What happened with OpenAI (AGI the new nuke)

Deep dive in wide aspects of AI:

Youtube: Then & Now – How AI was Stolen

Technical aspect of AI:

Deep Learning: A Crash Course (2018) | SIGGRAPH Courses

Deep learning is a revolutionary technique for discovering patterns from data. We’ll see how this technology works and what it offers us for computer graphic…

Youtube: ACMSIGGRAPH – Deep Learning: A Crash Course (2018) | SIGGRAPH Courses

Look at all aspects of AGI; you can see it as something comparable to a nuclear weapon—a complete game changer. Understanding this point allows us to view current events from different perspectives. The West is the most advanced and heavily invested in AI, which will lead to AGI. In this context, Trump and US sanctions on China, along with other ongoing events, begin to make sense.

Most specialists and knowledgeable individuals in AI, given the current AI renaissance, assume AGI will emerge within the next 10 years. The West is aware of this and understands the significance of AGI. The West is willing to take significant risks, raising their entire economic structure and the global order, to be the first to achieve AGI, similar to their approach with nuclear weapons to impose a new world order.

AGI is not just a possibility; it’s an inevitability expected to arrive in about 10 years. The Western assumption is that even if their economy and power approach the brink of collapse, achieving AGI could provide invincible weapons, hack enemy defenses, create perfect war strategies, make flawless stock market bets, and more. Essentially, there’s nothing AGI couldn’t do for them. With this assumption, the West might use its current advantages and power to hinder China’s progress in AGI, ensuring they achieve it first. Almost anything becomes justifiable in their eyes.

With this understanding, many current events become clear. The Russia angle is a different example that I will write about another day. Many people wonder why the West doesn’t simply ally with Russia and let them join, but there’s an explanation for that. Nevertheless, Russia is not a real competitor to the West. The West is primarily concerned with China due to its advancements in electronics and software, making it a competitor in the AGI race, akin to the nuclear race during WWII. Considering this, the US and Western bans on electronics and technology, despite harming their own economies, make sense to ensure they achieve AGI first. It will be worth it since AGI will enable them to regain their money, advantage, and power.

We are essentially witnessing a new nuclear race, but this time it’s an AGI race. Whoever wins this race will rule the world. The West’s only serious competitor is China, and the West is willing to do anything to ensure victory, even if it means risking everything. We are all amazed by ChatGPT and its capabilities, and it’s already replacing jobs. Imagine the advanced versions of ChatGPT that might exist behind closed doors and the alternatives that organizations like the Pentagon, CIA, or NSA might have.

Sutskever is a computer scientist who became famous for a revolutionary 2012 paper about machine learning, which he coauthored with his mentor, Geoffrey Hinton. Hinton is known as the godfather of AI, and he left Google earlier this year so that he could freely speak about the risks of AI. And he’s totally chill about the whole thing.

“Does humanity know what it’s doing? No. I think we’re moving into a period when for the first time ever, we may have things more intelligent than us.”

“You believe they can understand?”

“Yes.”

“Cool, cool, cool.”

I talked with Hinton over the weekend. He said that he became more bullish as he watched the progress happening within OpenAI. The more bullish he became about superintelligence coming soon, the more he started to think about the existential threats of AI. He started to ally himself with the existential risk doomer camp within the company to hammer home that point.

During a leadership retreat earlier this year, he decided to commission a wooden effigy from a local artist that was supposed to represent unaligned AGI—AGI that goes badly. Then he burned it as a symbol of OpenAI’s commitment to its founding principles. It sort of adds drama to who Ilya is as a person.

“Drama? Couldn’t be this guy. We definitely will be able to create completely autonomous beings with their own goals, and it will be very important, especially as these beings become much smarter than humans.”

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because if you think about AI, we’re expecting it to be the future of the internet, like it’s supposed to be the next World Wide Web. This company is trying to develop artificial general intelligence, which is meant to do any economically viable job. It’s meant to displace people to a certain extent. So it really matters how they govern themselves and who ends up taking on that role.

I always come back to openness, transparency, accountability, and democratic oversight because, as I said at the end of “How the Internet Was Stolen,” it only takes one mad king, one greedy dictator, one slimy pope, or one foolish jester to nudge the levers they hover over towards chaos, rot, and even tyranny. Which leads me to the final point.

AI, as we’ve seen, is about that impossible totality. It really might be the new fire or electricity because it implicates everything. Everyone, everywhere. And so, more than anything, it’s about the issues we already face. The knowledge that comes out of artificial intelligence is already political, economic, already implicated in global affairs, workers and wages, healthcare and pensions, culture and war. And it’s those concrete, material things that matter. And I’d wager that, like every total technological transformation that came before—the printing press and the industrial revolution in particular—this one will also require a radical change in our politics. The printing press led to the Reformation, and the Industrial Revolution to liberalism and capitalism. What will our political world look like under AI? That’s up to us. We’re in for a period of mass disruption that’s almost certain. And so we need to democratically work out how AI can address all these issues instead of exacerbating them.

If we don’t, we’ll make ourselves slowly obsolete, redundant, forgotten. AI, using everything that we know, that we built or discovered, will surpass us, and we’ll drift off into the future, leaving us behind. We need to make sure that each of us is tethered in some way to that incomprehensibly different future—connected to it, taught by it, in control of it, compensated by it. It’s in service of us, all of us. I’m excited and daunted in equal measure, but my sense is that if we don’t do that, rather than being wiped out, we’ll be left stranded in the wake of a colossal, super-intelligent juggernaut that we just don’t understand. Just forgotten, left behind. Like all the human species that we surpassed and then went extinct. All of us left fleshy, old-fashioned, and forgotten. Bobbing around, watching the future go off into a dark, deep, endless, boundless sea.