“I would’ve been more sympathetic to this [objection] 10 years ago, back when we had nothing that resembled the kind of general, flexible, interesting, weird stuff we’re seeing with our large language models today,” said Cotra.
I 100% agree with this. If AI would have came out about 10 years ago, it would not be as advanceed as it is now.
“I’d just slowly ease the world into this transition,” Cotra said. “I’m very scared because I think it’s not going to happen like that.” Why not? Because of the objections to slowing down AI progress. Let’s break down the three main ones, starting with the idea that rapid progress on AI is inevitable because of the strong financial drive for first-mover dominance in a research area that’s overwhelmingly private.
I strongly agree with Cotra saying to slowly easing the world into the transition of AI, instead of just jumping into it. There is really no way to slow down the progress of AI. Especially with saying that rapid progress on AI is inevitable.
There are many objections to the idea, ranging from “technological development is inevitable so trying to slow it down is futile” to “we don’t want to lose an AI arms race with China” to “the only way to make powerful AI safe is to first play with powerful AI.”
This right here tells us how AI in America is strong, but China's is stronger. Saying "we don't want to lose an AI arms race with China" says a lot about AI period.
Here’s the weird thing, though. The very same researchers who are most worried about unaligned AI are, in some cases, the ones who are developing increasingly advanced AI. They reason that they need to play with more sophisticated AI so they can figure out its failure modes, the better to ultimately prevent them.
I feel as if AI has been being used so much lately to the point where we don't understand the failure modes. The issues with technology. But it is important to being able to know how to prevent such issues.
This paragraph here is showing how powerful artificial intelligence is already. How there really is no set time as to when AI will be dominating the world, either can be sooner or later.