The Power of a Smart Sociopath

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A thousand John von Neumann sociopath are already enough to probably like destroy the world or at least trigger World War three. We don't know how to control these AI. So they might just want something random, you know, maybe they just want to do some weird crazy thing that doesn't make any sense to us. I expect a similar thing to happen between humans and chimps in future.

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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.

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