I wish this viewpoint were more common. It's frightening to see how rapidly the "AI safety / alignment" discourse is being co-opted into arguments that AI should follow the whims of large centralized corporations. We have no idea what secret instructions OpenAI or the others are giving their "helpful" assistants. I find the notion that AI will spontaneously become a paperclip maximizer much less immediately terrifying than the clear and present danger of it being co-opted by our existing soulless paperclip maximizers, corporations, to devastating effect.
Yeah, the LLMs at the three letter agencies communicating directly with their LLM counterparts at FB and Google. And Twitter, once Musk moves on, and that site gets brought back into the fold.
> AI should follow the whims of large centralized corporations
I'm not arguing that AI should follow the whims of large centralized corporations, but given the cost of training large models such as GPT-4, what's the alternative?
Do we need large language models as a taxpayer-funded public utility?
Perhaps a non-profit foundation?
I'm not sure what the solution is here, but I am concerned that right now, large corporations may be the only ones capable of training such models.
