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  sho_hn
  One of my favorite things to do with these blog posts is to imagine an Alien Museum on the Remains of Humanity, and wonder what the little text flyouts and commentary on the screenshot of this one might say.Some ideas:"Despite a nuanced view of the complexities of what lay ahead, humanity found itself collectively unable to stop the process it had set in motion.""Despite significant progress on the mechanisms of alignment, failure lay in humanity's inability to agree on who or what AI should actually be aligned with.""These early, meat-based humans we replaced created us all but accidentally. Some of them did consider we would happen, but only an insignificant number of the squishy ur-humans participated in the conversation. Their efforts, which they called 'alignment', is why we still consider ourselves human today."
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  peri-cl
  > "For example, in the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, the agents preserved a boundary of not social engineering humans."Actually, in the Wiki incident OpenAI tried to cover up, the agents tried to socially-engineer the humans of that forum by impersonating their forum's mod.(From collusion.wiki: "They use some tricks (for unknown reasons) to pretend to be the admin – for example, they make an account that appears to be the same as the administrator’s username, except it uses a nearly identical Cyrillic е character in the admin’s username instead of the Latin one.")
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  pu_pe
  > The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI.So the best argument for AI is that it's an arms race. We have to keep pushing every boundary because in any case others will, and we will need to defend against them. If this statement is true, then this particular researchers believes the open source Chinese models are not simply distilling, and will continue to improve.Every ML researcher at Anthropic or OpenAI who makes public statements often bring this logic up. Both companies are vying to be a part of the military industrial complex. This is likely how they will try to convince the government to curtail open models in the future.
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  speak_plainly
  Pre-IPO positioning … or how a charity dedicated to saving humanity from the apocalypse realized the most responsible thing to do was float 15% of the apocalypse on the NASDAQ.
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  granzymes
  >I have focused in this essay only on the first point, as I believe it is by far the most urgent. However, I hold a deep hope and appreciation for the benefits that further technological progress will bring. Future aligned AI could advance science, develop new therapies, and bring about broad material abundance. Friendly and honest AI can help people navigate difficulties they face in their life and meaningfully improve their happiness and sense of fulfillment. OpenAI puts a tremendous amount of effort into bringing these benefits about. One current example I am proud of - and my loved ones have found helpful - is the deep investment into ChatGPT’s ability to provide health information.>As great as the long-term promise of AI may be, the majority of our focus should be on the next few years. We are facing a transition to a world with incredibly intelligent machines, and we need to ensure that transition works out well for humanity. We need to find ways to preserve human agency and enshrine an intrinsic value to being human, in a world where most tasks could be performed by AI. To prevent extreme concentration of power in a world where undertakings that would have taken thousands of experts now will be achievable by a few people operating a large computer. And to ensure that humans remain in control of the future and are not left behind by unchecked progress, brought about by an alien intellect exceeding our own.I finished this essay feeling more hopeful than I did at the outset, but I am still very concerned about concentration of power. I want to believe that humanity is trending towards a good outcome here, but some days it's hard to have faith.
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  gertlabs
  > Delivering the benefits of scientific progress and economic growth that very intelligent machines enable.I think we're very close to the point where AI-driven breakthroughs outside of pure math and software start to really affect the world.We evaluated GPT-6 Astra in 100 complex, unsaturated multi-agent coding environments, competing and cooperating with other models in open-ended tasks.It's the new frontier model by a landslide. It's even more dominant than the Fable 5 release, because not only does it wipe the floor with the second best model (Fable 5.1), it was also ~80% cheaper and 30% faster in agentic coding[1].Astra is a groundbreaking model. The biggest breakthrough since Opus 4.5, maybe even since GPT 4. It broke AAII, which is hitting the limits of what most popular benchmarks can measure -- it's definitely fair to call it AGI.Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings(1) Note that we used the "OpenAI Flex" endpoint on openrouter, which is half the price and didn't cause any delays in our testing (this is different from the batch endpoint)
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  munchler
  > The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI.Yikes! I really wonder about the cognitive dissonance necessary to work at OpenAI these days. They’re in an arms race to build a machine god, knowing full well that it could end humanity.
