How to Simplify Thinking on AI Threats

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

CNN's John Sutter offers a few answers to the question of whether AI can take over the world. He says most people who say this don't actually mean it, they're just crying out for help or attention. The practical answer is that psychopaths exist and we have prisons for them; if someone thinks our kids should be killed, then that's pretty commonly accepted as bad: There's no further thinking here necessary. But I expect most of these people wouldn't kill their children so those that would are put into prisons.

Read the full transcript here.

Does AI pose a near-term existential risk? Why might existential risks from AI manifest sooner rather than later? Can't we just turn off any AI that gets out of control? Exactly how much do we understand about what's going on inside neural networks? What is AutoGPT? How feasible is it to build an AI system that's exactly as intelligent as a human but no smarter? What is the "CoEm" AI safety proposal? What steps can the average person take to help mitigate risks from AI?

Connor Leahy is CEO and co-founder of Conjecture, an AI alignment company focused on making AI systems boundable and corrigible. Connor founded and led EleutherAI, the largest online community dedicated to LLMs, which acted as a gateway for people interested in ML to upskill and learn about alignment. With capabilities increasing at breakneck speed, and our ability to control AI systems lagging far behind, Connor moved on from the volunteer, open-source Eleuther model to a full-time, closed-source model working to solve alignment via Conjecture.

Staff