Contra The xAI Alignment Plan

Published: July 20, 2023, 11:55 a.m.

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Elon Musk has a new AI company, xAI. I appreciate that he seems very concerned about alignment. From his Twitter Spaces discussion:

I think I have been banging the drum on AI safety now for a long time. If I could press pause on AI or advanced AI digital superintelligence, I would. It doesn\\u2019t seem like that is realistic . . .

I could talk about this for a long time, it\\u2019s something that I\\u2019ve thought about for a really long time and actually was somewhat reluctant to do anything in this space because I am concerned about the immense power of a digital superintelligence. It\\u2019s something that, I think is maybe hard for us to even comprehend.

He describes his alignment strategy in that discussion and a later followup:

The premise is have the AI be maximally curious, maximally truth-seeking, I\'m getting a little esoteric here, but I think from an AI safety standpoint, a maximally curious AI - one that\'s trying to understand the universe - I think is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not . . . Earth is vastly more interesting than Mars. . . that\'s like the best thing I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint. I think this is better than trying to explicitly program morality - if you try to program morality, you have to ask whose morality.

And even if you\'re extremely good at how you program morality into AI, there\'s the morality inversion problem - Waluigi - if you program Luigi, you inherently get Waluigi. I would be concerned about the way OpenAI is programming AI - about this is good, and that\'s not good.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-the-xai-alignment-plan

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