OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees that the company might slow down AI development, according to unnamed insiders that Bloomberg quoted yesterday. And WIRED reports that the company is seeking federal guidance on whether an industry-led voluntary slowdown would run afoul of antitrust laws.
This is tentatively good news, and I certainly hope our government isn’t foolish enough to hamstring companies trying to exercise a modicum of caution. But for reasons I’ll explain below, I’m not celebrating yet.
Meanwhile, on the public stage, Reuters reports that OpenAI asked Congress to regulate the AI industry:
OpenAI is urging Congress to adopt capability-based national AI safety requirements, including testing standards, independent assessments, cybersecurity protections and incident-reporting rules for the most advanced AI systems.
OpenAI has also endorsed four California safety bills covering third-party auditors and verifiers, screening for AI-enabled biological threats, and child chatbot protections. (The audit and verification laws are actually weaker than they seem, because they certify third-party organizations but don’t even compel AI companies to use them.)
If sincere, these moves deserve credit. I wish I could respond with unqualified gratitude, but I find myself compelled to skepticism by OpenAI’s prior dishonesty.
We’ve been burned before. The last time OpenAI announced a “pause”, it turned out to mean a mere shuffling around of AI workloads.
And OpenAI’s past support for AI regulation has been milquetoast at best. The company and its affiliated super PACs have consistently (and often underhandedly) opposed regulation, except light-touch voluntary programs consistent with their “reverse federalism” plan.
In OpenAI’s own words:
Some of these bills we did not endorse in the past, and are now supporting after reconsidering in light of the recent jump in capabilities we have seen.
I find this apparent change of heart unconvincing. OpenAI explicitly aims to produce literal superintelligence; am I to believe the company didn’t think these dangerous capabilities were coming, when it was working to create them itself? Countless others, including expert forecasters and at least one former employee, predicted superhuman hacking capabilities would emerge near this time. Why was this a surprise to OpenAI?
I find myself agreeing when the company says...
Fully autonomous recursive self-improvement—in which AI systems independently drive successive generations of increasingly capable AI—is not happening today. We should not pursue it unless and until it can be done safely.
...but getting off the bandwagon when it reminds us of the plan to do it anyway:
Our aim is to safely build automated AI researchers that work under human supervision to advance both deep learning and alignment—using each generation of AI to help make the next one safer, more aligned, and easier to control, not simply more capable.
In other words, the plan is still to surrender responsibility for the most important research in the world to AIs we can’t fully trust, supervised by humans who failed to notice said AIs running amok in their own systems for months on end.
This was a bad plan before the swarms, and it’s a bad plan today.
As much as I appreciate the support for marginally better safety regulations, a marginal improvement will not be enough at this late stage, thanks in no small part to OpenAI’s long history of fighting to quash said improvements.
I am forced to consider this latest pivot an attempt to steer the federal response to the AI crisis towards policies OpenAI finds more convenient. We need nothing short of an international halt to the AI race, and we need it yesterday.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.