Masters of Scale
00:15:14 · Reid Hoffman, Demis Hassabis
[00:15:14] S3: Should there be ways that the labs are encouraged, required, permitted to collaborate on this? And if so, what should some of those ways be? Because it obviously gets stronger if there is sharing of intelligence, methodology, mutual accountability. [00:15:31] S2: Yeah. Mean, been lots of proposals, I've been working on these things a lot. You saw my essay over the summer, maybe some of you read it, about potential for like an SRO, industry run standards body with some kind of government oversight over it. I think something like that is going to be needed, then ideally it becomes international, you know, it's US led, and then obviously the state of geopolitics today makes it, and and our international institutions are very, very weak as we all know, just at the time when we need them to be strongest in a way. So that's a bit unfortunate, but we've got to start somewhere. [00:16:04] S3: By the way, British, a bit unfortunate is holy just to translate...
00:16:08 · Demis Hassabis
[00:16:08] S2: To translate? Another translation. Yes. Like tea time and dinner time. Yes. Exactly. A bit unfortunate. So we're trying to... Various of us are trying to do things about that. And that essay did have an impact and... You know, in the White House and in the administration and and with our colleagues. Eventually, you know, I think some of that energy became the accord that you... The famous letter everyone signed, which is which is better than nothing. Don't think it goes far enough, but it's a start. At least it acknowledges from all of the main players the issues that are there and that they need to be addressed. It doesn't say too much about what to do about them, but that has to come next. At least it gives air cover, I think, for the teams to work together what sorts of benchmarks, what are safe... Best practices on safety, what are you seeing in terms of analysis of what things could happen with these types of systems. And I do think there are some things that generally all the leading labs do agree on, like the idea of third party auditors or evaluators coming in. Obviously, there's a question mark on which third parties, and I think we need a healthy kind of ecosystem of that, that actually, you know, you could have good start ups and companies doing that, that there's enough revenue there for them, and they should be given the amount of investment going into AI as a whole. A bit like there are auditors, you know, in the finance industry or in any of these industries. So I could see that happening, and some of the big players are moving into this, like Accenture, We're working in our other leaders are working with. I think they're a little bit ahead of the game because they've acquired, you know, a good start up, good friend of ours, Marc Warner, start up. So they have some expertise internally, but I think we need more of that. And then other things like, you know, the leading labs maybe red teaming each other before general release of these systems.
00:17:54 · Jeff Berman
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00:19:44 · Reid Hoffman, Demis Hassabis
[00:19:44] S3: So let's move from that to a little bit more of the fantastical. It started actually a few years back. I think it was a Google engineer who said, I asked Gemini if it was conscious and it said yes, so therefore it's conscious, which seemed like a little bit of a [00:19:57] S2: Yes, premature. [00:19:58] S3: A weak inference. But that's now gaining some motion with some of the things especially anthropic is doing and the way that it kind of strategizes thinking that at some point, it's almost like a Pascal's wager. At some point, there will be consciousness in these systems, and we want those conscious systems to look back saying that we were treating them the way... The same way that we treat a two year old. Mhmm. Which is, hey, we were good to you as a two year old, and so, you know, it kind of continues through. Obviously to many people that looks kind of wacky. Mhmm. Right? And so, what do you think... I mean, because part of what I think maybe many people don't realize is you also come to this from a depth of expertise in brain science. Mhmm. And you know, one of the things is not just a, oh, did the chat bot say it was conscious or not, is not a way to make a decision on this kind of thing. What do you think some of the ways to think about this is, and also how we should be deliberately trying to shape it?
00:19:58 · Reid Hoffman, Demis Hassabis
[00:19:58] S3: A weak inference. But that's now gaining some motion with some of the things especially anthropic is doing and the way that it kind of strategizes thinking that at some point, it's almost like a Pascal's wager. At some point, there will be consciousness in these systems, and we want those conscious systems to look back saying that we were treating them the way... The same way that we treat a two year old. Mhmm. Which is, hey, we were good to you as a two year old, and so, you know, it kind of continues through. Obviously to many people that looks kind of wacky. Mhmm. Right? And so, what do you think... I mean, because part of what I think maybe many people don't realize is you also come to this from a depth of expertise in brain science. Mhmm. And you know, one of the things is not just a, oh, did the chat bot say it was conscious or not, is not a way to make a decision on this kind of thing. What do you think some of the ways to think about this is, and also how we should be deliberately trying to shape it? [00:20:50] S2: Yeah, well, look, I think there's quite a few things to say about this. First of all, we haven't, despite thousands of years of thinking about this, there isn't an agreed upon definition of consciousness. So that's one issue, I think, and that's one issue with labeling things conscious, especially the hard problem of consciousness, you know, is it really feeling this internally like the way we seem to, You know, behaviorally, these [00:21:11] S3: things about you,
00:21:12 · Demis Hassabis
[00:21:12] S2: but But... Yes. Exactly. But the behaviorally... Well, but I used to argue with Daniel Dennett about this. There's there's an additional thing is we're not just behaving in ways like we'd imagine conscious beings behave, but we also share the same substrate, where we have the same squishy brains, and so then it's most parsimonious to think you're feeling what I'm feeling. But of course with an AI, that's not the case. You don't have the second... The substrate equivalents. So I think it's gonna be very hard to conclude that. I think there are dangers... Look. There's there's two reasons why I think we should be focusing on building intelligent tools today, not conscious entities. I think for one thing is a safety argument and technical safety and risk, which is the... You know, there's a direct trade off between creating something, let's say, with self volition, right, or self awareness even prior to conscious disease or the prerequisites, right, to a conscious entity that it will... And that and instruction following or sometimes called corrigibility. So this idea of a system actually following instructions, and if it's going wrong, you telling it... You know, you as the user or the human user telling it, like, stop doing that. Right? Or switch yourself off or whatever it is that you're going to, you know, change course. So if you are training your system to be able to reject commands based on its own internal workings, then you're setting up a situation where if you've got your constitution wrong or your rules wrong, and this is what Asimov was always warning about with these three laws, you know, that was a form of... A very simple form of a constitution. And his books are all warnings that that's you're never gonna get that right Yes. In every corner case, in every edge case. And I think his books show that very well. And yet we're sort of, I think, bit hubristically thinking that that... Some people thinking that, you know, sometimes called the misalignment problem is sort of under control just because today's systems, you know, the good news is they seem more malleable than we might have imagined fifteen, twenty years ago, which is great news in terms of their steerability. But that doesn't mean we've solved the misalignment problem in total as we get closer to a GI and superintelligence and so on.