Charting the emergence of AGI?

  The recent appointment of General Paul Nakasone, former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), to OpenAI's board of directors has sparked widespread outrage and concern among privacy advocates and tech enthusiasts alike. Nakasone, who led the NSA from 2018 to 2023, will join OpenAI's Safety and Security Committee, tasked with enhancing AI's role in cybersecurity. However, this move has raised significant red flags, particularly given the NSA's history of mass surveillance and data collection without warrants. Critics, including Edward Snowden, have voiced their concerns that OpenAI's AI capabilities could be leveraged to strengthen the NSA's snooping network, further eroding individual privacy. Snowden has gone so far as to label the appointment a "willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on Earth." The tech community is rightly alarmed, with many drawing parallels to dystopian fiction. The move has also raised questions about ...

  Adobe's recent update to its Terms of Service for Creative Cloud has sparked widespread concern among the creative community. The changes grant Adobe unprecedented access to users' projects, raising questions about privacy, copyright, and the very ownership of creative work. In this post, we'll delve into the key objections and legal implications of these new terms, and what they mean for professionals and individuals alike. Access to User Content: A Privacy Concern? Adobe's updated Terms of Service grant the company the right to access users' projects through automated and manual methods. While Adobe justifies this access as necessary for responding to support requests, detecting technical issues, and addressing security concerns, many users are uneasy about the potential for privacy violations and the unauthorised use of copyrighted material. This lack of transparency has led to fears that Adobe may use users' work to train its AI systems without their conse...

There have been some good attempts by organisations and individuals at developing policies on AI for third sector organisations. Some of the fundamental challenges that have been difficult to capture is the rapid evolution of AI. This rapid pace of AI development, particularly the potential for artificial general intelligence (AGI) by 2027/28 as suggested by scaling laws, poses significant challenges for charities in keeping their policies up-to-date. Here are some key considerations which may be of use to your organisation: Establish Principles and Ethical Frameworks Charities should establish clear principles and ethical frameworks to guide their use of AI, rather than relying solely on specific use cases or technical details that may quickly become outdated. These principles should align with the charity's mission, values, and commitment to beneficiaries, while addressing issues like transparency, accountability, privacy, and bias.[1][3] Adopt Agile and Iterative Policymaking Gi...

  Leopold Aschenbrenner's 'Situational Awareness, the decade ahead  Situational Awareness, the decade ahead . June 2024' may turn out to be the most significant publication on AI safety to date. Unlike a lot of theoretical musings from highly intelligent critics of AI systems this one has been written by an engineer, who was until recently employed by Open AI in the now disbanded former Super Alignment team.  It begins by discussing the rapid advancements in AI technology, particularly focusing on the progression from GPT-2 to GPT-4 models. It highlights that AI capabilities are evolving at an exponential rate, and there are predictions that by 2027, AI models could match or even surpass the work of human AI researchers and engineers. The text underscores the importance of understanding the trendlines in compute, algorithmic efficiencies, and unlocking latent capabilities for future AI development. Additionally, the document mentions the potential risks and challenge...

  Neel Nanda is involved in Mechanistic Interpretability research at DeepMind, formerly of AnthropicAI, what's fascinating about the research conducted by Nanda is he gets to peer into the Black Box to figure out how different types of AI models work. Anyone concerned with AI should understand how important this is. In this video Nanda discusses some of his findings, including 'induction heads', which turn out to have some vital properties.  Induction heads are a type of attention head that allows a language model to learn long-range dependencies in text. They do this by using a simple algorithm to complete token sequences like [A][B] ... [A] -> [B]. For example, if a model is given the sequence "The cat sat on the mat," it can use induction heads to predict that the word "mat" will be followed by the word "the". Induction heads were first discovered in 2022 by a team of researchers at OpenAI. They found that induction heads were present in ...

  'AI eliminated nearly 4,000 jobs in May' so it's reported by hallenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. Following on from reports by IBM et al that thousands of job cuts will occur due to AI replacement, there is no need to wait for the utopia of AI allowing humans more leisure time, as that's already here, in the form of redundancies, if we are to accept the reports findings. 'With the exception of Education, Government, Industrial Manufacturing, and Utilities, every industry has seen an increase in layoffs this year.' What's particularly notable is that it's the Tech sector that's the most affected from job cuts in the US economy: 'The Technology sector announced the most cuts in May with 22,887, for a total of 136,831 this year, up 2,939% from the 4,503 cuts announced in the same period last year. The Tech sector has now announced the most cuts for the sector since 2001, when 168,395 cuts were announced for the entire year. ' Another reason ...

  This blogpost will be added to over a few days, maybe weeks as it is in response to a report that has been published today, 13th June, 2023. I am writing this in the morning, I will need time to read it through in detail. However it is important enough for me to give my initial impressions.  On first glance it seems a comprehensive report with some interesting areas for debate, acknowledgement of the potential for the transformative effect on states of such technology, yet rather predictable solutions being offered that are too state orientated. It ultimately seems to be about power. How the power of corporations co-exist with the power of the state and what a future symbiotic co-existence might look like. There are the now usual calls for the UK's state to be elevated as a centre of AI Safety (which seems geopolitically unrealistic). The potential 'benefits' seem overplayed and the potential dangers underplayed.  One fear, such interventions are beginning to bring abou...