Planning for AGI and beyond

OpenAI's push for AGI heats up.

Welcome Back,

OpenAI has always positioned itself as the AGI company. With ChatGPT’s public success, that argument is taking an interesting turn in 2023, one which the now well-founded startup is trying to capitalize on.

What if someone not named Google actually does invent AGI like capabilities in the next 20 years? What would actually happen to the world?

OpenAI wants you to believe:

Although we cannot predict exactly what will happen, and of course our current progress could hit a wall, we can articulate the principles we care about most:

1. We want AGI to empower humanity to maximally flourish in the universe. We don’t expect the future to be an unqualified utopia, but we want to maximize the good and minimize the bad, and for AGI to be an amplifier of humanity.

2. We want the benefits of, access to, and governance of AGI to be widely and fairly shared.

3. We want to successfully navigate massive risks. In confronting these risks, we acknowledge that what seems right in theory often plays out more strangely than expected in practice. We believe we have to continuously learn and adapt by deploying less powerful versions of the technology in order to minimize “one shot to get it right” scenarios. - OpenAI blog.

I’m not sure OpenAI has done a very good job of mitigating even the risks of ChatGPT, nevermind something more powerful.

When Tesla’s head of A.I. quit Tesla and now joined OpenAI again, I guess Elon Musk got a bit upset.

OpenAI Foundry and other Foundries will mean LLMs will be everywhere soon and cheaper than they are today. It will also mean Cloud computing Giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft will have more incentives to fund these A.I. labs and startups and eventually acquire them relatively quickly.

So who decides how AGI is unleashed upon the world? It may not be Governments or National Security people but powerful corporations that are set to become more powerful than nation states.

Can we trust Google, Microsoft or Amazon with Responsible A.I., even as killer robots are appearing? Killer robot swarms are coming, and AGI hype has its own risks. It heightens the danger of a conflict between the United States and China in their maneuvering for global dominance.

I share some controversial opinions in relative private in the following notes.