If they're right that LLMs on that scale are generally dangerous but theirs is the exception as they've very carefully calibrated it to be safe, it's extraordinarily irresponsible of them to withhold all details of steps that might make it safe...
Or that someone will automate cyberattacks, as if the government isn't already doing it?
my greatest fear is that there is only one superintelligence, with access controlled by a monopoly of a few san franciscans deciding what moral boundaries AI will have. I couldn't even get Claude+ to talk to me about houses of zodiac because it insisted it's not an astrologer, it's an AI assistant designed to be helpful blah blah blah, tell me what use is this kind of "safety"?
But I suspect that they'll also be getting many government / military contracts going forward.
Thats a very bold statement and goes against everything I've read on it so far, care to backup such a claim with some facts? Of course each of us has their own bar for such things, but for most its pretty darn high
Some things I wonder about, it says things like this:
> GPT-4 successfully passes the classic Sally-Anne false-belief test from psychology [BCLF85] (which was modernized to avoid the possibility the answer was memorized from the training data)
But it's a language model, generalizing text and performing substitutions on it, is what it excels at. "The car is yellow" is "the <noun> is <descriptor>" and it can substitute in other things, so I'm not sure how their modernization really ensure it does not pattern match on learned texts.
One human mind is a lot like another human mind, markedly less like one of an octopus or a dog (still enough similarity that the concept of, e.g., “hurt” kind of makes sense), but really unlike an LLM (and I’m not going to get into an argument as to why an LLM is fundamentally different from a human mind and why we are not even close and possibly can never be to achieving that, the only way of producing new systems like us remaining childbirth; if you don’t agree on that part then it’d be useless to discuss the matter further). We have an uncanny situation where a system radically unlike us can produce output that is mostly similar to what another human mind might produce, but unless we accept that everything around can be conscious (and believe in gods and spirits again) it’s not even a question as to whether the system can understand any of the symbols it produces or have consciousness in the commonly accepted meaning of those terms: it’s only a tool.
Note that I’m not against widening our concept of sentience, just saying it needs to happen if we want to grant an LLM sentience; and if this widening does happen, a sentient language model would be small beans compared to a philosophical revolution we’d have on our hands then.