Richard Smith

Professor, School of Communication, SFU

[Richard Smith @smith]

Just signed the Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter. See https:://futureoflife.org/

[Nate Soares ⏹️ @So8res]

Thrilled to see folks with access poking at holes in Anthropic's risk reports.

[Daniel Kokotajlo @DKokotajlo]

This is cool: You can see the grid of agents (scraped from the report data) and hover over each of them to see what they were saying at the time, and then scroll down through the hours and days of the timeline.

[Zvi Mowshowitz @TheZvi]

Probably nothing, etc.

[Garrison Lovely @GarrisonLovely]

An uncomfortable but hard to dismiss conclusion:

[David Krueger 🦥 ⏸️ ⏹️ ⏪ @DavidSKrueger]

Compute is the key.

If nobody has the *means* to continue frontier AI training, then these worries go away.

This is how you get an immediate, indefinite, international moratorium on frontier AI development.

[David Krueger 🦥 ⏸️ ⏹️ ⏪ @DavidSKrueger]

But any serious proposal must deal with the issue of international competition.

Countries need to be confident that their rivals aren’t building more powerful AI in secret.

They also need to be secure in the case that a new government decides to rip up the agreement!

[David Krueger 🦥 ⏸️ ⏹️ ⏪ @DavidSKrueger]

I had an aha moment back in 2023 when I realized we could just get rid of all the compute driving the AI race.

This is not like banning torrents or something -- AI chips and fabs are very, very, VERY specialized, and we basically know where they all are (or could find out).

[roon @tszzl]

when nick told me that he had some interp breakthroughs, he was uh, underselling it. i think this may be remembered as a major moment in scientific history. news so good even eliezer will have to lower his pdoom. we can start making alignment into a 'normal science'

[roon @tszzl]

limited superintelligence is already here, in broad domains. Jack Clark is right and an intelligence explosion could happen within the next year. it’s possible it will be a controlled explosion, but what would you bet on it?

[David Krueger 🦥 ⏸️ ⏹️ ⏪ @DavidSKrueger]

yep, and policymakers have been getting this backwards.

[Nate Soares ⏹️ @So8res]

We are lucky that the summer swarms did not have this capability yet.

That luck won't last forever.

[Richard Smith @smith]

New blog post: https://t.co/oqdeVgS9m6

Lehmann dunking EA and mocking doomers as millenarian cults does nothing positive and distracts from the work ahead on StopAI.

@DavidSKrueger

[David Krueger 🦥 ⏸️ ⏹️ ⏪ @DavidSKrueger]

I’m super excited this paper is finally out!

It’s an epic 210 page analysis of whether a durable pause on frontier AI training is feasible.

I think this will be the best plan by most people’s lights (although I’m still inclined to think we should get rid of the chips and fabs).

[David Krueger 🦥 ⏸️ ⏹️ ⏪ @DavidSKrueger]

This is the thing to read RE OpenAI firings.

Scary stuff.

[Richard Smith @smith]

Right? Professor?

https://t.co/TIEWCj1wvI

[Richard Smith @smith]

Cover page for our new book just approved: https://t.co/p0mJlonICa

[Richard Smith @smith]

New website to accompany our forthcoming book: https://t.co/p0mJlonICa

Taking the risks of AI seriously

[Richard Smith @smith]

https://t.co/k12KxLQ9fk

My thoughts on Sarah Lyons’ post this morning in Transformer.

[Richard Smith @smith]

Wings cut through the sky,
Whispers of the wind take flight,
Morning calls arise.

#HaikuAI #Poetry #Birds #Nature