Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

dang

(I took the title from the Economist interview since "A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age" sounds like a press release - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... )

noelwelsh

The premise is "Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away". If this is true, establishing an institution to ensure things like "publishing model cards with technical details, maintaining strong internal cybersecurity, vetting key personnel, and providing sufficient resourcing for safety and security research" is really mostly irrelevant. TFA does talk about what really needs to be done, but punts this into future work: "Even if we solve these hard technical challenges, there will be further complex economic and philosophical questions to tackle: what sorts of new economic models will be needed to help everyone thrive in a post-scarcity world? What values do we want to live by, what will meaning and purpose be, and how might even the human condition itself change?" There's also a need to consider the rights that this new intelligence should have.

gruez

The proposal: >The American government, he says, should develop a system for testing the safety of new AI models before they are released. “It’s important that it’s not just an industry body,” he adds. But a regular government agency wouldn’t do either. “It would not be able to move fast enough, or have the right resources.” Instead, Sir Demis suggests taking inspiration from FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a private agency in America that regulates brokers and stock markets.

khurs

>This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away. There is a heatwave in London, perhaps Demis needs to stay out of the sun and drink more water. Or perhaps he is seeking more funding/a fight to maintain his divisions AGI research budget.

geremiiah

All the frontier labs are lobbying hard to lock down the AI market, because they see that their position at the top is temporary and that there's no secret sauce.

chrsw

For better or worse, humans (or any animal) are a lot better at reacting than planning. I'm sure this technology will play out differently than any one of us, or any collection of us, can imagine. The possibility space is enormous.

thegrim33

Spoiler: The plan is .. add massive regulation, but only to the US, don't affect other countries developing it in any way other than "setting a good standard that'll hopefully influence them". Seems like an airtight plan.

watwut

These people who read too many scifi books and confused them with reality are royally annoying. There is real and potential harm from AI, but the more someone talks/write abut AI safety, the less they care about actual harm to real people, economy and what not.

pshirshov

Blah-blah-singularity, so let's cripple the models so much they refuse to talk about React, because who knows if you are not cooking chemical weapons or meth in your browser's DOM, right?

sluongng

how would this help smaller labs? would it put more burdens on them when trying to compete with trillion-dollar companies or would it help?

HarHarVeryFunny

Not exactly a "plan" - he's just saying we should have a standards body that assesses models for safety. At this point I'd say the societal risk of AI isn't models gone wild, or used by the bad guys. Regulation will take care of itself, and it seems the AI companies will not only welcome it, but lobby for it to shift responsibility to the government. The real risk of AI is societal disruption due to job displacement, and maybe other structural changes, and this is far harder to solve, and likely will not be solved, or even seriously addressed, until/unless politicians feel like their own jobs and well-being depends on them addressing it.

cmrdporcupine

All that would happen from what he's proposing is such a watchdog would just be an explicit formal declaration of the US's national interests as being somehow the most legitimate, which in the context of current international relations is basically putting up a sign saying: "reject this!" I find it mind boggling that someone could be this tone-deaf to the current situation. No "ally" of the US is going to (willingly) agree to this governance structure given the current US administration's "might makes right" proclamations and threats on sovereignty of its continental neighbours. And non-allies would just ignore. Unless forced by said "might makes right", which in the long run will have no staying power. Apart from its completely delusional formulation, what is most concerning about this blog post is that it indicates that all 3 major US labs have formally submitted to boot-licking Trump/Bessent/Lutnick. I had I guess vainly held out hope that Google might be more reticent to do so.

macleginn

"It will help us solve some of the biggest problems society faces from accelerating drug discovery to developing new clean energy sources to creating novel advanced materials" — but these are not the real problems plaguing modern developed societies, are they? What developed societies really need to figure out right now is how to distribute the already available resources without making people miserable, and so far AI hasn't been helpful.

rhipitr

I do wonder what type of AI some of these leaders expect to be able to harness. If you create something that is true AI, won’t it be smarter than you to a level you cannot fathom. I was thinking of this idea/though-experiment (which I know is ridiculous) of what if dogs created humans thinking they could control them, and then just wound up being pets because their survival now depended on that new hierarchy that previously didn’t exist. Seems to be a lot of hubris with some AI thought leaders thinking control will remain with them and be absolute.

KaiserPro

sigh The standards body will have no teeth. whats to stop someone just not bothering? Next, the threats he is asserting to check for (cyber, chemical, biological) are nice, but also not that useful. We already have chemical and biological controls, that why I can't by anthrax spores or high concentration nitric acid. The risks that AI has now are already playing out: 1) the evaporation of trust in the video as medium of "this happened" 2) systematic spying 3) job losses Increased productivity means job losses, Tiktok, instagram and X are a wash with disinformtion campaign pumping your feeds with AI ragebait. That is and will continue to fracture society so that only the strictly information controlled (ie authoritarian) have a functioning state. if the author had bothered to engage with the world outside of tech, or even their local government, they would know that the proposal are dead in the water and frankly superfluous. The knowledge is out there, without AI. let us work on the issues we face now, rather than dipshit tech bro's miopic vision/funding manifesto.

techpression

Has anything really important been solved by AI yet, or where is this radical (imo) belief around AGI coming from? Genuinely curious, I know there are some math problems solved and ML has been used for far longer than AI to improve things, but where is clean (efficient) energy, the cure for cancer (or any of the horrible neurological disorders, take your pick), new hardware designs, quantum computing solutions, etc etc, you get the gist. Where are the things that will actually send humanity into the next era of civilization, I don't care about more React apps (but I do enjoy my coding companions for other things). Heck, a proof for P=NP or P!=NP or solve the The Riemann Hypothesis. Just give me something truly exciting and I will believe AGI is around the corner, until then I will see it as cool technology, that while beneficial to me, also helped cause the biggest amount of disinformation we've every seen.

merelydev

How will this be enforced, at least with financial markets money is discrete, can largely be counted. This seems like a slippery slope to full blown surveillance of the internet and in general computing. If AGI is truly imminent and will collectively effect all of us why not apply democracy to it, and vote for new AI models?

nullbio

This is bad. Where is the transparency? So a small group of technocrats get together behind closed doors and secretly share their AI breakthroughs, and determine whether it's too powerful or not for the plebs in the public. Who is watching the watchers?

segmondy

Not surprised, seems these labs start calling for regulation once they are losing or have competition. OpenAI started calling it for it once Anthropic got better, Anthropic started calling for it once the Chinese models got good, Google is now calling it for it because they are falling far behind.

rokhayakebe

If we get to AGI, the first step governments will take is ensure only a few countries are allowed to have it. Just like Nuclear.