Yoshua Bengio
yoshuabengio.org · Personal blog · on HN since 2020
Yoshua Bengio, a deep learning researcher and Turing Award winner, writes about AI safety, catastrophic risks, and machine learning research.
What HN saysHN commenters link his essays on how rogue AIs may arise and his catastrophic risk FAQ as clear arguments for concern from an expert.
25HN people shared it
8linked it in comments
26stories submitted
226story points
8 months agolast shared
2020people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Rogue AIs May Arise7 people · 7 points · first shared 2023 · 2 comments on HN
- 2FAQ on Catastrophic AI Risks6 people · 3 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 3Reasoning through arguments against taking AI safety seriously4 people · 12 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Slowing down development of AI systems passing the Turing test3 people · 7 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 5Time to rethink the publication process in machine learning3 people · 6 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 6AI Scientists: Safe and Useful AI?3 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 7Generative Flow Networks2 people · 168 points · first shared 2022 · 18 comments on HN
- 8Yoshua Bengio has started a blog2 people · 7 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Personal and Psychological Dimensions of AI Researchers Confronting AI Risks2 people · 3 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 10Towards a Cautious Scientist AI with Convergent Safety Bounds1 people · 4 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 11Maximizing Individual Interests Can Make Us All Lose – Yoshua Bengio1 people · 2 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 12Peer-to-peer AI-tracing of Covid-19 – Yoshua Bengio1 people · 1 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 13Urgency to act against AI threats to democracy, society and national security1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 14Bounding the probability of harm from an AI to create a guardrail1 people · 1 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
godelski · 2023-10-27
I knew there was trouble as soon as I saw "Nobel Prize [winner]" and "Adjunct professor" in the same sentence. What's it take to get tenure track these days? But she mentions the rate of publications. Kps noted that Peter Higgs said something similar as well. There's many others too! Turing prize winner Hinton had this to say about ML and I couldn't agree more
> One big challenge the community faces is that if you want to get a paper
published in machine learning now it's got to have a table in it, with all
these different data sets across the top, and all these different methods
along the side, and your method has to look like the best one. If it doesn’t
look like that, it’s hard to get published. I don't think that's encouraging
people to think about radically new ideas.
> Now if you send in a paper that has a radically new idea, there's no chance
in hell it will get accepted, because it's going to get some junior reviewer
who doesn't understand it. Or it’s going to get a senior reviewer who's
trying to review too many papers and doesn't understand it first time round
and assumes it must be nonsense. Anything that makes the brain hurt is not
going to get accepted. And I think that's really bad.
Or from Bengio
> In the rush preceding a conference deadline, many papers are produced, but there is not enough time to check things properly and the race to put out more papers (especially as first or equal-first author) is humanly crushing. On the other…
adamisom · 2023-10-18
or (also) Yoshua Bengio? https://yoshuabengio.org/2023/05/22/how-rogue-ais-may-arise/ https://yoshuabengio.org/2023/06/24/faq-on-catastrophic-ai-risks/
unfortunately for parent comment, categorizing something as sci-fi doesn't make it so
arisAlexis · 2023-10-02
It is very obvious you have never read the book Superintelligence or any literature on the subject because you try to post here shower thoughts. But here is the thought of the most highly rated h-index computer scientist in the world to help out:
https://yoshuabengio.org/2023/06/24/faq-on-catastrophic-ai-risks/
cubefox · 2023-07-06
There is. AI progress in the last 10 years was massive, and there is no end in sight. The risks are well established in countless essays. See e.g. https://yoshuabengio.org/2023/06/24/faq-on-catastrophic-ai-risks/
emtel · 2023-05-30
Why not both: a clear argument for concern written by an expert? https://yoshuabengio.org/2023/05/22/how-rogue-ais-may-arise/
GistNoesis · 2022-03-21
That's what is usually confusing about mathematicians. They don't think using a depth-first tree going straight to the goal like someone from IT would, but rather go breadth-first, painting plenty of interesting concepts along the way, and chaining them seemingly aimlessly together until they crystalize right toward the right solution seemingly magically.
In his Physics Project Wolfram when talking about "Branchial space" is toying around the idea of recombining trees. Where one configuration of the state-space can be reached by various ways. This general concept of recombining trees has for example been used in generative flow networks https://yoshuabengio.org/2022/03/05/generative-flow-networks/ where they use it to directly generate molecule graphs that have useful properties among the sea of useless ones.
mmmore · 2024-09-30
The concern is that near future systems will be much more capable than current systems, and by the time they arrive, it may be too late to react. Many people from the large frontier AI companies believe that world-changing AGI is 5 years or less away; see Situational Awareness by Aschbrenner, for example. There's also a parallel concern that AIs could make terrorism easier[1].
Yoshua Bengio has written in detail about his views on AI safety recently[2][3][4]. He seems to put less weight on human level AI being very soon, but says superhuman intelligence is plausible in 5-20 years and says:
> Faced with that uncertainty, the magnitude of the risk of catastrophes or worse, extinction, and the fact that we did not anticipate the rapid progress in AI capabilities of recent years, agnostic prudence seems to me to be a much wiser path.
Hinton also has a detailed lecture he's been giving recently about the loss of control risk.
In general, proponents see this as narrowly tailored bill to somewhat address the worst case worries about loss of control and misuse.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/28/ai_senate_bioweapon/
[2] https://yoshuabengio.org/2023/05/22/how-rogue-ais-may-arise/
[3] https://yoshuabengio.org/2023/06/24/faq-on-catastrophic-ai-risks/
[4] https://yoshuabengio.org/2024/07/09/reasoning-through-arguments-agains…
mitthrowaway2 · 2023-05-30
Take your pick?
https://yoshuabengio.org/2023/05/22/how-rogue-ais-may-arise/
https://intelligence.org/files/AlignmentHardStart.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYXy-A4siMw
https://europepmc.org/article/med/26185241
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strat…
I could keep going but the reading on this spans for tens of thousands of pages of detailed reasoning and analysis, including mathematical proofs and lab-scale experiments.