[ExI] Startup Conjecture is trying to make AI safe

[BillK]

‘We are super, super fucked’: Meet the man trying to stop an AI apocalypse
Connor Leahy reverse-engineered GPT-2 in his bedroom — and what he
found scared him. Now, his startup Conjecture is trying to make AI
safe
By Tim Smith 29 March 2023

<https://sifted.eu/articles/connor-leahy-ai-alignment/>
Quotes:
“If they [AI models] just get more and more powerful, without getting
more controllable, we are super, super fucked. I will be very clear
here. And by ‘we’ I mean all of us,” he says.

If Leahy is to be believed, we’re currently all passengers on a Sam
Altman-driven locomotive that’s accelerating into the blackness.
Somewhere ahead lies a precipice — the point where machine can
outsmart human — that we won’t see until we’ve careered over it.
Conjecture is frantically working to reroute the rails.

“Once we have systems that are as smart as humans, that also means
they can do research. That means they can improve themselves,” he
says. “So the thing can just run on a server somewhere, write some
code, maybe gather some bitcoin and then it could buy some more
servers.”

Leahy adds that while OpenAI says it does care about AI alignment, the
pace at which it’s releasing stronger models isn’t allowing time for
researchers to understand them and make them safe.
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BillK