Blah-blah-singularity, so let's cripple the models so much they refuse to talk about React, because who knows if you are not cooking chemical weapons or meth in your browser's DOM, right?
The premise is "Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away".<p>If this is true, establishing an institution to ensure things like "publishing model cards with technical details, maintaining strong internal cybersecurity, vetting key personnel, and providing sufficient resourcing for safety and security research" is really mostly irrelevant.<p>TFA does talk about what really needs to be done, but punts this into future work: "Even if we solve these hard technical challenges, there will be further complex economic and philosophical questions to tackle: what sorts of new economic models will be needed to help everyone thrive in a post-scarcity world? What values do we want to live by, what will meaning and purpose be, and how might even the human condition itself change? There's also a need to consider the rights that this new intelligence should have.
> what sorts of new economic models will be needed to help everyone thrive in a post-scarcity world<p>What sort of new economic models did we come up with to help everyone thrive in a post-X world? Like, food production is really a solved technical problem. We can feed anyone on the planet if we wanted to. Another example: we could put everyone who's homeless into some sort of a house. Have we done that yet?
Food production is indeed a solved problem in most countries (we are almost post-scarcity when it comes to food), which is why obesity is a much bigger issue than hunger today. Hunger is present pretty much only in conflict zones. I fully expect such issues in conflict zones, even in AI post-scarcity world.<p>Housing is definitely not post-scarcity today, building a house is still very expensive, not to mention the limited availability of land zoned for housing.
The A(G)I can tell us if and how it needs to be regulated :-/
The fundamental issue is that if we really get something like this, scarcity will still exist. There will still be scarce things people want.<p>But the motivating justificatory structure for any inequality in allocation will have completely evaporated.
The proposal:<p>>The American government, he says, should develop a system for testing the safety of new AI models before they are released. “It’s important that it’s not just an industry body,” he adds. But a regular government agency wouldn’t do either. “It would not be able to move fast enough, or have the right resources.” Instead, Sir Demis suggests taking inspiration from FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a private agency in America that regulates brokers and stock markets.
Spoiler: The plan is .. add massive regulation, but only to the US, don't affect other countries developing it in any way other than "setting a good standard that'll hopefully influence them". Seems like an airtight plan.
All the frontier labs are lobbying hard to lock down the AI market, because they see that their position at the top is temporary and that there's no secret sauce.
For better or worse, humans (or any animal) are a lot better at reacting than planning. I'm sure this technology will play out differently than any one of us, or any collection of us, can imagine. The possibility space is enormous.
>This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away.<p>There is a heatwave in London, perhaps Demis needs to stay out of the sun and drink more water.<p>Or perhaps he is seeking more funding/a fight to maintain his divisions AGI research budget.
Not exactly a "plan" - he's just saying we should have a standards body that assesses models for safety.<p>At this point I'd say the societal risk of AI isn't models gone wild, or used by the bad guys. Regulation will take care of itself, and it seems the AI companies will not only welcome it, but lobby for it to shift responsibility to the government.<p>The real risk of AI is societal disruption due to job displacement, and maybe other structural changes, and this is far harder to solve, and likely will not be solved, or even seriously addressed, until/unless politicians feel like their own jobs and well-being depends on them addressing it.
how would this help smaller labs? would it put more burdens on them when trying to compete with trillion-dollar companies or would it help?
These people who read too many scifi books and confused them with reality are royally annoying.<p>There is real and potential harm from AI, but the more someone talks/write abut AI safety, the less they care about actual harm to real people, economy and what not.
Sigh, another person talking their book while also talking their life’s work. One is bad, but the two together are unhinged.<p>I’m going to have to flag this because it is obnoxious and absurd.
All that would happen from what he's proposing is such a watchdog would just be an explicit formal declaration of the US's national interests as being somehow the most legitimate, which in the context of current international relations is basically putting up a sign saying: "reject this!"<p>I find it mind boggling that someone could be this tone-deaf to the current situation. No "ally" of the US is going to (willingly) agree to this governance structure given the current US administration's "might makes right" proclamations and threats on sovereignty of its continental neighbours.<p>And non-allies would just ignore.<p>Apart from its completely delusional formulation, what is most concerning about this blog post is that it indicates that all 3 major US labs have formally submitted to boot-licking Trump/Bessent/Lutnick. I had I guess vainly held out hope that Google might be more reticent to do so.
(I took the title from the Economist interview since "A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age" sounds like a press release - <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=corporate%20press%20release%20by:dang" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...</a>)