Nothing will stop AI

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/singularity by /u/Sure_Cicada_4459 on 2023-06-27 20:36:34+00:00.

There is lots of talk about slowing down AI by regulating it somehow till we can solve alignment. Some of the most popular proposals are essentially compute governance. We try to limit the amount of compute someone has available, requiring a license of sorts to acquire it. In theory you want to stop the most dangerous capabilities from emerging in unsafe hands, whether through malice or incompetence. You find some compute threshhold and decide that training runs above that threshhold should be prohibited or heavily controlled somehow.

Here is the problem: Hardware, algorithms and training is not static, it is improving fast. The compute and money needed to build potentially dangerous systems is declining rapidly. GPT-3 cost abt 5million to train in 2020, in 2022 it was only abt 450k, thats ~70% decline YoY (Moore's Law on steroids). This trend is still staying steady, there are constant improvements in training efficiency, most recent one being last week DeepSpeedZero++ from Microsoft (boasts a 2.4x training speed up for smaller batch sizes, more here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/deepspeed-zero-a-leap-in-speed-for-llm-and-chat-model-training-with-4x-less-communication/ ).

These proposals rest on the assumption that you need large clusters to build potentially dangerous systems, aka. no algorithmic progress during this time, this is to put it midly *completely insane* given the pace of progress we are all witnessing. It won't be long till you only need 50 high end gpus, then 20, then 10,...

Regulating who is using these GPUs for what is even more fancyful then actually implementing such stringent regulation on such a widespread commodity as GPUs. They have myriad of non-AI use cases, many vital to a lot of industries. Anything from simulations to video editing, there are many reasons for you or your buisness to acquire a lot of compute. You might say: "but with a license won't they need to prove that the compute is used for reason X, and not AI?". Sure, except there is no way for anyone to check what code is attempted to being run for every machine on Earth. You would need root level access to every machine, have a monumentally ridiculous overhead and bandwidth, magically know what each obfuscated piece of code does,.... The more you actually break it down, the more you wonder how anyone could look at this with a straight face.

This problem is often framed in comparison to nukes/weapons and fissile material, proponents like to argue that we do a pretty good job at preventing ppl from acquiring fissile material or weapons. Let's just ignore for now that fissile material is extremely limited in it's use case, and comparing it to GPUs is naive at best. The fundamental difference is the digital substrate of the threat. The more apt comparison (and one I must assume by now is *deliberately* not chosen) is malware or CP. The scoreboard is that we are *unable* to stop malware or CP globally, we just made our systems more resilient to it, and adapt to it's continous unhindered production and prolifiration. What differentiates AGI from malware or CP is that it doesn't need prolifiration to be dangerous. You would need to stop it as the *production* step, this is obviously impossible without the aforementioned requirements.

Hence my conclusion, we cannot stop AGI/ASI from emerging. This can't be stressed enough, many ppl are collectively wasting their time on fruitless regulation pursuits instead of accepting the reality of the situation. In all of this I haven't even talked abt the monstrous incentives that are involved with AGI. We are moving this fast now, but what do you think will happen when most ppl know how beneficial AGI can be? What kind of money/effort would you spend for this lvl of power/agency? This will make the crypto mining craze look like gentle breeze.

Make peace with it, ASI is coming whether you like it or not.