Twitter thread on open-source AI

By richard_ngo @ 2024-07-31T00:30 (+32)

This is a linkpost to https://x.com/RichardMCNgo/status/1813673154851824078

Some thoughts on open-source AI (copied over from a recent twitter thread):

1. We should have a strong prior favoring open source. It’s been a huge success driving tech progress over many decades. We forget how counterintuitive it was originally, and shouldn’t take it for granted.

2. Open source has also been very valuable for alignment. It’s key to progress on interpretability, as outlined here.

3. I am concerned, however, that offense will heavily outpace defense in the long term. As AI accelerates science, many new WMDs will emerge. Even if defense of infrastructure keeps up with offense, human bodies are a roughly fixed and very vulnerable attack surface.

4. A central concern about open source AI: it’ll allow terrorists to build bioweapons. This shouldn’t be dismissed, but IMO it’s easy to be disproportionately scared of terrorism. More central risks are eg “North Korea becomes capable of killing billions”, which they aren’t now.

5. Another worry: misaligned open-source models will go rogue and autonomously spread across the internet. Rogue AIs are a real concern, but they wouldn’t gain much power via this strategy. We should worry more about power grabs from AIs deployed inside influential institutions.

6. In my ideal world, open source would lag a year or two behind the frontier, so that the world has a chance to evaluate and prepare for big risks before a free-for-all starts. But that’s the status quo! So I expect the main action will continue to be with closed-source models.

7. If open-source seems like it’ll catch up to or surpass closed source models, then I’d favor mandating a “responsible disclosure” period (analogous to cybersecurity) that lets people incorporate the model into their defenses (maybe via API?) before the weights are released.

8. I got this idea from Sam Marks. Though unlike him I think the process should have a fixed length, since it’d be easy for it to get bogged down in red tape and special interests otherwise.

9. Almost everyone agrees that we should be very careful about models which can design new WMDs. The current fights are mostly about how many procedural constraints we should lock in now, reflecting a breakdown of trust between AI safety people and accelerationists.

10. Ultimately the future of open source will depend on how the US NatSec apparatus orients to superhuman AIs. This requires nuanced thinking: no worldview as simple as “release everything”, “shut down everything”, or “defeat China at all costs” will survive contact with reality.

11. Lastly, AIs will soon be crucial extensions of human agency, and eventually moral patients in their own right. We should aim to identify principles for a shared digital-biological world as far-sighted and wise as those in the US constitution. Here's a start.

12. One more meta-level point: I’ve talked to many people on all sides of this issue, and have generally found them to be very thoughtful and genuine (with the exception of a few very online outliers on both sides). There’s more common ground here than most people think.