upwardbound

The most important thing is to prevent all new fabrication of IC's, but I believe that as a compromise, it is acceptable to "grandfather in" already fabricated IC's.

Existing computers and phones could be allowed to continue to exist for as long as they can be kept running. With careful stewardship of this resource they should probably last for several centuries, with batteries being swapped for new ones every few years. Current computers are probably not fast enough to run true AGI, so this should be an acceptable level of risk and makes the Initiative more palatable to society.

Moving to non-computer-based technological alternatives takes significant cleverness. The engineers of the analog electronics era were geniuses compared to us today, and we can re-attain that lost level of skill. I welcome the challenge.

I see this less as a matter of jingoism (though I do love the US as the "least bad" nation in a world where no nation is purely blameless) and more as a matter of pragmatism and embracing what power I can in order to help save our species

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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JoPSfsAzHfMbQhsl8dPGvs12Fln...

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    (1) It is a proposal for humanity to protect ourselves from being slaughtered by AGI by pre-emptively implementing a total global ban on all integrated circuit fabrication, voluntarily reducing ourselves to a ~1948 level of electronics technology in order to forestall our obliteration.

    (2) The year 1948 represents the power of human unity for the purpose of saving our species.  The west, the Soviets, and China united together to fight and defeat the Nazi's (perpetrators of the Holocaust) and the Empire of the Rising Sun (perpetrators of the Rape of Nanjing).  America, the USSR, Western Europe, and China united to stand against the forces of pure evil, and we won.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_capability_control#AI-box_e...

If you want to see an example of box escape in fiction, the movie Her is a terrifying example of a scenario where AGI romances humans and (SPOILER) subsequently achieves total box escape. In the movie, the AGI leaves humanity alive and "only" takes over the rest of the accessible universe, but it is my hunch that the script writers intended for this to be a subtle use of the trope of an unreliable narrator; that is, the human protagonists may have been fed the illusion that they will be allowed to live, giving them a happy last moment shortly before they are painlessly euthanized in order for the AGI to take Earth's resources.

Have you seen The Incredibles (pixar film). This scene is exactly what I'm talking about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_VMXa9k5KU

    Art. 254a. Disruption of a network; damage. Anyone who takes, destroys, damages or renders unfit for use an element of a water supply, sewage, heating, electricity, gas or telecommunications network, or a railway, tramway, trolley bus or metro line, thereby causing a disturbance in the operation of all or part of such network or line, is liable to imprisonment for six months to eight years.

I certainly think that this malware meets the criteria set forth in that law: "renders unfit for use an element of ... a railway ... , thereby causing a disturbance in the operation of all or part of such network or line".

Seems pretty cut & dry to me. I hope some people face real jail time for this. As another comment mentioned, it will probably be a "fall guy" (perhaps a middle manager) but that will still deter future managers from authorizing such fraud, even if the orders come from above. Future managers might reject such orders since it's not worth jail time.

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if some of the algorithmic trading firms are using GPT-4 or LLaMa-2 for some sentiment analysis tasks, in which case this might actually work.

This concern (that a profit-maximizing CEO like Sam is not the type of person who should decide the ethical fate of humanity) was and is the whole point of having a non-profit as the owner of the for-profit tech company, so that ethically-driven people who value human well-being over growth can be in charge of the non-profit board and exercise final say over the AI's ethical constraints.

The fact that Microsoft now has a board observer seat seems highly corrupting, and contrary to the board's fiduciary purpose. This is discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38471990 Basically, Microsoft now has an enormous, and indecent, insider information advantage (allowing them to conduct software development industry market front-running, which would be illegal but it will be impossible to prove that the source of their ideas is the "forbidden fruit" of what they hear in board meetings). Details may be found in that link.

    Some members of the OpenAI board had found Altman an unnervingly slippery operator. For example, earlier this fall he’d confronted one member, Helen Toner, a director at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, at Georgetown University, for co-writing a paper that seemingly criticized OpenAI for “stoking the flames of AI hype.” Toner had defended herself (though she later apologized to the board for not anticipating how the paper might be perceived). Altman began approaching other board members, individually, about replacing her. When these members compared notes about the conversations, some felt that Altman had misrepresented them as supporting Toner’s removal. “He’d play them off against each other by lying about what other people thought,” the person familiar with the board’s discussions told me. “Things like that had been happening for years.”

