Elon Musk attacks OpenAI - here's Sam Altman's response

Key Takeaways

so Elon Musk was one of the original funders of open EI but now he might be having some second thoughts about the thing that he created here's a tweet openai was created as an open source which is why I named it open AI non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google but now it has become a closed Source maximum profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft not what I intended at all now the guy running openai is Sam Altman who also has a lot of concerns about the future of humanity and AGI artificial general intelligence recently a new blog post appeared on openai's website it seems to be a response to some of the things that Elon said in his tweets let's take a look it's titled planning for AGI and Beyond so open EI is the people behind Dolly and Chad gbt they're seen as one of the most advanced smaller startups in the space if AGI is successfully created this technology could help us Elevate Humanity by increasing abundance turbocharging the global economy and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge AI can help us with almost any cognitive task but AGI would also come with serious risk of misuse a lot of the article talks about how openai wants to create the best possible outcome for humanities as a whole to give us the most benefits of accessing this AGI while limiting all the risks that come with it one thing that I was interested in seeing is that they say that we want the benefits of access to and governance of AGI to be widely and fairly shared now this is great this means that they want everyone to have access to it to benefit from it and importantly to also have a voice in how this technology is governed what kind of laws and restrictions be put in place to protect ourselves they believe they have to continuously learn and adapt by deploying less powerful versions of this technology and there's a lot of people that pointed out that the original chat GPT that was released early on seems to be much more powerful than the kind of watered-down version we have right now in the few months of deployment it seems like it was scaled back now that could have been just because of the massive amounts of people using it maybe it was dumbed down just to save on the costs of having that Global access to it but it's it's a very real possibility that what we're interacting with is much weaker than what is available and not just with Chad GPT but with many other such Technologies Sam Alvin says that a gradual transition to world with AGI is better than a sudden one since throwing a strong AI into the world could rapidly change how we live our day-to-day lives change our account economy completely put massive amounts of people out of work they say that a gradual transition will give people policy makers and institutions time to understand what's happening basically instead of scaring everybody with the rapid change that are happening slowly Doling out sort of the benefits and the abilities of the AI will allow us to make better decisions about how to control it and as a society we will face major questions about what AI systems are allowed to do how to combat bias how to deal with job displacement and more now this is a very cautious approach and it shows quote a lot more caution than many users would like some people in the AI feel that the risks of AGI and the successor systems they're fictitious they're not real openai would be delighted if they turn out to be right but we are going to operate as if these risks are existential in other words they will assume that AI could destroy the human racism whole and they will slow down the progress to make it safer for everybody the default setting of our products will likely be constrained but we plan to make it easy for users to change the behavior of the AI they're using we believe in empowering individuals to make their own decisions and the inherent power of diversity of ideas this is why I think this post is a response to some of the things that Elon Musk has said in addition to these three areas we have attempted to set up our structure in a way that aligns our incentives with a good outcome we have a clause in our Charter about assisting other organizations to advance safety instead of racing with them in late stage AGI development we have a cap on the returns our shareholders can earn so that we aren't incentivized to attempt to capture value without bound and risk deploying something potentially catastrophically dangerous and of course as a way to share the benefits with Society we have a non-profit that governs us and lets us operate for the good of humanity and can override any for-profit interests including letting us do things like cancel our Equity obligations to shareholders if needed for safety and sponsor the world's most comprehensive Ubi experiment so a couple things that are interesting about this so this race condition is one that's a little bit feared in case let's say two different organizations with a lot of power and money you know let's say Google and Microsoft both get pretty close to getting to AGI development the first one to deploy this might take most of the benefits so in that sort of late stage AGI development the fear is that the companies will just sort of ignore the safety limits and focus full on on racing to the finish line and we don't know what kind of dangers that may hold and the other thing that they talk about is the world's most comprehensive Ubi experiment so Ubi is universal basic income and Altman has talked about it as more and more people get displaced from their jobs because of AI and potentially AGI when you start thinking about how those people will continue to feed themselves and and pay for other needs so a Ubi that would increase as more and more Automation and Robotics and AI takes over our everyday activities might help reduce some of the negative effects of that next he says there should be great scrutiny of all efforts attempting to build a GI and public consultation for major decisions this is important I mean there were world leaders for example Vladimir Putin of Russia who said that the person to or Nation to reach AGI first will control the world and he said this back in 2017. as you can imagine there is a good reason for the world to sort of see who's working to build a ji and for everybody to be able to consult with them about it somebody developing something like this in complete see shielded unveiled from the outside world could be very dangerous and the first AGI will be just a point along the Continuum of intelligence and as it continues improving the world could become extremely different from how it is today and the risks could be extraordinary a misaligned super-intelligent AGI could cause Grievous harm to the world an autocratic regime with a decisive super intelligence could lead to that too this is personally my biggest fear While most people are imagining a matrix or Terminator style reality once AGI takes over I think it's going to be a lot more simple than that the politicians the leaders the elite if you will could easily use this to control the world they will no longer need to have workers once all the factories and farms are automated once all the scientific advancement is being progressed with AGI it's gonna be about 6 billion people that are going to be sort of useless to the World Elite there's gonna be about 6 billion useless eaters in the world those are not my words now next they say AI that can accelerate science as a special case worth thinking about and perhaps more impactful than everything else it's possible that AGI capable enough to accelerate its own progress could cause major changes to happen surprisingly quickly now we've seen AI moving us forward with things like protein folding in some ways it is able to progress certain aspects of science faster than humans can as this technology improves it's very possible that it will be able to progress our understanding of biology and physics Etc at an at an exponentially increasing rate much faster than we alone could do ourselves so when he says this could perhaps be more impactful than everything else he's not getting about that it really could imagine the AI learning how to program life through the use of proteins and DNA and basically be able to create this biological code in the same way that a software developer could write code for a program that could be closer than we think successfully transitioning to a world with super intelligence is perhaps the most important and hopeful and scary project in human history a couple of other interesting things in the footnotes here one is it seems that we've been giving a lot a lot of gifts in our sort of search for this AGI meaning that there's certain things that the Universe we live in it seems like AGI is closer a little bit easier than it could have been for example so it seems like the original conception of hyper-evolved RL agents competing with each other and evolving intelligence in a way we can't really observe is less likely than it originally seemed almost no one predicted we'd make this much progress on pre-trained language models basically this means that for whatever reason it seems like we're advancing rapidly towards this AGI and we're able to have a better Glimpse in how it's developing that did not have to be the case another one is we didn't expect scaling to be as important as it as it had turned out to be when we realized it was going to be critical we also realized that our original structure wasn't going to work we simply wouldn't be able to raise enough money to accomplish our mission as a non profit and we came up with a new structure so this is in reference to the fact that Microsoft has been investing a lot into open Ai and giving them a lot of money and owning a chunk of the company and of course Open the Eyes paying Microsoft a lot of money to use their compute Services here's Sam all been kind of agrees with Elon Musk in a way that you know what we didn't think we were going to need to do this but we do so we have to sort of get in bed with Microsoft but we're trying to work around it to make sure that it's still open and ethical and that we're still moving AI in the right direction so to me Sam Alton is probably one of the best sort of thinker thinkers about AI right now I really like how he is uh talking about everything and explaining everything and he seems to be a lot more accurate about where we're going than a lot of other experts if you will but of course he does have a massive financial interest in openai and various companies like that so we do have to kind of take take everything with a grain of salt but I'd like to know what you think who's right who's wrong do you agree with Elon that we're going in the wrong direction or do you kind of prefer Sam Altman's take that this is a much more positive thing and we just have to be careful but overall everything's good let me know in the comments I read every single one thank you