EA - Future Matters #8: Bing Chat, AI labs on safety, and pausing Future Matters by Pablo

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Future Matters #8: Bing Chat, AI labs on safety, and pausing Future Matters, published by Pablo on March 21, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Future Matters is a newsletter about longtermism and existential risk. Each month we collect and summarize relevant research and news from the community, and feature a conversation with a prominent researcher. You can also subscribe on Substack, listen on your favorite podcast platform and follow on Twitter. Future Matters is also available in Spanish.A message to our readersThis issue marks one year since we started Future Matters. We’re taking this opportunity to reflect on the project and decide where to take it from here. We’ll soon share our thoughts about the future of the newsletter in a separate post, and will invite input from readers. In the meantime, we will be pausing new issues of Future Matters. Thank you for your support and readership over the last year!Featured researchAll things BingMicrosoft recently announced a significant partnership with OpenAI [see FM#7] and launched a beta version of a chatbot integrated with the Bing search engine. Reports of strange behavior quickly emerged. Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for the New York Times, had a disturbing conversation in which Bing Chat declared its love for him and described violent fantasies. Evan Hubinger collects some of the most egregious examples in Bing Chat is blatantly, aggressively misaligned. In one instance, Bing Chat finds a user’s tweets about the chatbot and threatens to exact revenge. In the LessWrong comments, Gwern speculates on why Bing Chat exhibits such different behavior to ChatGPT, despite apparently being based on a closely-related model. (Bing Chat was subsequently revealed to have been based on GPT-4).Holden Karnofsky asks What does Bing Chat tell us about AI risk? His answer is that it is not the sort of misaligned AI system we should be particularly worried about. When Bing Chat talks about plans to blackmail people or commit acts of violence, this isn’t evidence of it having developed malign, dangerous goals. Instead, it’s best understood as Bing acting out stories and characters it’s read before. This whole affair, however, is evidence of companies racing to deploy ever more powerful models in a bid to capture market share, with very little understanding of how they work and how they might fail. Most paths to AI catastrophe involve two elements: a powerful and dangerously misaligned AI system, and an AI company that builds and deploys it anyway. The Bing Chat affair doesn’t reveal much about the first element, but is a concerning reminder of how plausible the second is.Robert Long asks What to think when a language model tells you it's sentient []. When trying to infer what’s going on in other humans’ minds, we generally take their self-reports (e.g. saying “I am in pain”) as good evidence of their internal states. However, we shouldn’t take Bing Chat’s attestations (e.g. “I feel scared”) at face value; we have no good reason to think that they are a reliable guide to Bing’s inner mental life. LLMs are a bit like parrots: if a parrot says “I am sentient” then this isn’t good evidence that it is sentient. But nor is it good evidence that it isn’t — in fact, we have lots of other evidence that parrots are sentient. Whether current or future AI systems are sentient is a valid and important question, and Long is hopeful that we can make real progress on developing reliable techniques for getting evidence on these matters.Long was interviewed on AI consciousness, along with Nick Bostrom and David Chalmers, for Kevin Collier’s article, What is consciousness? ChatGPT and Advanced AI might define our answer [].How the major AI labs are thinking about safetyIn the last few weeks, we got more information about how the lead...