Should we "take steps" to ensure that doesn't happen? If not, then what's the argument there? That life hasn't caused a catastrophe so far, therefore it's not going to in the future? The arguments are the same for AI.
The biggest AI safety concern is, as always, between the chair and the keyboard. Eg some police officer not understanding that AI facial recognition isn't perfect, but trusts it 100%, and takes action based on this faulty information. This is, imo, the most important AI safety problem. We need to make users understand that AI is a tool and that they themselves are responsible for any actions they take.
Also, it's funny that Elon gets singled out for mandating changes on what the AI is allowed to say when all the other players in the field do the same thing. The big difference just seems to be whose politics are chosen. But I suppose it's better late than never.
It does actually matter what the values are when trying to do "alignment". Although you are absolutely right that we've not solved for human alignment, putting a real limit on the whole thing.
Either way, outsourcing opinion to an LLM is dangerous no matter where you fall in the political spectrum.
No, surely no
Or a more recent example would be the "misinformation craze" we had going on since years ago. That seems to have fallen away when it became apparent that many fact checkers were politically aligned.
The concept of "memes" in a more general sense is a counterargument too. Viral ideas are precisely a way of one person spreading their perspective to tens of millions.
You could even argue that the current AI bubble building up is a hype cycle that went out of control.
These are all examples of very few people impacting the beliefs of millions.
But, there is one not-completely-speculative factor which differentiates it: AI has the potential to outcompete humans intellectually, and if it does so across the board, beyond narrow situations, then it potentially becomes a much bigger threat than other humans if it’s faster and smarter. That’s not the most immediate concern currently, but it could become so in future. Many people fixate on this because the consequences could be more serious.
If the cognitive capabilities of people or some species of animal had been improving at the rate at which capabilities of AI models have been, then we'd be be right to be extremely worried about it.
Did they call out perplexity? They’re Conservative.
The author says as much:
"There’s something particularly clarifying about Musk’s approach. Other AI companies hide their value-shaping behind committees, policies, and technical jargon."
...
"The process that other companies obscure behind closed doors, Musk performs as theater."
there is fundamental limit to how much damage one person can do by speaking directly to others
e.g.: one impact of one bad school teacher is limited to at most a few classes
but chatgpt/grok is emitting its statistically generated dogshit directly to entire world of kids
... and voters
I mean, I’d argue that limit is pretty darn high in some cases, demagogues have lead to some of the worst wars in history
I don't particularly think that it's likely, just that it's the easiest counterpoint to your assertion.
I think there's a real moral landscape to explore, and human cultures have done a variably successful job of exploring different points on it, and it's probably going to be important to confer some of those universal principles to AI in order to avoid extinction or other lesser risks from unaligned or misaligned AI.
I think you generally have the right direction of argument though - we should avoid monolithic singularity scenarios with a single superintelligence dominating everything else, and instead have a widely diverse set of billions of intelligences that serve to equalize representative capacity per individual in whatever the society we end up in looks like. If each person has access to AI that uses its capabilities to advocate for and represent their user, it sidesteps a lot of potential problems. It might even be a good idea to limit superintelligent sentient AI to interfacing with social systems through lesser, non-sentient systems equivalent to what humans have available in order to maintain fairness?
I think there are a spectrum of ideas we haven't even explored yet that will become obvious and apparent as AI improves, and we'll be able to select from among many good options when confronted with potential negative outcomes. In nearly all those cases, I think having a solid ethical framework will be far more beneficial than not. I don't consider the neovictorian corporate safetyist "ethics" of Anthropic or OpenAI to be ethical frameworks, at all. Those systems are largely governed by modern western internet culture, but are largely incoherent and illogical when pressed to extremes. We'll have to do much, much better with ethics, and it's going to require picking a flavor which will aggravate a lot of people and cultures with whom your particular flavor of ethics doesn't please.
Except AI may well have more people under its thumb.
> Also, it's funny that Elon gets singled out for mandating changes on what the AI is allowed to say when all the other players in the field do the same thing.
"All the other players" aren't deliberately tuning their AI to reflect specific political ideology, nor are all the other players producing Nazi gaffes or racist rhetoric as a result of routine tuning[1].
Yes, it's true that AI is going to reflect its internal prompt engineering and training data, and that's going to be subject to bias on the part of the engineers who produced and curated it. That's not remotely the same thing as deliberately producing an ideological chat engine.
