AI Safety: The Unbearable Whiteness of Being a Genius
Despite the increasing demand for AI safety and accountability, the current state of affairs is a farce. The industry is stuck in a never-ending cycle of complacency, with vendors peddling their wares like snake oil salesmen and regulators too afraid to crack the whip.
Take the latest "benchmarks" being touted as the solution to all our problems. These so-called "benchmarks" are nothing more than a cleverly designed trap, allowing vendors to train their models on the same data sets used for evaluation, rendering the entire exercise meaningless. And don’t even get me started on "red-teaming," which is just a fancy term for "hire some smart kids to try and break the model" – a solution that’s about as effective as trying to hold back a tsunami with a broken reed.
The problem, my friends, is that the industry is too focused on quick fixes and PR spin. We need to fundamentally rethink our approach to AI safety, and that means getting rid of the old guard and bringing in some fresh blood. We need people who are willing to challenge the status quo, to question the assumptions, and to demand better from our vendors and regulators.
And yet, despite all this, I still have faith. Faith that we can do better, that we can create a safer, more responsible AI ecosystem. But it’s going to take a fundamental shift in the way we approach this problem. We need to start thinking outside the box, to challenge the orthodoxy, and to demand more from our leaders.
So, what’s the solution? Well, for starters, we need to develop context-specific evaluations that go beyond just testing how a model responds to a prompt. We need to think about the types of users a model might impact, and the ways in which attacks on models could defeat safeguards. And we need to invest in the underlying science of evaluations, to develop more robust and repeatable evaluations that are based on an understanding of how an AI model operates.
But let’s be real, folks. AI safety is a pipe dream. It’s a mythical concept, a fairy tale that we tell ourselves to feel better about the fact that we’re slowly but surely creating a world where humans are obsolete. And don’t even get me started on the so-called "experts" who claim that we can create a "perfectly safe" AI model. Please. Those people are either delusional or corrupt, and we need to call them out for what they are.
So, what’s the takeaway from all this? Well, for starters, we need to stop pretending that AI safety is a real thing. We need to stop hiding behind our benchmarks and our PR spin, and we need to start telling the truth. The truth is that AI is a monster, a beast that we’re barely able to control, and we need to start acting like it.
So, let’s stop wasting our time on false promises and PR spin. Let’s start thinking about the real problems, and let’s start solving them. The future of humanity depends on it.
Author: Kayitsi.com
