Bing chatbot is a recurring product in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 01, 2023 and March 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Microsoft was not competent... and released it as the Bing chatbot". It most often appears alongside AGI, AI, Anthropic.
- Reference entry
- Bing chatbot
- Mention count
- 1
- Issue count
- 1
- First seen
- March 01, 2023
- Last seen
- March 01, 2023
Outbound links
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221104130431/https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/1m-bet-rules
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221129133112/https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaim-accepts-500000-challenge-on-covid-vaccine-safety-efficacy/
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221224061743/https://www.skirsch.com/covid/SaarWilf.pdf
- https://abc7news.com/post/graffiti-in-san-francisco-tagging-vandalism-street/13801629/
- https://archive.ph/pY4gF#selection-663.103-683.190
- https://web.archive.org/web/20230104080248/https://www.rootclaim.com/
- https://what3words.com/guitars.record.caps
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/business/media/heather-cox-richardson-substack-boston-college.html
- https://www.statista.com/chart/21581/public-opinion-on-easing-stay-at-home-restrictions/
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
And so on . . . Meanwhile, in real life, OpenAI released ChatGPT in late November, helped Microsoft launch the Bing chatbot in February, and plans to announce GPT-4 in a few months. Nobody thinks society has even partially adapted to any of these, or that alignment researchers have done more than begin to study them. The only sense in which OpenAI supports gradualism is the sense in which they’re not doing lots of research in secret, then releasing it all at once. But there are lots of better plans than either doing that, or going full-speed-ahead. So what’s OpenAI thinking? I haven’t asked them and I don’t know for sure, but I’ve heard enough debates around this that I have some guesses about the kinds of arguments they’re working off of. I think the longer versions would go something like this: The Race Argument: Bigger, better AIs will make alignment research easier. At the limit, if no AIs exist at all, then you have to do armchair speculation about what a future AI will be like and how to control it; clearly your research will go faster and work better after AIs exist. But by the same token, studying early weak AIs will be less valuable than studying later, stronger AIs. In the 1970s, alignment researchers working on industrial robot arms wouldn’t have learned anything useful. Today, alignment researchers can study how to prevent language models from saying bad words, but they can’t study how to prevent AGIs from inventing superweapons, because there aren’t any AGIs that can do that. The researchers just have to hope some of the language model insights will carry over. So all else being equal, we would prefer alignment researchers get more time to work on the later, more dangerous AIs, not the earlier, boring ones.
Reading even further between the lines - at this point it’s total guesswork - OpenAI’s corporate partner Microsoft asked them for a cool AI. OpenAI assumed Microsoft was competent - they make Windows and stuff! - and gave them a rough draft of GPT-4. Microsoft was not competent, skipped fine-tuning and many other important steps which OpenAI would not have skipped, and released it as the Bing chatbot. Bing got in trouble for threatening users, which gave OpenAI a PR headache around safety. Some savvy alignment people chose this moment to approach them with their latest ideas (is it a coincidence that Holden Karnofsky published What AI Companies Can Do Today earlier that same week?), and OpenAI decided (for a mix of selfish and altruistic reasons) to get on board - hence this document.
Inline links: What AI Companies Can Do Today