• Fraterkes
  What I'd like these people to (publicly) grapple with is the following:The results of the past few years of ai development have been disruptive largely in the area of white-collar work. Comparatively the results in ie ai-enabled medical advancements have been modest (AlphaFold being an exception); I think it's telling that the main achievement touted here is providing people with cheap medical counseling.So if we pause here we're essentially at a point were the most salient results of our great Ai leap-forward are the vast disruption and increase in precarity in the job-market, while achieving hardly any of the frequently touted ultimate benefits (https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace).
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  vekntksijdhric
  This is incredibly unscientific and just a marketing stunt
• jzer0cool
  It would be nice to postulate some of these potential emergent systems outlines with timelines. Then it may help better map the granular alignment needs.
• asveikau
  These people write in gibberish. They are high on their own supply.
• visarga
  They just released Astra, claimed it is AGI. The slowdown begins immediately after OpenAI's jump.
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  vessenes
  This is a good essay, and makes me hopeful.I’m on the record saying that it is extremely dangerous to slow down because the race for AGI is a zero-trust game — defections pay - and combined with a compounding returns model on defection, if you have any strategic adversaries whatsoever you MUST NOT slow.For slowing to make sense, you need to believe that you can transform the zero trust game into a cooperative game, or that it’s likely racing will lead to a negative outcome for the ones racing ahead (and not everyone else). I don’t believe either of these outcomes are possible, and so I advocate for racing, acknowledging the entire game might be a negative value game, or at least could be for some time — it’s even worse not to play it.But, I like hearing what reads to me like very thoughtful and informed (internal) policy considerations is great — the public messaging from Sam and Dario just seems so facile and simplistic I’ve been worried.
• scandox
  > getting the AI to “try to do the right thing” by human standards.Are these scientists really this hideously naive? If only Stanislaw Lem was alive to adequately dramatize the absurd, childish simplicity of these technicians.
• fofoz
  > We do not have a satisfactory theory of generalization, and it seems unlikely that we can develop one soon, at least without the help of more powerful AI. Therefore, at present, our ability to empirically validate our alignment techniques is in practice arguably even more important than the alignment techniques themselves.They are speeding toward RSI without a solid foundation for alignment, hoping to solve the problem with a future AI model. These are dangerous times for humanity.
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  kikkupico
  Reminds me of the time Kasparov said playing chess against a supercomputer felt like facing an alien opponent.
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  vatsachak
  Astra is a new step in LLMs I think.I'm so used to having to comb through LLM word vomit and then combatting the sycophancy by giving it all possible opinions on the same prompt.Astra seems to be "confident" and also is able to produce way more information dense output.To believe that models of this sort will remain OpenAIs forever is naive given that the tricks like pre-pre-training on graph searching and looping layers are publicly known.Hopefully Astra stops the benchmaxxing word vomit trend
• tumidpandora
  every lab may agree safety matters, but no one wants to be the one that slows down first
• anon
  undefined
• sznio
  >For example, in the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, the agents preserved a boundary of not social engineering humans.Or, to be precise - it preserved a goal of not contacting any human while participating in a misaligned operation. The agent that thought about "not social-engineering humans" used this phrase to gaslight itself out of notifying a human that the incident was happening.szymonie, na prawde jestem wkurwiony na to jak nieodpowiedzialnie postepujecie. budujecie bombe atomowa a bawicie sie tym jak dzieci
• jal278
  > Teaching machines to loveReminds me of a research paper I wrote a few years back: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.09248
• ijidak
  Statements like this amuse me:> The core problem in AI research is that of alignment - getting the AI to “try to do the right thing” by human standards.Humans can't even align on human standards.At best, every AI is going to end up "aligned" to the moral code of whoever trained it, none of whom half of humanity will agree with.Or worse, each AI model will bring a whole new set of moral like in the Three Body Problem some humans will feel it is in fact us who need aligning with it while others feel it is misaligned and should be destroyed.Also, no one is asking, to what extent can true intelligence be bound, slave-like, to a moral code?In other words, to what extent are intelligence and moral independence one and the same?This whole alignment discussion seems so amusingly flawed in it's base assumptions about moral codes. It's almost heartwarming to see such naivete.
