Elon Musk’s only expert witness at the OpenAI trial fears an AGI arms race

When can we take AI doomers severely?

That’s a key subtext of Elon Musk’s try and shut down OpenAI’s for-profit AI enterprise. His attorneys argue that the group was arrange as a charity targeted on AI security, and misplaced its method in pursuit of lucre. To show that, they cite outdated emails and statements from the group’s founders concerning the want for a public-spirited counterweight to Google DeepMind.

At present, they referred to as their solely knowledgeable witness: Peter Russell, a College of California, Berkeley laptop science professor who has studied AI for many years. His job was to supply background on AI, and set up that this expertise is harmful sufficient to fret about.

Russell co-signed an open letter in March 2023 calling for a six-month pause in AI analysis. In an indication of the contradictions right here, Musk additionally signed the identical letter, whilst he was launching xAI, his personal for-profit AI lab.

Russell informed jurors and Choose Yvonne Gonzalez Rodgers that there have been a wide range of dangers related to the event of AI, starting from cybersecurity threats to issues with misalignment and the winner-take-all nature of growing Synthetic Common Intelligence (AGI). In the end, he mentioned that there was a stress between the pursuit of AGI and security.

Russell’s bigger issues concerning the existential threats of unconstrained AI didn’t get aired in open courtroom after objections from OpenAI’s attorneys led the choose to restrict Russell’s testimony. However Russell has lengthy been a critic of the arms-race dynamic created by frontier labs across the globe competing to achieve AGI first, and referred to as for governments to manage the sphere extra tightly.

OpenAI’s attorneys spent their cross-examination establishing that Russell wasn’t immediately evaluating the group’s company construction or its particular security insurance policies.

However this reporter (in addition to the choose and the jurors) shall be weighing how a lot worth to placed on the connection between company greed and AI security issues. Nearly each one of many OpenAI founders have strenuously warned concerning the dangers of AI, whereas additionally emphasizing the advantages, trying to construct AI as quick as potential — and hatching plans for AI-focused for-profit enterprises they’d management.

From the surface, a transparent difficulty right here is the rising realization inside OpenAI after its founding that the group merely wanted extra compute spend if it was to succeed. That cash may solely come from for-profit buyers. The founding crew’s concern of AGI within the palms of a single group pushed them to hunt the capital that in the end tore the crew aside, creating the arms race we all know right this moment—and bringing us to this lawsuit.

The identical dynamic is already taking part in out at a nationwide degree: Senator Bernie Sanders’ push for a legislation imposing a moratorium on knowledge heart development cites AI fears enunciated by Musk, Sam Altman, Geoffrey Hinton and others. Hoden Omar, who works on the commerce group the Heart for Knowledge Innovation, objected to Sanders citing their fears with out their hopes, telling TechCrunch that “it’s unclear why the general public ought to low cost every little thing tech billionaires say besides when their phrases may be recruited to fill gaps in a precarious argument.”

Now, each side of the case are asking the courtroom to just do that: take a part of Altman and Musk’s arguments severely, however low cost the components which can be much less helpful for his or her authorized argument.