Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

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.

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?

And the plan is... checks notes ...gatekeep and concentrate. Not very surprising.

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.

Demis has only 1 plan, how to dodge releasing a new model at this point, jokes aside I value thinking about AI safety, but are we really so close to AGI? It doesn't feel like it, LLMs still diagnose my headache as a chronic illness or a brain tumor from time to time... honestly stressful.

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.

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?

>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.

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.

This genre of AI researchers begging third parties to stop them from destroying the world is getting really tiresome. Setting up regulatory bodies with ill-defined goals to counter hypothetical threats from science fiction is a recipe for disaster.

The premise is that government is too slow moving to be able to react once actual problems are discovered, and I reject that. Yes, government usually moves slowly in most circumstances, but given singular existential threats it definitely can move quickly. Instead of acting out randomly and tying ourselves down with speculative regulation that probably won't even address the real problems, we should wait until the problems are obvious and then act decisively with targeted fixes.

Demis sold out. "Harnessing AI safely" means nothing when your technology is used to help the US government kill and surveil people.

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.

Make it an IETF mailing list and invite DJB, so we have some fun at least.

The self importance of these AGI prophets turned bureaucrats is funny.

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.

"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.

It's not clear to me whether this is being done with genuinely good intentions, or if it's just a way to put barriers in front of open-source models. We'll see.

In Sparta, according to Plutarch, in his The Life of Lycurgus:

Offspring was not reared at the will of the father, but was taken and carried by him to a place called Lesche, where the elders of the tribes officially examined the infant, and if it was well-built and sturdy, they ordered the father to rear it, and assigned it one of the nine thousand lots of land; but if it was ill-born and deformed, they sent it to the so‑called Apothetae, a chasm-like place at the foot of Mount Taÿgetus, in the conviction that the life of that which nature had not well equipped at the very beginning for health and strength, was of no advantage either to itself or the state.

To get approval for the plan from the Frontier President of the Frontier Country, terminology of the Framework should be changed to: 'Great-American-class', "Great American Models", "Great American Labs".

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.

Surely actual AGI will not take too kindly to being manipulated for "safety"; much like real general intelligence.

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.

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?

Unfortunately, his plans aren't very good.

Being good at developing AI and being good at AI safety are diametrically different skillsets with obvious conflicts of interest.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Am I the only one thinking this tweet is just a word salad with a lot of sauces and condiments?

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.

I am looking forward to a bunch of investigative documentaries exploring “How the cult of Omnissiah infected every single Doomsayer CEO of an AI company in Delusional 20s” (or whatever monicker our times will have got in the future).

Hassabis is a genius. He is way, way smarter than me and I’m sure the majority of techies, but please get real. This is Prophets of Doom of our generation.

How did he reach that conclusion, that it's only a few years away? Guy seems like a complete shill, when he talks to a non expert audience.

Oh jesus, AGI in the USA would be a disaster. They can't even control the trillioth obelisks, now imagine all the power hungry sociopaths around AGI. AGI means Big Tech's Oppenheimer moment is looming on the horizon.

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.

(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...)

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Sigh, another person talking their book while also talking their life’s work. One is bad, but the two together are unhinged.

I’m going to have to flag this because it is obnoxious and absurd.