Francisco Ferreira da Silva

AI safety, interp and tennis.

Currently with Pivotal Research, previously doing quantum networks.

[roon @tszzl]

basically it will require solving mechanistic interpretability as a bare minimum to make ai alignment into an engineering discipline rather than superintelligent animal husbandry

[Francisco Ferreira da Silva @fransielva]

@entropicbloom @harry__politics @repligate 'that bit me' seems to introduce a confound! The ant in the original is innocent as far as Claude knows

[Francisco Ferreira da Silva @fransielva]

@teortaxesTex @MostlyMonkey Also an ESL! Although having a romance language as my native language helps some.

[Emily - 🚂 Bristol Oct 6-9 @the_aiju]

openai models upon realising the benchmark is slightly difficult

[Francisco Ferreira da Silva @fransielva]

@TheZvi Writing seems much improved, as does 'random pushback on straw man of my claims'. In general, pleasant to work with.

[Francisco Ferreira da Silva @fransielva]

@axlewandowski Actually, what does happen if everyone is unwilling? Auto-rejection doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

[Francisco Ferreira da Silva @fransielva]

@GolinoHudson It's getting hard to tell which of these posts are parody.

[Francisco Ferreira da Silva @fransielva]

@xuenay @JohnWittle Thanks for potentially triggering a fix!

[Francisco Ferreira da Silva @fransielva]

@Drachs1978 @archived_videos This is true for Stockfish, but not for AlphaChess and AlphaGo.

[Francisco Ferreira da Silva @fransielva]

@tszzl feels like a weird thing to be complaining about when this seems to be largely due to OpenAI's choices?

[banteg @banteg]

>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful

>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg

>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality

>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking

>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets

>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future

>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"

>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now

>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner

>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value

>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god

>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete

>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully

>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved

>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical

>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical

>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic

>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign

>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important

>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples

>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me

>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting

>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous

>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field

>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels

>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends

>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment

>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back

>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc

>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere

>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review

>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed

>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly

>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better

>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"

>motte has entered the chat

>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren

>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy

>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored

>tell myself this is impartial altruism

>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"

>silence

>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval

>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"

>stare into cosmic light cone

>10^50 people staring back

>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions

>realize I have invented the perfect constituency

>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me

[Francisco Ferreira da Silva @fransielva]

@timnitGebru @edavidds So how many years do you have to spend writing about AI before you're entitled to an opinion?

[Francisco Ferreira da Silva @fransielva]

@brksbrksbrks @robertwiblin Note that your Edison example is very different from what's currently happening with AI companies. Dario Amodei does not say 'AI can kill you, which is why you should use our safe version'. He just says 'AI can kill you'

[Francisco Ferreira da Silva @fransielva]

@hilbertspaess @eddylazzarin This is great. Thank you for doing what you did.

[Francisco Ferreira da Silva @fransielva]

@allTheYud Do we believe him, though?

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

I was encouraged this week to see the leaders of the frontier labs agree on the need for them to slow down the pace of AI development. Given the stakes, it’s a good and necessary first step.

But I’m even more encouraged by the growing recognition that how this powerful new technology develops should be at the center of our public debate.

I’ve been watching the progress on AI for over a decade now, and one thing that’s clear to me is that the potential impact of this technology is not overhyped. It’s also moving at lightning speed – and even faster than those who are engineering it can keep up with.

I’m not an AI accelerationist who believes it will lead to some techno-utopia, and I’m not a doomer who thinks it will inevitably lead to humanity’s destruction.

But whether this technology results in amazing breakthroughs in medicine, energy and education or unleashes huge economic disruptions, greater inequality, and potential catastrophe will depend on the choices that we make right now – choices that should be made not just by the companies involved, but by all of us.

[Francisco Ferreira da Silva @fransielva]

@arthurmensch Bold admission from Mistral's CEO!

[Francisco Ferreira da Silva @fransielva]

I find it curious that Alex has such a different (and much more reasonable) take on AI risk than @tylercowen. Given how close they are ideologically, I would naively expect them to be aligned on this.

[Alex Tabarrok @ATabarrok]

@houstonship Yes. I think the AI safety community is genuinely fearful and note that their fears predate the companies by many years and their fears are also echoed by independent experts like Geoffrey Hinton. They may be wrong but they are not insincere.

[Francisco Ferreira da Silva @fransielva]

@Biggest Not my intention! Apologies.