EA - Is it time for a pause? by Kelsey Piper

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Is it time for a pause?, published by Kelsey Piper on April 6, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Note: This post was crossposted from Planned Obsolescence by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.The single most important thing we can do is to pause when the next model we train would be powerful enough to obsolete humans entirely. If it were up to me, I would slow down AI development starting now — and then later slow down even more.Many of the people building powerful AI systems think they’ll stumble on an AI system that forever changes our world fairly soon — three years, five years. I think they’re reasonably likely to be wrong about that, but I’m not sure they’re wrong about that. If we give them fifteen or twenty years, I start to suspect that they are entirely right.And while I think that the enormous, terrifying challenges of making AI go well are very much solvable, it feels very possible, to me, that we won’t solve them in time.It’s hard to overstate how much we have to gain from getting this right. It’s also hard to overstate how much we have to lose from getting it wrong. When I’m feeling optimistic about having grandchildren, I imagine that our grandchildren will look back in horror at how recklessly we endangered everyone in the world. And I’m much much more optimistic that humanity will figure this whole situation out in the end if we have twenty years than I am if we have five.There’s all kinds of AI research being done — at labs, in academia, at nonprofits, and in a distributed fashion all across the internet — that’s so diffuse and varied that it would be hard to ‘slow down’ by fiat. But there’s one kind of AI research — training much larger, much more powerful language models — that it might make sense to try to slow down. If we could agree to hold off on training ever more powerful new models, we might buy more time to do AI alignment research on the models we have. This extra research could make it less likely that misaligned AI eventually seizes control from humans.An open letter released on Wednesday, with signatures from Elon Musk[1], Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, leading AI researcher Yoshua Bengio, and many other prominent figures, called for a six-month moratorium on training bigger, more dangerous ML models:We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.I tend to think that we are developing and releasing AI systems much faster and much more carelessly than is in our interests. And from talking to people in Silicon Valley and policymakers in DC, I think efforts to change that are rapidly gaining traction. “We should slow down AI capabilities progress” is a much more mainstream view than it was six months ago, and to me that seems like great news.In my ideal world, we absolutely would be pausing after the release of GPT-4. People have been speculating about the alignment problem for decades, but this moment is an obvious golden age for alignment work. We finally have models powerful enough to do useful empirical work on understanding them, changing their behavior, evaluating their capabilities, noticing when they’re being deceptive or manipulative, and so on. There are so many open questions in alignment that I expect we can make a lot of progress on in five years, with the benefit of what we’ve learned from existing models. We’d be in a much better position if we could collectively slow down to give ourselves more time to do this work, and I hope we find a way to do that intelligently and effectively. As I’ve said above, I ...