Daily Tech News 27 October 2023

• Humanity is at risk from an AI "race to the bottom". (The Guardian)
  
  What's the risk?

  A handful of tech companies are jeopardising humanity's future through unrestrained AI development and must stop their "race to the bottom", according to the scientist behind an influential letter calling for a pause in building powerful systems.

  What's the risk?

  "We're witnessing a race to the bottom that must be stopped," Tegmark told the Guardian. "We urgently need AI safety standards, so that this transforms into a race to the top. AI promises many incredible benefits, but the reckless and unchecked development of increasingly powerful systems, with no oversight, puts our economy, our society, and our lives at risk. Regulation is critical to safe innovation, so that a handful of AI corporations don't jeopardise our shared future."

  What's the risk?

  In a policy document published this week, 23 AI experts, including two modern "godfathers" of the technology, said governments must be allowed to halt development of exceptionally powerful models.

  What's the risk?

  The paper, whose authors include Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio – two winners of the ACM Turing award, the "Nobel prize for computing" – argues that powerful models must be licensed by governments and, if necessary, have their development halted.

  What's the risk?

  The unrestrained development of artificial general intelligence, the term for a system that can carry out a wide range of tasks at or above human levels of intelligence, is a key concern among those calling for tighter regulation.

  None of these companies are working on AGI. All of them are dumping huge amounts of money into glorified typeahead systems that understand nothing.

• OpenAI is forming a team to study catastrophic risks relating to AI. (Tech Crunch)
  
  What is the risk?

  ... including nuclear threats.

  I have a surefire mitigation for that.
  
  If you even think of giving AI access to nuclear weapons, we will shoot you.
  
  
  
• Writing a simple virtual machine in less than 125 lines of C. (Andre Inc)
  
  Which isn't bad, because my current test framework for opcode performance is double that.
  
  But it's a really simple virtual machine. The only mathematical operation available is addition, for example.
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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