The Big Shift in AI Safety Discourse

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, is the AI safety movement dead? The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, visit the Discord linked in our show notes.

0:21Hello, friends. It is Memorial Day weekend, the traditional kickoff of the summer in the United States, which means I'm traveling, which means I had to do some slightly different types of episodes to make sure that you had some content for your long weekend. So I'm actually going to do two long-read-style episodes, the first one today and then another one for this weekend. And in the first one, we're going to read a piece by Tyler Cowen, who writes the Marginal Revolution blog and is a professor of economics at George Mason University. The piece is called The AI Safety Movement is Dead. Public pressure to rein in artificial intelligence may be waning, but the work of making these systems less risky is just beginning.

0:54Let's read Tyler's piece, or rather, let's listen to an AI version of NLW read Tyler's piece with the help of Eleven Labs, and then we'll come back and talk about it. AI safety is dead and Chuck Schumer faces risks. Tyler Cowen May 2024 will be remembered as the month that the AI safety movement died. It will also be remembered as the time when the work of actually making artificial intelligence safer began in earnest. Some history. In the mid-2000s, a movement known as effective altruism made AI safety a top priority, based on fears that highly advanced AI models could vanquish us all or at least cause significant global chaos.

1:29Two leading AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, set up complicated board structures with non-profit elements in the mix to keep those companies from producing dangerous systems. The safety movement probably peaked in March 2023, with a petition for a six-month pause in AI development, signed by many luminaries, including specialists in the AI field. As I argued at the time, it was a bad idea and got nowhere. Fast forward to the present. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his working group on AI have issued a guidance document for federal policy. The plans involve a lot of federal support for the research and development of AI, and a consistent recognition of the national security importance of the U.S.

2:07maintaining its lead in AI. Lawmakers seem to understand that they would rather face the risks of U.S.-based AI systems than have to contend with Chinese developments without a U.S. counterweight. The early history of COVID, when the Chinese government behaved recklessly and non-transparently has driven this realization home. No less important is the behavior of the major tech companies themselves. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta all released major service upgrades this spring. Their new services are smarter, faster, more flexible, and more capable. Competition has heated up, and that will spur further innovation.

2:41Hello, friends. Before we get back to the episode, I want to tell you about something special I'm doing on Superintelligent this June. Super is, of course, our platform for AI learning, And I've heard from a lot of you that you really want something for a true AI beginner, someone who's really just getting their feet wet with these tools. So what I'm going to do is put together basically a course that sits on top of and uses super intelligent tutorials and lessons, but where I hand guide you through around 10 different lessons and how to's that I think once you complete them, we'll have you ahead of 80 % of the other people who are just starting to use AI right now.

3:11If you are interested in this learning experience, go to besuper.ai and sign up using code June. June, you'll get 25 % off your first month, and I'll automatically add you to that AI for beginners group. That's bsuper.ai, discount code June. See you there. What does the broader social evidence say about the dangers of AI? From a market standpoint, at least, the world is doing just fine. The markets are hitting new highs. That is not what we would expect if the end of the world were nigh. Investors seem more concerned with inflation, interest rates, and conflict in the Middle East. How about academia?

3:43Top scientists are not publishing new models in science or nature, two of the better-known journals suggesting AI will bring about the end of the world. In economics, Darren Asimoglu, arguably the best-published economist of his generation, recently published a model suggesting that AI would boost worldwide GDP by very modest amounts. I think he is underestimating the potential upside, but in any case, his paper is hardly a foreboding of doom. And it is notable that this is the same Darren Akimoglu who signed that petition for a six-month pause in AI research just more than a year ago. As for the philosophers, Nick Bostrom, formerly director of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, was among the first to formulate and spread AI safety fears under the broader concept of existential risk.

4:23In his most recent book, published in March, he has moved to a more optimistic position. Furthermore, due to unknown reasons, the Institute has been shut down. The biggest current obstacles to AI development are the hundreds of pending AI regulatory bills in scores of U.S. states. Many of those bills would intentionally or not significantly restrict AI development, as for instance one in California that would require pre-approval for advanced systems. In the past, this kind state-level rush has typically led to federal consolidation, so that overall regulation is coordinated and not too onerous.

4:52Whether a good final bill results from that process is uncertain, but Schumer's project suggests that the federal government is more interested in accelerating AI than hindering it. Still, to go back to where I started, is the demise of the AI safety movement cause for panic? Hardly. Complete engineering safety in advance was never a realistic prospect. When humans invented computers, or for that matter the printing press, very few safety issues were worked out beforehand, nor could they have been. Rather, as history progressed, safety problems were addressed on a case-by-case basis. Not every pro-safety effort succeeded.

5:24Dangerous books were indeed published, but the printing press was nonetheless a boon for humankind. If we want to do better this time around and build safe AI systems, and we should, then the best way to get there is simply to forge ahead. Build the systems and offer their services to users, iterating and improving them along the way. Fortunately, that seems now to be just what is happening. The influence of the AI safety movement may have waned, but the opportunity to make AI more safe is only just beginning. Back to real non-robot NLW here. I don't really want to get too deep into this argument around the safety movement actually being dead.

5:59I kind of think it's a little bit of hyperbole for the sake of a great headline. But I do think that Tyler is right to recognize that there has been something of a fundamental shift in where that conversation is right now. What I mean by that, or by example, I guess, can be seen in the disbanding of the OpenAI super alignment team. For some, the very public resignation of Jan Leakey and others from that team has been a cause for additional concern. It suggests to people that OpenAI isn't taking this seriously anymore and that we should be more concerned. It's an argument for additional regulation.

6:33However, that opinion has mostly been expressed by people who were already concerned around open AI and AI safety. In other words, I'm not so sure it's mainstream. And I wonder if the mainstream is moving away from the AI ex-risk conversation in a way that extracts less political cost to open AI for, for example, not paying as much attention to it. I don't know that that's the case, but it does feel a little bit like that might be the case. In other words, like people aren't buying those arguments as much as they were maybe a year ago. Is that because big tech is doing a better job lobbying? Is that because the AI safety movement isn't doing a good job explaining itself?

7:09Is this an inevitable consequence of mainstream media writing headlines about how we're all going to die, which ultimately just has the impact of anesthetizing us to that possibility? I don't know, but what I do sense very strongly is that something in the public conversation here has shifted. I think it's worth paying attention to, and so I'm going to. For now though, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Until next time, peace.