The View From Inside the AI Bubble
Secret parties, lavish buffets, and talks of annihilation at one of the largest AI-research conferences
In a small room in San Diego last week, a man in a black leather jacket explained to me how to save the world from destruction by AI. Max Tegmark, a notable figure in the AI-safety movement, believes that “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, could precipitate the end of human life. I was in town for NeurIPS, one of the largest AI-research conferences, and Tegmark had invited me, along with five other journalists, to a briefing on an AI-safety index that he would release the next day. No company scored better than a C+.
The threat of technological superintelligence is the stuff of science fiction, yet it has become a topic of serious discussion in the past few years. Despite the lack of clear definition—even OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, has called AGI a “weakly defined term”—the idea that powerful AI contains an inherent threat to humanity has gained acceptance among respected cultural critics.
Granted, generative AI is a powerful technology that has already had a massive impact on our work and culture. But superintelligence has become one of several questionable narratives promoted by the AI industry, along with the ideas that AI learns like a human, that it has “emergent” capabilities, that “reasoning models” are actually reasoning, and that the technology will eventually improve itself.
I traveled to NeurIPS, held at the waterfront fortress that is the San Diego Convention Center, partly to understand how seriously these narratives are taken within the AI industry. Do AGI aspirations guide research and product development? When I asked Tegmark about this, he told me that the major AI companies were sincerely trying to build AGI, but his reasoning was unconvincing. “I know their founders,” he said. “And they’ve said so publicly.”
Parallel to the growth of fear and excitement about AI in the past decade, NeurIPS attendance has exploded, increasing from approximately 3,850 conference-goers in 2015 to 24,500 this year, according to organizers. The conference center’s three main rooms each have the square footage of multiple blimp hangars. Speakers addressed audiences of thousands. “I do feel we’re on a quest, and a quest should be for the holy grail,” Rich Sutton, the legendary computer scientist, proclaimed in a talk about superintelligence.
https://archive.is/M6D0f#selection-675.0-703.519
OpenAI has long published research on the potential safety and economic impact of its own technology.
Now, Wired reports that the Sam Altman-led company is becoming more “guarded” about publishing research that paints an inconvenient truth: that AI could be bad for the economy.
The perceived censorship has become such a point of frustration that at least two OpenAI employees working on its economic research team have quit the company, according to four Wired sources.
One of these employees was economics researcher Tom Cunningham. In his final parting message shared internally, he wrote that the economic research team was veering away from doing real research and instead acting like its employer’s propaganda arm.
Shortly after Cunningham’s departure, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer Jason Kwon sent a memo saying the company should “build solutions,” not just publish research on “hard subjects.”
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-researcher-quits-hiding-truth