The Mediocrity of the AI Pause Open Letter
The past few weeks has been full of hubbub about the future of AI, GPT-4 and longtermism. If you haven’t read the Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter for yourself, I suggest you give it a read. Dr. Emily Bender, Dr. Timnit Gebru, Dr. Meg Mitchell and so many other PhD’d womxn AI scholars have shared insightful questions and thought-provoking commentary on social media and via news articles. They’ve stood up and raised important points that shouldn’t be ignored. They shared no lies detected and I’m in full agreement with their takes. So I’m not going to re-iterate what they’ve already said.
Let’s focus our attention just how mediocre this AI pause request was explained. I’d give it a C. While my irritation points are many, I’m going to focus on three statements in the open letter.
“AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts.”
- Which AI labs? Which independent researchers? No names were shared. So I guess this is an open call and we all can imagine how wide the AI knowledge gaps will be to those who’d respond.
- Do these AI lab personnel and independent researchers know each other? People work with other…
