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AF - We might be dropping the ball on Autonomous Replication and Adaptation. by Charbel-Raphael Segerie
2024-05-31
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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: We might be dropping the ball on Autonomous Replication and Adaptation., published by Charbel-Raphael Segerie on May 31, 2024 on The AI Alignment Forum.
Here is a little Q&A
Can you explain your position quickly?
I think autonomous replication and adaptation in the wild is under-discussed as an AI threat model. And this makes me sad because this is one of the main reasons I'm worried. I think one of AI Safety people's main proposals should first focus on creating a nonproliferation treaty. Without this treaty, I think we are screwed. The more I think about it, the more I think we are approaching a point of no return.
It seems to me that open source is a severe threat and that nobody is really on the ball. Before those powerful AIs can self-replicate and adapt, AI development will be very positive overall and difficult to stop, but it's too late after AI is able to adapt and evolve autonomously because Natural selection favors AI over humans.
What is ARA?
Autonomous Replication and Adaptation. Let's recap this quickly. Today, generative AI functions as a tool: you ask a question and the tool answers. Question, answer. It's simple. However, we are heading towards a new era of AI, one with autonomous AI. Instead of asking a question, you give it a goal, and the AI performs a series of actions to achieve that goal, which is much more powerful.
Libraries like AutoGPT or ChatGPT, when they navigate the internet, already show what these agents might look like.
Agency is much more powerful and dangerous than AI tools. Thus conceived, AI would be able to replicate autonomously, copying itself from one computer to another, like a particularly intelligent virus. To replicate on a new computer, it must navigate the internet, create a new account on AWS, pay for the virtual machine, install the new weights on this machine, and start the replication process.
According to METR, the organization that audited OpenAI, a dozen tasks indicate ARA capabilities. GPT-4 plus basic scaffolding was capable of performing a few of these tasks, though not robustly. This was over a year ago, with primitive scaffolding, no dedicated training for agency, and no reinforcement learning. Multimodal AIs can now successfully pass CAPTCHAs. ARA is probably coming.
It could be very sudden. One of the main variables for self-replication is whether the AI can pay for cloud GPUs. Let's say a GPU costs $1 per hour. The question is whether the AI can generate $1 per hour autonomously continuously. Then, you have something like an exponential process.
I think that the number of AIs is probably going to plateau, but regardless of a plateau and the number of AIs you get asymptotically, here you are: this is an autonomous AI, which may become like an endemic virus that is hard to shut down.
Is ARA a point of no return?
Yes, I think ARA with full adaptation in the wild is beyond the point of no return.
Once there is an open-source ARA model or a leak of a model capable of generating enough money for its survival and reproduction and able to adapt to avoid detection and shutdown, it will be probably too late:
The idea of making an ARA bot is very accessible.
The seed model would already be torrented and undeletable.
Stop the internet? The entire world's logistics depend on the internet. In practice, this would mean starving the cities over time.
Even if you manage to stop the internet, once the ARA bot is running, it will be unkillable. Even rebooting all providers like AWS would not suffice, as individuals could download and relaunch the model, or the agent could hibernate on local computers. The cost to completely eradicate it altogether would be way too high, and it only needs to persist in one place to spread again.
The question is more interesting for ARA with incomplete adaptation capabilities. It is likely th...
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Here is a little Q&A
Can you explain your position quickly?
I think autonomous replication and adaptation in the wild is under-discussed as an AI threat model. And this makes me sad because this is one of the main reasons I'm worried. I think one of AI Safety people's main proposals should first focus on creating a nonproliferation treaty. Without this treaty, I think we are screwed. The more I think about it, the more I think we are approaching a point of no return.
It seems to me that open source is a severe threat and that nobody is really on the ball. Before those powerful AIs can self-replicate and adapt, AI development will be very positive overall and difficult to stop, but it's too late after AI is able to adapt and evolve autonomously because Natural selection favors AI over humans.
What is ARA?
Autonomous Replication and Adaptation. Let's recap this quickly. Today, generative AI functions as a tool: you ask a question and the tool answers. Question, answer. It's simple. However, we are heading towards a new era of AI, one with autonomous AI. Instead of asking a question, you give it a goal, and the AI performs a series of actions to achieve that goal, which is much more powerful.
Libraries like AutoGPT or ChatGPT, when they navigate the internet, already show what these agents might look like.
Agency is much more powerful and dangerous than AI tools. Thus conceived, AI would be able to replicate autonomously, copying itself from one computer to another, like a particularly intelligent virus. To replicate on a new computer, it must navigate the internet, create a new account on AWS, pay for the virtual machine, install the new weights on this machine, and start the replication process.
According to METR, the organization that audited OpenAI, a dozen tasks indicate ARA capabilities. GPT-4 plus basic scaffolding was capable of performing a few of these tasks, though not robustly. This was over a year ago, with primitive scaffolding, no dedicated training for agency, and no reinforcement learning. Multimodal AIs can now successfully pass CAPTCHAs. ARA is probably coming.
It could be very sudden. One of the main variables for self-replication is whether the AI can pay for cloud GPUs. Let's say a GPU costs $1 per hour. The question is whether the AI can generate $1 per hour autonomously continuously. Then, you have something like an exponential process.
I think that the number of AIs is probably going to plateau, but regardless of a plateau and the number of AIs you get asymptotically, here you are: this is an autonomous AI, which may become like an endemic virus that is hard to shut down.
Is ARA a point of no return?
Yes, I think ARA with full adaptation in the wild is beyond the point of no return.
Once there is an open-source ARA model or a leak of a model capable of generating enough money for its survival and reproduction and able to adapt to avoid detection and shutdown, it will be probably too late:
The idea of making an ARA bot is very accessible.
The seed model would already be torrented and undeletable.
Stop the internet? The entire world's logistics depend on the internet. In practice, this would mean starving the cities over time.
Even if you manage to stop the internet, once the ARA bot is running, it will be unkillable. Even rebooting all providers like AWS would not suffice, as individuals could download and relaunch the model, or the agent could hibernate on local computers. The cost to completely eradicate it altogether would be way too high, and it only needs to persist in one place to spread again.
The question is more interesting for ARA with incomplete adaptation capabilities. It is likely th...
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