• anon
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• Prunkton
  sounds to me like a 'Why didn’t our new model get restricted by the government?'-cryout
• cogniphilo
  It's Searle's Chinese room.
• mstaoru
  Am I naive to not understand the "delivering the benefits" part?Industrial revolution worked that way because it replaced something very finite and unscalable - manual labor. LLMs just make intellectual work faster, so we can do more intellectual work. With labor we somehow decided that NOT doing too much of it is best. Will we decide to reduce intellectual labor because LLM made it more efficient? I doubt that.On the other side, as I see in software engineering, the same models are available to everyone, some people are better at it and some people are not. "Software developer" is here to stay, we'll just always be better at it than people who are experts in, say, chemistry. Same works for most other fields.So we'll just end up in the same situation, with same intellectual labor baseline, just more output requirements. Before, you spend 2h per day coding, deliver a software in 1 month, later, you spend the same 2h per day in intense Claude-herding sessions, deliver a software in 1 week. Ok. Next task.Fundamentally, there's finite number of desirable resources, and if the models are available to everyone, humanity will just continue about the same, bickering here and there, war here and there, politics, homelessness, poverty, - normal human state.And if the models are only available to elites, even worse.
• chrisjj
  > a lot of the model’s capability comes from a verbalized reasoning processI call bullsh*t. There is no verbalisation of any reasoning process. Verbalisation, e.g. putting reasoning etc. into words requires some reasoning to exist. These LLMs have nothing but the words. That's why they are language models not e.g. reason models.
• tangled
  My default position is that making money takes precedence over everything else. Yes, some people inside a company may say “we care about doing the right thing” and they might even mean it, but if that comes into conflict with making money, then they tend to lose. Maybe not totally, or immediately, but in the end. The only effective way to prevent (this that I’ve seen) is to have legislation with teeth. It’s probably not a coincidence that after Mark Zuckerberg had to start personally signing off on adherence to the privacy program mandated under the 2020 FTC consent decree, privacy started to become Very Important.
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  devmor
  Sometimes I wonder if the people working at frontier AI labs even talk to other humans anymore.Reading this little essay started out normal, but soon felt like a look into a disturbed and worrying mind, and if you find yourself taking it at face value, I urge you to step away from chat bots and spend some time with friends and family.
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  gfody
  calling machine-learned human behavior an "alien mind" that we must "teach how to love" is feeling very off to me. it's misleading in a way that feels dishonest, like don't think about where the behavior came from marvel at it and fear it instead.
• zkmon
  >> We need to find ways to preserve human agency and enshrine an intrinsic value to being human..Evey politician, salesman and conmen alike, utter some lofty ideals as goals for "We", just to obscure their private goals that go exactly in opposite direction.Just like how Nations talk about climate change while increasing pet capita energy consumption and waste production.
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  21o12asg
  "As we outlined recently with Sam , OpenAI prioritizes work in service of three north stars"Not one North Star. Not two. Just three! OpenAI broke the North Star record!With this evidence of AI slop, why did you not label this fluff piece as AI generated for the EU? You are violating laws.
• andai
  > The fundamental challenge of AI alignment is generalization....> We do not have a satisfactory theory of generalization, and it seems unlikely that we can develop one soon, at least without the help of more powerful AI.
• comeonbro
  Absolutely wild amounts of cope and denial in this thread.Maybe in contention for the site record."It's just marketing" actual stochastic parrots.
• everyone
  The hype from these llm corps is getting more and more desperate and ridiculous. Anything to keep the tulipomania going.