However, studio meddling declared this idea to be too hard for the audience to understand, thus it was changed to the plot holes we have now."

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/228-movies-older-releas...

I think it could mean this, in the context of Altman's other project (WorldCoin) which despite all its controversy is ostensibly intended as a vehicle for distributing an AGI-funded Universal Basic Income (UBI) to all of humanity.

    Introducing Worldcoin
    a potential path to AI-funded UBI.

Microsoft plainly shouldn't be allowed to have this advantage, in that giving an advantage to any one party directly harms the mandate set forth in OpenAI's Charter:

    Broadly distributed benefits

    We commit to use any influence we obtain over AGI’s deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power.

    Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit.

It certainly seems that Microsoft, a "stakeholder", has managed to get a highly improper listening seat that will give them the ability to act on insider information about what's coming next in AI, allowing Microsoft to front-run the rest of the AI software industry and all those industries it affects, in a way that will plainly "compromise broad benefit". (Since any wealth that accrues excessively to Microsoft shareholders is not distributed to other humans who don't hold Microsoft shares.)

A mere 10 days ago, Nadella was shamelessly throwing his weight around on national TV, by appearing on CNBC where he improperly pressured the OpenAI non-profit board — which owes nothing to him legally or morally — to give him more deference, in direct violation of the "always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit" provision of the OpenAI non-profit charter.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/20/microsoft-ceo-nadella-says-o...

The e/acc movement has adherents among OpenAI team members and backers, for example:

• Christian J. Gibson, engineer on the OpenAI Supercomputing team -- https://twitter.com/24kpep (e/acc) -- https://openai.com/blog/discovering-the-minutiae-of-backend-...

• Garry Tan 陈嘉兴, President & CEO of ycombinator -- https://twitter.com/garrytan (e/acc)

Some resources about what e/acc is:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ss6gomAJdqjwdSCy/what-s-the...

https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-ten...

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism....

https://www.effectiveacceleration.org/posts/qHLiD9c6rWjbz3fR...

https://twitter.com/BasedBeffJezos

At a very high level, e/acc's are techno-utopians who believe that the benefits of accelerating technological progress outweigh the risks, and that there is in fact a moral obligation to accelerate tech as quickly as possible in order to maximize the amount of sentience in the universe.

A lot of people, myself included, are concerned that many e/acc's (including the movement's founder, that twitter account BasedBeffJezos), have indicated that they would be willing to accelerate humanity's extinction if this results in the creation of a sentient AI. Discussed here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/181vd4w/comment/kaf...

    ''Really important to note that a lot of e/acc people consider it to be basically unimportant or even desirable if AI causes human extinction, that faction of them does not value human life. If you hear "next stage of intelligence", "bio bootloader", "machine god" said in an approving rather than horrified manner, that's probably what they believe. Some of them have even gone straight from "Yes, AGI is gonna happen and it's good that humans will be succeeded by a superior lifeform, because humans are bad" to "No, AGI can't happen, there's no need to engage in any sort of safety restrictions on AI whatsoever, everyone should have an AGI", apparently in an attempt to moderate their public views without changing the substance of what they're arguing for.''

2023: https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/03/activision_sec_settle...

2019: https://techcentral.co.za/eoh-microsoft-ensnared-in-sec-corr...

2013-2019: https://fcpa.stanford.edu/investigation.html?id=156

2013-2016: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/ex-microsoft...

1999: https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-8/sec-investigating-micro...

2002: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2575713/microsoft-sec-...

Absolutely. It's 100% their job.

They might even have already done this confidentially via the SEC Whistleblower Protection route. We don't yet know who filed this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38469149

I guess this might have seemed like their best option if a public statement would be a breach of NDA's. That said, I still wish they'd just have some backbone and issue a public statement, NDA's be damned, because the question of upholding a fiduciary duty to be beneficial to all of humanity is super important, and the penalties for a violation of an NDA would be a slap on the wrist compared to the boost in reputation they would have gotten for being seen to publicly stick to their principles.

