he challenge with the debate around pacing frontier AI is that it suffers from the same problem we face as a society: polarization obscures reality.
When it comes to controlling, managing, and regulating AI, we are presented with two choices:
- Allow AI to proceed unfettered so that it can cure all diseases, drive economic expansion, and allow democracy to flourish.
- Slow down its development to avoid the risks of this powerful technology getting out of control and potentially causing great harm, including the possibility of extinguishing humanity.
This kind of black-and-white dichotomous thinking offers clarity that works well in today’s social media-driven news cycle. However, it needs more maturity and nuance if it hopes to solve the problem.
These two scenarios represent a pair of extremes on opposite ends of a very large spectrum of possibilities for how AI could play out in the years ahead—and they aren't mutually exclusive. As with public dialogue on many different topics right now, people and organizations are racing to positions on the extremes to stake their intellectual ground, and then defend it to the death.
What we need to solve the most difficult issues is to improve the quality of the dialogue itself. There are plenty of smart people with creative ideas, insights, and perspectives on what's happening and how to navigate it. What we need are fewer social media clips and zingers, and more opportunities to extrapolate, listen, and learn from each other.
Society in general is looking for boogeymen when it comes to AI. In the US, over half the population holds a negative opinion about the technology, despite not being very well informed about it. So the stories of AI breaking free of its constraints and doing things humans didn't intend it to do leads many people to believe we're on the path to the sci-fi depictions they've seen in The Terminator and iRobot.
As concerning as the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident was, it's not a canary in the coal mine, at least not yet. It's simply an indicator that better safety constraints need to be put in place and that work still needs to be done to help AI agents understand how to achieve the goals given to them by humans while adhering to the value systems humans set for them. (It's the latter that Anthropic has been experimenting with in the form of "constitutional AI.") Some researchers such as Ajeya Cotra disagree with the take mentioned above about OpenAI-Hugging Face. And I respect that. We're at a stage in the maturation of humanity where we need to re-learn how to disagree with each other without seeing each other as the enemy.
Our Deeper View #
The US and Chinese governments have bristled against the calls from OpenAI and Anthropic to regulate AI. Why would they be against AI companies wanting to place more control in the hands of governments? Several reasons—some sensible and others less altruistic. First, they have legitimate concerns about "regulatory capture," where these AI companies counsel governments on how to set up the rules around AI governance in ways that will protect their leadership position in the market. Second, the governments are concerned that OpenAI and Anthropic simply want governments to slow down their competitors while the two market leaders take a to figure out how to deal with the over-powered AI models they've created. But there's also a sense that the governments don't want to take on the responsibility for creating proper guidelines for AI and then get blamed if things go badly. That's another reason why we need higher quality dialogue so that consensus can emerge to help inform the next steps for the industry and society. That could give both governments and companies more confidence to move forward in ways that are better aligned with broader sentiment.