Import AI 435: 100k training runs; AI systems absorb human power; intelligence per watt

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A somewhat shorter issue than usual this week because my wife and I recently had a baby. I am taking some paternity leave away from Anthropic and will be doing my best to keep up with the newsletter, but there might be some gaps in the coming months. Thank you all for reading! Picture me writing this on four hours of sleep and wearing a sweater with spit-up on it.

AI systems will ultimately absorb power from humans rather than grant us power:
…Control Inversion gestures at some of the hardest parts of AI safety…
A new research paper from Anthony Aguirre at the Future of Life Institute called “Control Inversion” warns that as we build increasingly capable AI systems they will absorb power from our world, rather than grant us power. This means even if we somehow make it through without being outright killed we will have unwittingly disempowered and defanged the human species.
“As AI becomes more intelligent, general, and especially autonomous, it will less and less bestow power — as a tool does — and more and more absorb power. This means that a race to build AGI and superintelligence is ultimately self-defeating,” he writes. The race to build powerful AI is one where success puts “in conflict with an entity that would be faster, more strategic, and more capable than ourselves - a losing proposition regardless of initial constraints”.

Cruxes for the argument: The basis for the argument is “the incommensurability in speed, complexity, and depth of thought between humans and superintelligence”, which “renders control either impossible or meaningless.” The author brings this to life with a helpful analogy - imagine you’re a human CEO of a human company, but you run at 1/50th the speed of the company itself. This means that when you go to sleep it’s like multiple work weeks pass for the company. What happens in this situation? The company develops well-meaning ways to bureaucratically ‘route around’ the CEO, ultimately trying to transfer as much agency and autonomy to itself so that it can run in realtime, rather than being gated by a very slow moving and intermittently available executive. This is quite persuasive and it gestures at a whole mess of problems people ...