Cross posting from LessWrong:

I absolutely sympathize, and I agree that with the world view / information you have that advocating for a pause makes sense. I would get behind 'regulate AI' or 'regulate AGI', certainly. I think though that pausing is an incorrect strategy which would do more harm than good, so despite being aligned with you in being concerned about AGI dangers, I don't endorse that strategy.

Some part of me thinks this oughtn't matter, since there's approximately ~0% chance of the movement achieving that literal goal. The point is to build an anti-AGI movement, and to get people thinking about what it would be like to be able to have the government able to issue an order to pause AGI R&D, or turn off datacenters, or whatever. I think that's a good aim, and your protests probably (slightly) help that aim.

I'm still hung up on the literal 'Pause AI' concept being a problem though. Here's where I'm coming from: 

1. I've been analyzing the risks of current day AI. I believe (but will not offer evidence for here) current day AI is already capable of providing small-but-meaningful uplift to bad actors intending to use it for harm (e.g. weapon development). I think that having stronger AI in the hands of government agencies designed to protect humanity from these harms is one of our best chances at preventing such harms. 

2. I see the 'Pause AI' movement as being targeted mostly at large companies, since I don't see any plausible way for a government or a protest movement to enforce what private individuals do with their home computers. Perhaps you think this is fine because you think that most of the future dangers posed by AI derive from actions taken by large companies or organizations with large amounts of compute. This is emphatically not my view. I think that actually more danger comes from the many independent researchers and hobbyists who are exploring the problem space. I believe there are huge algorithmic power gains which can, and eventually will, be found. I furthermore believe that beyond a certain threshold, AI will be powerful enough to rapidly self-improve far beyond human capability. In other words, I think every AI researcher in the world with a computer is like a child playing with matches in a drought-stricken forest. Any little flame, no matter how small, could set it all ablaze and kill everyone. Are the big labs playing with bonfires dangerous? Certainly. But they are also visible, and can be regulated and made to be reasonably safe by the government. And the results of their work are the only feasible protection we have against the possibility of FOOM-ing rogue AGI launched by small independent researchers. Thus, pausing the big labs would, in my view, place us in greater danger rather than less danger. I think we are already well within the window of risk from independent-researcher-project-initiated-FOOM. Thus, the faster we get the big labs to develop and deploy worldwide AI-watchdogs, the sooner we will be out of danger.

I know these views are not the majority views held by any group (that I know of). These are my personal inside views from extensive research. If you are curious about why I hold these views, or more details about what I believe, feel free to ask. I'll answer if I can.
 

For one answer to this question, see https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ytGsHbG7r3W3nJxPT/will-releasing-the-weights-of-large-language-models-grant?commentId=FCTuxs43vtqLMmG2n 

For lots more discussion, see the other LessWrong comments at: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ytGsHbG7r3W3nJxPT/will-releasing-the-weights-of-large-language-models-grant 

And also check out my rather unpopular question here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dL3qxebM29WjwtSAv/would-it-make-sense-to-bring-a-civil-lawsuit-against-meta 

I am genuinely interested in gathering valid critiques on my work so that I can do better in the future.

Yes, the information is available on Google. The question is, in our eyes, more about whether a future model could successfully walk an unskilled person through the process without the person needing to understand it at all.

The paper is an attempt to walk a careful line of warning the world that the same information in more capable models could be quite dangerous, but not actually increasing the likelihood of someone using the current open source models (which it is too late to control!) for making biological weapons.

If there are specific questions you have, I'd be happy to answer.

For what it's worth, my model of a path to safe AI looks like a narrow winding path along a ridge with deadly falls to either side:

Unfortunately, the deadly falls to either side have illusions projected onto them of shortcuts to power, wealth, and utility. I don't think there is any path which goes to safety without a long ways of immediate danger nearby. In this model, deliberately consistently optimizing for safety above all else during the dangerous stretch is the only way to make it through.