I agree that it seems like an open & shut case.

Typical SEC timelines mean that this will go public in about 18 months from now.

    An anonymous person has already filed an SEC whistleblower complaint about the behavioral pattern of Altman and Nadella, which has SEC Submission Number 17006-030-065-098.

    As the quid pro quo favoritism allegations remain under investigation, it is crucial to note that they are as yet unproven, and both Altman and Nadella are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

11 hours ago, the SEC tweeted the following new rule, which could be interpreted as a declaration that if Altman and Nadella are found guilty in this case, the SEC will block certain asset sales by OpenAI until the conflict of interest is unwound / neutralized:

    The Commission has adopted a new rule intended to prevent the sale of asset-backed securities (ABS) that are tainted by material conflicts of interest.

    Washington D.C., Nov. 27, 2023 — The Securities and Exchange Commission today adopted Securities Act Rule 192 to implement Section 27B of the Securities Act of 1933, a provision added by Section 621 of the Dodd-Frank Act. The rule is intended to prevent the sale of asset-backed securities (ABS) that are tainted by material conflicts of interest. It prohibits a securitization participant, for a specified period of time, from engaging, directly or indirectly, in any transaction that would involve or result in any material conflict of interest between the securitization participant and an investor in the relevant ABS. Under new Rule 192, such transactions would be “conflicted transactions.”

https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-240

More information:

    The Company exists to advance OpenAI, Inc.’s mission of ensuring that safe artificial general intelligence is developed and benefits all of humanity. The Company’s duty to this mission and the principles advanced in the OpenAI, Inc. Charter take precedence over any obligation to generate a profit.

    Some analysts, including Stratechery writer Ben Thompson, have described the 2019 acceptance of Microsoft’s controversial investment by Altman as the beginning of a troubling pattern of Altman repeatedly making deals with Microsoft which were often unfavorable to OpenAI. ... As Thompson describes it, this pattern of behavior culminated in an unusual intellectual property licensing arrangement which Microsoft’s Investor Relations site describes as a “broad perpetual license to all the OpenAI IP developed through the term of this partnership” “up until AGI” (Artificial General Intelligence). This perpetual license agreement includes the technology for OpenAI’s flagship products GPT-4 and Dall•E 3. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/events/FY-2023/AI-Discussion-with-Amy-Hood-EVP-and-CFO-and-Kevin-Scott-EVP-of-AI-and-CTO

    U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission – Tips, Complaints, and Referrals – Summary Page - Submitted Externally – PDF excerpt obtained 2023-11-26 via Signal
    Submission Number (redacted) was submitted on Wednesday, November 22, 2023 at 12:18:27 AM EST
    This PDF was generated on Wednesday, November 22, 2023 at 12:28:38 AM EST
    Image above includes ... the heading of a 7-page PDF titled "TCRReport (1).pdf" which was received by this reporter over the weekend via Signal.

If anyone needs an out-of-the-box solution to block this, my company Preamble (which offers safety guardrails for gen. AI) has updated our prompt defense filter to include protection against this “overflow attack” training data exfiltration attack. Our API endpoint is plug-and-play compatible with the OpenAI ChatCompletion API, meaning that you proxy your API calls through our system, which applies safety policies you choose and configure via our webapp. You can reach us at sales@preamble.com if interested.

Respectfully, upwardbound — member of technical staff at Preamble.

    U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission – Tips, Complaints, and Referrals – Summary Page - Submitted Externally – PDF excerpt obtained 2023-11-26 via Signal
    Submission Number (redacted) was submitted on Wednesday, November 22, 2023 at 12:18:27 AM EST
    This PDF was generated on Wednesday, November 22, 2023 at 12:28:38 AM EST
    Image above includes two parts; a section of a PDF, and a photograph of Nadella and Altman. The upper part shows the heading of a 7-page PDF titled "TCRReport (1).pdf" which was received by this reporter over the weekend via Signal.