely."
But there may be some tough years first. "In the near term, I worry a lot about AI disrupting opportunities for people who desperately want work."
If we get it right, he thinks humanity will have the option to "remove the obligation to work for a living."
"That is not something we're prepared for politically, culturally, or otherwise, and needs to be part of the policy conversation," he suggested. "A naïve shift towards a post-work world risks civilizational stagnation (see: Wall-E), and much more thought and debate about this is needed."
Post-work is also a matter OpenAI considers quite often, as Brundage joins the org's [11]CTO, chief research officer and research VP , plus [12]co-founder Ilya Sutskever , as recent departures from the AI standard-bearer.
Brundage played down the significance of his own departure, writing "I have been here for over six years, which is pretty long by OpenAI standards (it has grown a lot over those six years!)." ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://milesbrundage.substack.com/p/why-im-leaving-openai-and-what-im
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZxtsSQrroCZoV3csRxfDXQAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZxtsSQrroCZoV3csRxfDXQAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZxtsSQrroCZoV3csRxfDXQAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZxtsSQrroCZoV3csRxfDXQAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZxtsSQrroCZoV3csRxfDXQAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/23/fivetran_ceo_interview/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/22/publishers_sue_perplexity_ai/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/24/openai_realtime_api_phone_scam/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/china_phish_openai/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/26/openai_execs_leave/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/15/openai_cofounder_ilya_sutskever_leaves/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Good news, Bad News
In my opinion that next fundamental breakthrough will be when they will successfully wire a computer to a human brain and that the computer will be capable of using the living neuronal network as a means of advancing it's own learning process. That's when the real scary stuff will begin.
We already know that Neuralink has already succeeded in establishing a basic wiring stage. From here on in they, Neurlink and the other research labs, will start to quickly advance this kind of technology as I imagine that the equivalent of a Moore's law will apply here too.
Re: using the living neuronal network
Thank fuck we don't bother with ethics anymore, eh?
Re: using the living neuronal network
"Thank fuck we don't bother with ethics anymore, eh?"
Since when did industry care about ethics ?
Re: Good news, Bad News
Nothing you have said will prevent some nutter from connecting the big red nuke button to a spam filter. THAT is the real problem here!
"remove the obligation to work for a living"
Objectively, we're going in that direction. We have machines to do the hardest parts of manual labor (aka mining, tunneling, farming, etc). These machines need human supervision, but humans do not need to do the hard work. We have robots for many aspects of manufacturing. Cars are made mostly by robots, with humans just checking things out.
As a species, we are working towards having robots do everything. We'll have a robot car, no need to drive. We'll have a robot butler, no need to clean the house. We'll have robot road makers, house builders, farmers, etc. We're going there.
When we get there, what will we do ? We'll sit back and watch all that stuff work for us. Meanwhile, we'll be watching cat videos on Youtube. That means we'll need the means to have a computer, a connection, and the snacks we eat in front of said screen. All of that will need to be provided for, because we won't be working anymore.
This will be a sea change in human society. The sci-fi novel The Expanse touched on that subject, with Earth population being able to decide between Basic, where they would be fed/cared for for nothing, and /Not Basic/ (don't quite remember), where you had a career (mainly in politics, apparently) and a salary that could allow you some benefits beyond just having food, clothing, shelter and health care.
In the long run, we're going to have to come to grips with a society where humans no longer need to work to provide for themselves.
But it's in the long run.
Re: "remove the obligation to work for a living"
The idea that automation will remove the need to work has been around as long as technology. So has the notion of technology benefiting all of humanity .
I don't think there's any reason to suppose this particular technology will be different to any other in those respects.
Plus, it ignores the huge cost of the care and feeding of the beast. They're already talking about having to build nuclear power plants - not for the benefit of humanity but for the benefit of the (owners of the) machines. And it's an endless process: there will always be something more that can be learned and ingested and the training and retraining must inevitably continue. And it's the poor bloody humans that will be excavating new material in the content mines.
But above all, these fantastic visions of an idealistic future require us to believe that, perhaps with a little light-touch external guidance, Utopia will joyously be delivered by the likes of Microsoft and Google. That seems like the ultimate AI hallucination.
Re: "remove the obligation to work for a living"
"In the long run, we're going to have to come to grips with a society where humans no longer need to work to provide for themselves."
The *extremely* long run. Capitalists do not want a world in which we no longer need to work to survive. Not only is that leaving money on the table, from their perspective, but if we're not working to exhaustion, then we have the time to sit and think about how shitty the status quo is, and how to go about knocking them off their perch. "The purpose of a system is what is does", ie: it funnels public money to the already ultra-rich and powerful, and it protects them from the consequences of their action. That is not a boat which they are going to want rocked.
I mean, so much of the debate around AI and its abilities is already hand-wavy bullshit to that end. "Look this way, at the existential terrors that a non-existant AGI will bring! Plz don't look behind the curtain at how we really just use LLMs to automate our biases at an industrial scale, push creatives out of work, and hoover up the entire internet."
The fact that OpenAI *still exist*, and haven't been sued for trillions in copyright infringements kinda bears that out. Remember when the RIAA sued the little people for trillions just for a few MP3s?
Re: "remove the obligation to work for a living"
" Capitalists do not want a world in which we no longer need to work to survive"
Capitalism would no longer exist if people did not have to work, as the things that you need to survive would no longer have any intrinsic value that could be exploited by the banks/capitalists..
Re: "remove the obligation to work for a living"
No. Stuff you need to survive has intrinsic value because it's stuff you need to survive.
Take away someone's food/water/land/living space and find out how much intrinsic value they attach to it.
You'll always need to swap your thing you made/work you did for someone else's thing they made/work you need them to do, or for basics like food and clean water or a place to live.
Resources will never be infinite.
Whether you do this by exchanging money or clubbing them over the head until they comply is up to you.
Just another rat...
Leaving the sinking ship....
Good news, Bad News
On one hand, corporations will care just as much about AGI safety as they did about LLM safety, which is not at all - or at least just doing little enough that they can pretend they care.
On the other hand, you're not getting AGI from LLM no matter how large you scale it, so we're safe from that till at least another fundamental breakthrough. Yay?