07/26/2024
Stop superhuman AI that we can’t control by not building it in the first place. Pause AI.
In response to Meta's release of their latest model, PauseAI led protests in San Francisco, Chicago, Phoenix, Paris, London, & Tokyo.
Meta’s recklessness imperils our world.
Meta just released their latest AI model, Llama-3 405B. This model was trained with >5x as many parameters as previous Llama models. It marks another leap in open-weights models.
Meta’s release comes after years of Meta-funded lobbying to sabotage AI regulation. Meta has given millions to the American Edge Project, a campaign that’s railed against regulation of frontier AI models, warning that China will overtake the US in AI if we enact any regulations.
These efforts reflect a trend of denial by Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun. LeCun has dismissed AI risk, even though the other 2 of the 3 ‘godfathers of AI’ note that superhuman AI could cause human extinction and that it is very hard to control something that is smarter than you.
LeCun and his colleagues at Meta seem determined to race ahead, building increasingly advanced AI as quickly as possible. These are not neutral actors. Their position is similar to fossil-fuel companies who ignore the risks of climate change.
The best AI researchers have admitted that we have no idea how these systems work. Models are often fine-tuned & exploited to do dangerous things months after being released. But Meta's open-weights approach means that these models can never be retracted.
If present-day models are already unpredictable, the effects of future models could be cataclysmic. But Meta is racing to train more powerful models. Llama 3.1 was trained on 16,000 GPUs; by the end of this year, Meta plans to have 350,000 GPUs dedicated to AI.
Attempts to build more powerful AI to beat another country are foolish. They rely on the assumption that we’ll be able to control AI systems & use them to our advantage— but AI safety experts tell us that we don’t know how to control systems that are more intelligent than we are.
Superhuman AI poses a threat to all people, regardless of nationality. We desperately need international coordination to stop the development of such systems, now more than ever. The global community must reject Meta’s narrative and listen to the better angels of our nature.
This race is not about the US versus China, or any AI company versus another. It’s superintelligent AI versus humanity, and the only winning move is not to play.
