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This is: Comprehensive AI Services as General Intelligence, published by Rohin Shah on the AI Alignment Forum.
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Since the CAIS technical report is a gargantuan 210 page document, I figured I'd write a post to summarize it. I have focused on the earlier chapters, because I found those to be more important for understanding the core model. Later chapters speculate about more concrete details of how AI might develop, as well as the implications of the CAIS model on strategy. ETA: This comment provides updates based on more discussion with Eric.
The Model
The core idea is to look at the pathway by which we will develop general intelligence, rather than assuming that at some point we will get a superintelligent AGI agent. To predict how AI will progress in the future, we can look at how AI progresses currently -- through research and development (R&D) processes. AI researchers consider a problem, define a search space, formulate an objective, and use an optimization technique in order to obtain an AI system, called a service, that performs the task.
A service is an AI system that delivers bounded results for some task using bounded resources in bounded time. Superintelligent language translation would count as a service, even though it requires a very detailed understanding of the world, including engineering, history, science, etc. Episodic RL agents also count as services.
While each of the AI R&D subtasks is currently performed by a human, as AI progresses we should expect that we will automate these tasks as well. At that point, we will have automated R&D, leading to recursive technological improvement. This is not recursive self-improvement, because the improvement comes from R&D services creating improvements in basic AI building blocks, and those improvements feed back into the R&D services. All of this should happen before we get any powerful AGI agents that can do arbitrary general reasoning.
Why Comprehensive?
Since services are focused on particular tasks, you might think that they aren't general intelligence, since there would be some tasks for which there is no service. However, pretty much everything we do can be thought of as a task -- including the task of creating a new service. When we have a new task that we would like automated, our service-creating-service can create a new service for that task, perhaps by training a new AI system, or by taking a bunch of existing services and putting them together, etc. In this way, the collection of services can perform any task, and so as an aggregate is generally intelligent. As a result, we can call this Comprehensive AI Services, or CAIS. The "Comprehensive" in CAIS is the analog of the "General" in AGI. So, we'll have the capabilities of an AGI agent, before we can actually make a monolithic AGI agent.
Isn't this just as dangerous as AGI?
You might argue that each individual service must be dangerous, since it is superintelligent at its particular task. However, since the service is optimizing for some bounded task, it is not going to run a long-term planning process, and so it will not have any of the standard convergent instrumental subgoals (unless the subgoals are helpful for the task before reaching the bound).
In addition, all of the optimization pressure on the service is pushing it towards a particular narrow task. This sort of strong optimization tends to focus behavior. Any long term planning processes that consider weird plans for achieving goals (similar to "break out of the box") will typically not find any such plan and will be eliminated in favor of cognition that will actually help achieve the task. Think of how a racecar is optimized for speed, while a bus is optimized for carrying passengers, rather than having a "generally capable vehicle".
It's also worth noting what we mean by ...
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