- they want to make benchmarking easier by using AI systems
- they want to automate red-teaming and safety-checking ("problematic behavior" i.e. cursing at customers)
- they want to automate the understanding of model outputs ("interpretability")
Notice how absolutely none of these things require "superintelligence" to exist to be useful? They're all just bog standard Good Things that you'd want for any class of automated system, i.e. a great customer service bot.
The superintelligence meme is tiring but we're getting cool things out of it I guess...
My take is that every advancement in these highly complex and expensive fields is dependent on our ability to maintain global social, political, and economic stability.
This insistence on the importance of Super-Intelligence and AGI as the path to Paradise or Hell is one of the many brain-worms going around that have this "Revelation" structure that makes pragmatic discussions very difficult, and in turn actually makes it harder to maintain social, political, and economic stability.
There's more mumbo-jumbo in thinking human intelligence has some secret sauce that can't be replicated by a computer.
It could be theoretically possible to build an AGI smarter than a human, but is it really plausible if it turns out to need a data center the size of the Hadron Collider and the energy of a small country to maintain itself?
It could be that it turns out the only architecture we can find that is equal to the task (and feasibly produced) is the human brain, and instead the hard part of making super-intelligence is bootstrapping that human brain and training it to be more intel?
Maybe the best way to solve the "alignment problem", and other issues of creating super-intelligence, is to solve the problem of how best to raise and educate intelligent and well-adjusted humans?
Where is your evidence that we're approaching human level AGI, let alone SuperIntelligence? Because ChatGPT can (sometimes) approximate sophisticated conversation and deep knowledge?
How about some evidence that ChatGPT isn't even close? Just clone and run OpenAI's own evals repo https://github.com/openai/evals on the GPT-4 API.
It performs terribly on novel logic puzzles and exercises that a clever child could learn to do in an afternoon (there are some good chess evals, and I submitted one asking it to simulate a Forth machine).
I think reasonable, rational people can disagree on this issue. But it's nonsense to claim that the people on the other side of the argument from you are engaging in "supernatural mumbo-jumbo," unless there is rigorous proof that your side is correct.
But nobody has that. We don't even understand how GPT is able to do some of the things it does.
If nobody understands how an LLM is able to achieve it's current level of intelligence, how is anyone so sure that this intelligence is definitely going to increase exponentially until it's better than a human?
There are real existential threats that we know are definitely going to happen one day (meteor, supervolcano, etc), and I believe that treating AGI like it is the same class of "not if; but when" is categorically wrong, furthermore, I think that many of the people leading the effort to frame it this way are doing so out of self-interest, rather than public concern.