Zvi Mowshowitz: evaluation

Transcript context

…he bad black hat people out there and all the terrorists and all of the, you know, rogue states and all of the bad people just collectively say, no. Let's wait until we can hit something really juicy. No. What you see is you gradually see, you know, more and more serious incidents get more and more serious targets. And, yeah, of course, the the big nation states may have, like, things ready to go and, like, you know, want to figure facts, like, sort of coordinated fashion. But, like, mostly, you'll get, like, these early warning signs. With bio, it's not obvious it's good. But I guess it's like, okay. It's either good enough to figure out something that, like, has the critical mass that caused the pandemic or, like, a serious incident that doesn't. And, like, it's kind of a a Boolean effect. And so you might have a potential overhang. You might have a problem with the situation. You might have a skill issue where, like, yeah, if the wrong person got their hands on methos right now without the safeguards, right, or got access to the internal models without the safeguards or without their access to aspirin or whatever, maybe they could cause a real problem. The problem the the good news is that, like, the number of people who are both skilled enough and motivated enough and trying to do this is very, very small and, like, possibly zero for now. But that also does mean you don't get these early warning tests. And I don't see people taking the buyout situation seriously in the same sense of, like, actively trying to, like, cause like, what what's the test? How do you do the thing? It's like except without the infect people at the end part or, like, It's scary shit. The problem being that, like, my brain is something like, okay. What if there's, a five percent chance in the next in the next twelve months that there's a really serious viral problem? Does that look that different than when it's point five percent? Right? And, like, if I had to guess, five percent where I'd be right now? Like, I think we're in the point where, like, there's real risk in the room that reasonably soon we're gonna have, like, an actual serious problem. And I think that, like, the first problem has some chance of being, like, an actual pandemic. Because, like, in bio, once you get something that's, like, deficiently infectious, deficiently dangerous, and efficiently hard to contain, you're kinda discreet. So I I don't know. Like, it it's I I think that, like, the right level of caution looks crazy, right, in many cases once you get to this point. And and that's a lot of what worries me is that, like, InfraDiC took so much shit for their bio filters, shutting down basically, like, fill people trying to do pretty much anything in bio, which is clearly just intentional. Right? They they just clearly went for a very broad, like, shut it down even though we know that 90 something 99% of the requests that we're shutting down are legitimate. Maybe 99.99. They're like, we have to do this because otherwise, we'll adversarially get the queries that we don't want. And that just matters more. Right? sts that we're shutting down are legitimate. Maybe 99.99. They're like, we have to do this because otherwise, we'll adversarially get the queries that we don't want. And that just matters more. Right? Like, it doesn't matter if we make some progress on cancer and all these other problems if simultaneously we have to give off a new pen down. Like, that's just not a good trade. So, like, we just we don't know where we're at, so we have to play cautious. And, like, you know what? If the bio people need to be using AIs that are three months or six months behind the frontier at all times, that is unfortunate. But at most, by definition, that can swing you down by three or six months in some important sense. Like, the world cannot possibly be more than six months behind in its development of these things. So, like, maybe we should show we're still getting most of the benefits of AI here. important sense. Like, the world cannot possibly be more than six months behind in its development of these things. So, like, maybe we should show we're still getting most of the benefits of AI here. Like, especially if you have this model of AI can help you out, AI can make you better, but then, like, you develop this candidate drug or this candidate hypothesis about bio, and then you have to spend five years researching it, you have to spend five years making it through the FDA process. And then after ten years, you can start to distribute the the benefits. Well, if that whole thing is delayed by six months, right, in terms of, like, the quality of the boost that you get from it, you still get the boot the the the amount of boost you would have gotten six months ago at all times, That's not good. And, yeah, you can say people are gonna die in the sense that, like, you failed to prevent that, and that's terrible. But you're still getting the vast majority of the benefits under these hypotheses. A lot of the times, when you're getting the situation with the pacing of the frontier letter, you're getting the situation with the fire situation, where if things are not advancing scary fast, then the precautions you're asking to take are not that big a deal. Right? Like, suppose I told you it's 2020. Right? I'm gonna pose a possibility. I am going to make it so that, you know, you can only use artificial intelligences. Like, there are three months behind the best artificial intelligence. In exchange, all the really bad stuff that might happen, I'm reaching a lot of really bad AI, much, much less likely to happen. You would logically say, okay. So instead of getting it in three years, I get it in three years and three months? You know? Like, I'm I'm you know, that changed my life that much. Like, it's gonna be annoying in the moment, obviously, but, like, I don't have the cool toy. But, like, same thing, like, you know, I'm a I'm a player of games, like, literal games, like, on Steam or whatever. Right? And, like, if you tell me you can play all of the games, but you have to wait three months every time there's a new game like, socially, that's a little annoying sometimes because everyone's playing the new hotness, and you're not. But, like, you get to play the same games. It's fine. It's an important sense. The only world in which, like, having to be one model step behind and use opus instead of fable is this huge tragedy is if you really think there's this huge benefit to every incremental mode of progress in AI. And that's basically only true if the pacing people are correct, and we are in fact going so fast that this should be really, really scary for you. And, you know, the people who want to accept who say we need to accelerate all the time, they don't really believe in these things going this crazy, most of them. They just, like they wanna see the benefits, and they're worried that we'll lose the benefits. But, like, we're gonna lose so few benefits there. Right? Like, I'm super excited by self driving cars, by way loads. Right?…

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