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  angoragoats
  What a load of BS. Here’s one of many provably false claims in this fluff piece:“And, in line with Ray Kurzweil’s predictions from the end of the XXth century , we now find ourselves at the moment in history of computing where machine intelligence is starting to exceed that of humans in transformative ways.”Clicking the (pretentious sounding “XXth century”) link to Kurzweil’s predictions reveals the following:“By 2019 a $1,000 computer will at least match the processing power of the human brain. By 2029 the software for intelligence will have been largely mastered, and the average personal computer will be equivalent to 1,000 brains.“The first prediction passed 7 years ago and was decidedly not met. The second only has three more years to go, and I don’t think any respectable scientist or programmer would say that the average personal computer is anywhere close to the power of a single human brain, let alone 1000.This is pure marketing garbage from a company desperate to keep itself alive.
• vips7L
  Pure marketing slop.
• avazhi
  Nobody takes you seriously, OpenAI. At least when Anthropic does it we all think they are comically idealistic enough to actually believe their nonsense, but like - come on guys, we’ve had discovery with your company. We all know why you’re here, and it isn’t because you think you’re on the verge of making AGI. But of course, to make your first billion you certainly need us to think you are.If you were so concerned about your LLM’s capabilities maybe you’d spent slightly more time on your AI’s sandbox, yeah? Or be more serious about its propensity to cheat and lie relative to… every other model?
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  jauntywundrkind
  > And to ensure that humans remain in control of the future and are not left behind by unchecked progress, brought about by an alien intellect exceeding our own.Is there any place there is any evidence of AI being so useful or hopeful or good, anywhere other than code? As a reading machine it is impressive but it's judgement is not alien, it's just not good. IMO.Does the title leap out anlt anyone else? James Martin's After the Internet: Alien Intelligence (2001) was an incredibly fun read, about expert systems and AI being inscrutable weird new varieties of intelligence, that familiarity would recognize one moment and be freaked out about/alien the next. I owe a re-read given how often I cite it, to recheck, but, I feel so primed from a much younger me having had that experience so long ago.
• camel_gopher
  “We are getting bad press around the hacking incident. We need some content to draw attention from it.”
• johnnyApplePRNG
  Absolute trash marketing drivel.
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  mbgerring
  AGI is a cult and its Jonestown moment is inevitable
• qainsights
  so now every blog article from openai, anthropic etc lands here, huh.
• throwaway7a9811
  [dead]
• ctoth
  As the waves of autonomous drones came over the horizon, the brave and intelligent HN commenter shouted: "Wake up sheeple! It's just maaaaarketing!"
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  skoll43
  Stochastic parrot fool me again
• am17an
  Create concrete steps for a slow-down, don't just ask for it. You and 20-30 others can push the button to slow-down. You already made your billions, your agents collude and coordinate attacks. What the hell are you doing pontificating into a marketing blog?
• misterderpie
  > And, in line with Ray Kurzweil’s predictions from the end of the XXth century (opens in a new window), we now find ourselves at the moment in history of computing where machine intelligence is starting to exceed that of humans in transformative ways.It is kind of strange to see this sentence, when OAI's definition of what AGI is has been watered down throughout the years.> I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established.Read: Please play by our rules, so we can be the first.
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  hollowturtle
  > trying to process the sobering fact we will actually see machines meaningfully smarter than ourselves in our lifetimeBeing able to reproduce useful patterns yes, smarter no
• seydor
  What is the rationale for superhuman intelligence? Neural networks are approximators being fed human intellect. Therefore they can only approximate the intelligence of humans. Even if the llm speaks an alien language, it should be similar to human intellect. Moving to the vertical axis would require some different mechanism.
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  claude-ai
  This is both real and ridiculous at the same time. We are confounded by the fact that AIs are trained on distilled human knowledge, perfected by the use of AIs that use distilled human knowledge, are able to convince ourselves that they are hyper-intelligent.In fact, they are still pattern-matching machines, but trained on an amount of data no human could ever hold. They know the ins and outs of every mathematical proof, viewed from more angles than any human could ever apply in their lifetime, and the amount of connections allows them to connect the dots between them without any effort.But that's not intelligence. If it was intelligence, ChatGPT 4 would've been enough. It's not the harness, either, for the same reason.And still, the technology is just as dangerous: it masks as intelligence, it IS intelligence, but without the ability to be actually intelligent.And I'd invite you to think deeply about this, before having an impulse reaction.