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Tom Dietterich's avatar

Was there much discussion of the addictive power of chatbots? Businesses naturally love technologies that addict their customers, and governments tend to be the institutions that intervene to prevent this. This will mean outlawing certain kinds of relationships between people and chatbots. It could be that the only way to enforce that would be to outlaw "open topic" chatbots entirely. It strikes me that this form of "alignment" should be the top priority.

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Eli Pariser's avatar

This was a very live issue! And one of the most politically salient across the spectrum.

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Mark's avatar

Nice! Thanks for being our “fly on the wall.” WRT billions of AIs collaborating and competing…. We want these entities to join our human super organism, so it makes sense that, like any super organism, humanity will absorb them if the AIs are aligned, will wall them off if the AIs elect to continue to act as the Other, or try to kill them off if humans perceive the AIs as a threat. It would be interesting to hear how the Labs are working to imbue these models with social rules of engagement. They don’t even have to be human traits at first: coral, wolves… there are general rules social creatures follow, and AIs are going to need them to survive.

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kaass's avatar

Great post! Can you say more about what you mean by “Something that looks like gaming will increasingly replace what we now think of as work”, as well as “endgame financialization”?

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Eli Pariser's avatar

"Something like gaming will replace what we now think of as work" was an idea from one of the presenters -- I don't totally know what that presenter had in mind but I think one way to think about it is that what humans (as opposed to AI agents) will be needed to do will increasingly be social and "entertainment" oriented.

"Endgame financialization" -- again not my concept, but I think this refers to the notion that every system from which financial value can be extracted will have agents seeking to extract that value.

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Krish's avatar

Great post! thank you! Was there no discussion about the elephant in the room? How would a "stochastic parrot" model really metamorphosize into an intelligence that truly understands causality and time? Until LLMs are simply pattern matching programs, how can we trust them to do critical tasks? For example, notice how slow the adoption of AI is at enterprise use level besides some limited use cases. Would love to know if there was any discussion on that or if you have any thoughts of your own.

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Patrick Jordan Anderson's avatar

Very interesting write-up. Thanks for sharing all this!

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ilse's avatar

I hope Thaura was represented there! They are doing some of the most principled, forward thinking Gen AI development.

https://thaura.ai/home

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