The danger zone is where the model is sufficiently powerful and agentic enough that a greedy shortsighted person could say to it, "Here is access to the internet. Make me lots of money." and this would result in a large stream of money pouring into their account. I think we're only a few years away from that point, and that the actions that safety researchers take in the meantime aren't going to change that. So, we need both safety research and governance, and carefully selecting disproportionately safety-accelerating research would be entirely irrelevant to the strategic landscape.

This is just my view, and I may be wrong, but I think it's worth pointing out that there's a chance that the idea of trying to do disproportionately safety-accelerating research is a distraction from strategically relevant action.

Cool, thanks. Sorry for sounding a bit hostile, I'm just really freaked out by my strongly held inside view that we have less than 10 years until some really critical tipping point stuff happens. I'm trying to be reasonable and rational about this, but sometimes I react emotionally to comments that seem to be arguing for a 'things will stay status quo for a good while, don't worry about the short term ' view.

Calling my strongly held inside view 'fringe' doesn't carry much weight as an argument for me. Do you have actual evidence of your longer than 10 years timelines view?

I hold the view that important scientific advancements tend to come disproportionately from the very smartest and most thoughtful people. My hope would be that students smart enough to be meaningfully helpful on the AGI alignment problem would be able to think through and form correct inside views on this.

If we've got maybe 2-3 years left before AGI, then 2 years before starting is indeed a large percentage of that remaining time. Even if we have more like 5-10... maybe better to just starting trying to work directly on the problem as best you can than let yourself get distracted by acquiring general background knowledge.

So here's a funny twist. I personally have been longtermist since independently coming to the conclusion that it was the correct way to conceptualize ethics, around 30 years ago. I realized that I cared about as much about future people as current people far away. After some thought, I settled on global health/poverty/rule-of-law as one of my major cause areas because I believe that bringing current people out of bad situations  is good not only for them but for the future people who will descend from them or be neighbors of their descendants, etc. Also, because society as a whole sees these people suffering, thinks and talks about them, and adjusts their ethical decision-making in accordance. I think that the common knowledge that we are part of a worldwide society which allows children to starve or suffer from cheaply curable diseases negatively influences our perception of how good our society COULD be. I think my other important cause areas, like existential risk mitigation and planning for sustainable exponential growth are also important, but.... Suppose we succeed at these two, and fail at the first. I don't want a galaxy spanning civilization which allows a substantial portion of its subjects to suffer hugely from preventable problems the way we currently allow our fellow humans to suffer. That wouldn't be worse than no-galaxy-spanning-civilization, but it would be a lot less good than one which takes reasonable care of its members.

Sounds like good work. Trying to get the right information to the right people who can pass that on to decision makers seems useful. 

Two things I would like you to consider having some cached thoughts on to offer to the right people would be:

1. food security under adverse circumstances (e.g. highlights from the work of AllFed like seaweed farming).

2. Global cooling work (e.g. Silver Lining, and doubling up with reef-protection by seawater spraying over reefs), and the combined work of carbon sequestration and soil quality improvement of Biochar as an agricultural practice. Biochar is neat because it's advantageous to the individual farmer, as well as being good for the world, so the local incentive structure is aligned.

Ok, these are all pretty simplified and I think you'd need to understand a bit more background to move the conversation on from these points, but not bad. Except for the 'why not merge with AI' response. That one is responding as if 'merge' meant physically merge, which is not what is meant by that argument. The argument means to merge minds with the AI, to link brains and computers together in some fashion (e.g. neuralink) such that there is high bandwidth information flow, and thus be able to build an AGI system which contains a human mind.

Here's a better argument against that: human values are not permeated all throughout the entire human brain, it is possible to have a human without a sense of morality. You cannot guarantee that a system of minds including a human mind (whether running on biological tissue or computer hardware) would in fact be aligned just because the human portion was aligned pre-merge. It is a strange and novel enough entity to need study and potentially alignment just like any other novel AGI prototype.