Matteo Wong , The Atlantic; The Myth of Safe AI
Silicon Valley promises to make AI benevolent. That may be technically impossible.
"Three months prior to the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI published what would prove to be a prescient blog outlining the firm’s approach to ensuring that its AI models would be safe and beneficent. This goal, known as “alignment”—as in, aligning AI with human values—is nebulous, grand, and perhaps the AI industry’s most foundational promise. The notion is right there in OpenAI’s mission statement to ensure AI “benefits all of humanity” and listed as one of Anthropic’s “primary” goals.
Yet even in the summer of 2022, OpenAI was admitting a sort of defeat: “There is currently no known indefinitely scalable solution to the alignment problem,” three of its researchers wrote in that same blog post, adding that developing one “is likely very difficult.”
If the goal of keeping AI beneficial to mankind sounds rather vague, it is. Four years later, the alignment problem remains unsolved, and for that matter, there isn’t consensus about what the problem even is. Meanwhile, AI bots are autonomously hacking sovereign nations. And sending fake murder tips to police hotlines. And creating aliases to launch phishing campaigns. OpenAI and Anthropic still can’t really tell you what an aligned AI model looks like. But anybody can tell you it doesn’t look like this.
The most influential AI executives and investors in the world fundamentally disagree about the nature of the technology and, more pragmatically, how to make their products safe."