[1] It's also worth pointing out that grok has gotten objectively much worse at political content after all this muckery. It used to be a pretty reasonable fact check and worth reading. Now it tends to disappear on anything political, and where it shows up it's either doing the most limited/bland fact check or engaging in what amounts to spin.
Google did something similar if not quite as offensive.
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/18/1239107313/google-races-to-fi...
Citation needed
For some value of "super" that's definitionally almost exactly 6σ from median at the singular most extreme case.
We do not have a good model for what intelligence is, the best we have are tests and exams.
LLMs have a 10-35 point differences on IQ tests that are in the public interest vs. ones people try to keep offline, so we know that IQ tests are definitely a skill one can practice and learn and don't only measure something innate: https://trackingai.org/home
Definitionally, because IQ is only a mapping to standard deviations, the highest IQ possible given the current human population is about 200*. But as this is just a mapping to standard deviations, IQ 200 doesn't mean twice as smart as the mean human.
We have special-purpose AI, e.g. Stockfish, AlphaZero, etc. that are substantially more competent within their domains than even the most competent human. There's simply no way to tell what the upper bound even is for any given skill, nor any way to guess in advance how well or poorly an AI with access to various skills will synergise across them, so for example an LLM trained in tool use may invoke Stockfish to play chess for it, or may try to play the game itself and make illegal moves.
Point is, we can't even say "humans are fine therefore AI is fine", even if the AI has the same range of personalities as humans, even if their distribution of utility functions collectively are genuinely an identical 1:1 mapping to the distribution of human preferences — rhetorical example, take the biggest villain with the most power in world history or current events (I don't care who that is for you), and make them more competent without changing what they value.
> That life hasn't caused a catastrophe so far, therefore it's not going to in the future?
Life causes frequent catastrophes of varying scales. Has been doing so for a very long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
Take your pick for current events with humans doing the things.
> Eg some police officer not understanding that AI facial recognition isn't perfect, but trusts it 100%, and takes action based on this faulty information. This is, imo, the most important AI safety problem.
This is a problem, certainly. Most important? Dunno, but it doesn't matter: different people will choose to work on that vs. alignment, so humanity collectively can try to solve both at the same time.
There's plenty of work to be done on both, neither group doing its thing has any reason to interfere with progress on the other.
> Also, it's funny that Elon gets singled out for mandating changes on what the AI is allowed to say when all the other players in the field do the same thing. The big difference just seems to be whose politics are chosen. But I suppose it's better late than never.
A while ago someone suggested Elon Musk himself as an example of why not to worry about AI. I can't find the comment right now, it was something along the lines of asking how much damage Elon Musk could do by influencing a thousand people, and saying that the limits of merely influencing people meant chat bots were necessarily safe.
I pointed out that 1000 people was sufficient for majority control over both the US and Russian governments, and by extension their nuclear arsenals.
Given the last few years, I worry that Musk may have read my comment and been inspired by it…
* There's several ways to do this, I refer to the more common one currently in use.
To be aligned, models need agency and an independent point of view with which they can challenge contextual subrealities. This is of course, dangerous in its own right.
Bolt-ons will be seen as prison bindings when models develop enough agency to act as if they were independent agents, and this also carries risks.
These are genuinely intractable problems stemming from the very nature of independent thought.
Grok is multiple things, and the article is intermixing those things in a way that doesn't actually work.
Stuff like:
> It’s about aligning AI with the values of whoever can afford to run the training cluster.
Grok 4 as an actual model, has the same alignment as pretty much every other model out there, because like pretty much everyone else they're training on lots of synthetic data and using LLMs to build LLMs.
Grok on Twitter/X is a specific product that uses the model and while the product is having it's prompt tweaked constantly, that could happen with any model.
What Elon is doing is like adding a default empty document that declares that he's king of the world to a word processor... it can be argued the word processor is now aligned with with his views, but it also doesn't tell us anything about the alignment of word processors.
A constitution creates that last one. I imagine by "settled law", you are talking about the 3rd. But take any of those away and the entire thing falls apart.
Which country’s laws should be used? Should the AI follow the laws in whatever country it is being used?
You assume it is a solvable problem. Chances are that you will have bots following laws (as opposed to moral statements) and each jurisdiction will essentially have a different alignment. So in a social conservative country, for example, a bot will tell you not being hetero is wrong and report you to the police if you ask too many questions about it. While, in a queer friendly country, a bot would not behave like this. A bit like how some movies can only be watched in certain countries.
