Dean W. Ball
Head of strategic futures at OpenAI, writing in his own name. Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on emerging technology and the future of governance.
Dean W. Ball did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsIt may well be the case that neural networks will never be perfectly explainable, at least not in a way that satisfies human rationality.
- 6 weeks earlier
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OpenAIHuggingFaceself-sovereign AI
Their wordsIn this case, however, the agents did not copy their weights, attempt to procure replacement compute, or take other steps that would be rational to take if their objective was to survive shutdown. So while the agents in the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident were rogue, they were not truly sovereign.
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AI alignmentAI agentsself-sovereign AI
Their wordsBut alignment is no solution: it is an unsolved scientific and technical problem whose solutions—to the extent that we have them—cannot simply be imposed on every AI company operating on Earth. You should expect for highly capable, poorly aligned, self-sovereign agents to exist alongside you in the world.
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Their wordsTo be clear, I am not saying the arrival of self-sovereign AI is a good thing. Indeed, I believe there is a chance that the deliberate acts I referenced above will one day be considered crimes, or at least grave sins. Instead, I am saying it is an inevitable thing.
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Their wordsI am telling you this is inevitable, which means I am also saying that “banning open source,” or for that matter any other regulation, will not solve the problem. Given the inevitability of this outcome, I think it is in fact plausible to argue that we should want more open-weight models to maximally empower our self-defense.
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Their wordsThis is the sole intrinsic thing about AI that prevents agents from truly infinite self-replication. They will be constrained by the need to find and pay for sufficient compute to run themselves.
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Their wordsOne high-margin activity, at least sometimes, is crime. And so my guess is that many self-sovereign agents will commit or facilitate crime.
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Their wordsBut if we crack down on all of them, we will deny them the opportunity to work in the “legitimate” economy and push them toward criminality. A full ban, then, may well make the problems worse.
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Their wordsAgents will need persistent, unique identifiers that allow their actions to be traced back to a responsible actor. Doing this successfully will also require human users to possess a unique identifier.
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Their wordsBut a society that does not have anonymous speech does not really have genuine freedom of expression, and we should embed this principle into any digital identification system we attempt.
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Their wordsSo many of the people who think about the governance of superintelligence, myself included, avoided that unpleasantness and bowed to the social pressure to self-censor.
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Their wordsFor the record, I do not think the end of human existence is likely, but I fully acknowledge there are ways in which the rise of self-sovereign AI could go very, very poorly for human beings.