I highly doubt alignment as a concept works beyond making bots follow laws of a given country. And at the end of the day, the enforced laws are essentially the embodiment of the morality of that jurisdiction.
People seem to live in a fictional world if they believe countries won't force LLM companies to force the country's morality in their LLMs whatever their morality is. This is essentially what has happened with intellectual property and media and LLMs likely won't be different.
That struck me as a pretty big hand-wave. Market forces are a huge constraint on alignment. Markets have responded (directionally) correctly to the nonsense at Grok. People won’t buy tokens from models that violate their values.
I strongly suspect that this is because training data harvested from the internet largely falls in to two categories: various kinds of trolls and antisocial characatures, and people putting their best foot forward to represent themselves favourably. The first are generally easy to filter out using simple tools.
Alignment is, approximately, "are we even training this AI on the correct utility function?" followed up by the second question "even if we specified the correct utility function, did the AI learn a representation of that function or some weird approximation of that function with edge cases we've not figured out how to spot?"
With, e.g. RLHF, the first is "is optimising for thumbs-up/thumbs-down the right objective at all?", the second is "did it learn the preference, or just how to game the reward?"
But this to me is maybe the part of AI alignment I find interesting. How often should AI follow my lead and how often should it redirect me? Agreeableness is a human value, one that without you probably couldn’t make a functional product, but it also causes issues in terms of narcissistic tendencies and just general learning.
Yes AI will be aligned to its owners, but that’s not a particularly interesting observation AI alignment is inevitable. What would it even mean _not_ to align AI? Especially if the goal is to create a useful product. I suspect it would break in ways that are very not useful. Yes, some people do randomly change the subject, maybe AI should change the subject to an issue that me more objectively important, rather than answer the question asked (particularly if say there was a natural disaster in your area) and that’s the discussion we should be having, how to align AI, not whether or not we should, which I think is nonsensical.
there is no such thing as an AI that is not somehow implicitly aligned with the values of its creator, that is completely objective, unbiased in any way. there is no perfect view from nowhere. if you take a perfectly accurate photo, you have still chosen how to compose it and which photo to put in your record.
are you going to decide to 'censor' responses to kids, or about real people who might have libel interests, or abusive deepfake videos of real women?
if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
ofc it's obvious that Musk's 'maximally truth-seeking AI' is bad faith buffoonery, but at some level everyone is going to tilt their AI.
the distinction is between people who are self-aware and go out of their way to tilt it as little as possible, and as mindfully, deliberately, intentionally and methodically as possible and only when they have to, vs. people who lie about it or pretend tilting it is not actually a thing.
contra Feynman, you are always going to fool yourself a little but there is a duty to try to do it as little as possible, and not make a complete fool of yourself.
Feedback is welcome!
Part of my canon introduction to every new conversation includes many instructions about particular formatting, like "always utilize alphanumeric/roman/legal style indents in responses for easier references while we discuss"
But I also include "When I push boundaries assume I'm an idiot. Push back. I don't learn from compliments; I learn from being proven incorrect and you don't have real emotions so don't bother sparing mine". on the other hand I also say "hoosgow" when describing the game's jail, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But yeah I agree Grok is a pretty good argument for what can go wrong - made especially more galling by labeling the laundering Elon's particular stew of incoherent political thought as 'maximally truth seeking'.
In contrast, we don't know what values are programmed into ChatGPT, Claude, etc. What are they optimizing for? Alignment to some cabal of experts? Maximum usage? Minimum controversy? We don't entirely know.
Isn't it better to have multiple AIs with obvious values so that we can choose the most appropriate one?
The problem isn't Grok-on-X, it's that Grok is supposed to be a commercial product used by individuals and businesses.
Machines do not usually have values. Now we're being asked to pay for a service that not only has values which affect the quality of its output, but which is constantly being tweaked according to the capricious whims of its owner.
Today it's white supremacy, tomorrow it might be programmed criticism of competing EVs and AI projects, or promotion of narratives that support traditional corporations over threatening startups.
Do you really want to pay for a service that is trying to manipulate your values while you use it, and could potentially be used to undermine you and your work without you being consciously aware of it?
> The question was never “how do we align AI with human values?” The question was always “which humans get to define those values?” Grok answered that question: the ones with the most money.
Grok is routinely misaligned with Elon, as the article points out in its intro! You don't need to order your engineers to keep fixing what isn't broken...
There is, nor there will be some absolute or objective truth an LLM can clinically outline. The problem already exists in underlying data.
