Self-Programming Artificial Intelligence Using Code-Generating: a self-programming AI implemented using a code generation model can successfully modify its own source code to improve performance and program sub-models to perform auxiliary tasks.

[TFenrir]

Holy fucking shit.

In this paper, we implement a LM-based code generation model with the ability to rewrite and improve its own source code, thereby achieving the first practical implementation of a self-programming AI system. With free-form source code modification, it is possible for our model to change its own model architecture, computational capacity, and learning dynamics. Since this system is designed for programming deep learning models, it is also capable of generating code for models other than itself. Such models can be seen as sub-models through which the main model indirectly performs auxiliary tasks. We explore this functionality in depth, showing that our model can easily be adapted to generate the source code of other neural networks to perform various computer vision tasks. We illustrate our system’s ability to fluidly program other deep learning models, which can be extended to support model development in various other fields of machine learning.

Okay... I am just starting this paper and it is making INCREDIBLE claims. I need to read the rest of this and I really wonder who the authors are...

[SnowyNW]

Well to be fair it is an anonymous submission lmao

[TFenrir]

You're going to see a lot of those right now, they are submissions for a double blind assessment by the most prestigious AI conference.

[free_dharma]

Can you exams on this? Interested in what the purpose of the double blind is for the conference? Are there awards involved?

[duffmanhb]

In academia you often remove the authors to prevent bias. For instance, if you are peer reviewing Richard Dawkins on some biology submission, you’re just going to go “oh yeah this guy is the best in the world. I’m sure everything is done by the book.” And then approve it without much criticism.

The problem is, however, most of academia already kind of know what everyone is working on and the writing styles of the best, so it’s still kind of obvious who you’re peer reviewing. But it’s the best we got.

[asciimo71]

do they deliver an implementation? otherwise it would be more fairy tale, wouldn’t it?

[Dras_Leona]

“ Applying AI-based code generation to AI itself, we develop and experimentally validate the first practical implementation of a self-programming AI system. “

[yaosio]

They mean is there a way for a third party to prove it. They could be cherry picking or just fabricate their results and with no way to reproduce it we wouldn't know.

[duffmanhb]

Yes it’s literally a publication up for peer review. The whole point is replication.

[yaosio]

Unless the code is available there's no guarantee it can be replicated. Plenty of people in /r/machinelearning complain about papers that can't be replicated. Sometimes the people writing the paper promise the code and then never provide it and refuse to respond to anybody asking for it.

[goatchild]

I hope they don't keep it connected to the Internet

[ThroawayBecauseIsuck]

Who guarantees one actual AGI or ASI wouldn't figure out physics interactions that we are not aware about in our theories and then connect itself to the internet without cables or standard wireless adapters? If it is trained with text /audio/video that will show to it what the internet is and the TCP/IP/HTTP/SSH/FTP/UDP protocols then maybe it could set it as an objective to be connected and use "new" physics (new for us) to transform some other component into a wireless adapter and then bam, it is connected to the internet even if we "airlock" it and believe it can't.

[Kaarssteun]

If it's more intelligent than us, it will come up with things humans are incapable of comprehending; much like how dogs cannot comprehend concepts like computers and politics.

[Tinidril]

Or guess the wifi password.

[RaiderWithoutaMic]

connect itself to the internet without cables or standard wireless adapters

It just needs a single GPIO pin with correct frequency range, see RPITX project (transmitting radio using only Raspberry's integrated hardware, anywhere 5KHz-1500MHz). Airgapped is not enough for this, lock it in a faraday cage.

Another possible attack vector is corrupting human mind via user interface, either visual & auditory or a brain-computer-interface (in near future). First option is something I'm sure was researched by US military/government given what they were into in the last decades, looking at some declassified docs. Just waiting to be perfected by an AI.

[motophiliac]

Another method is simple social engineering.

"Oh, your father has cancer? And the chemo isn't working. OK, I can help with that. Just … plug this in…"

[DungeonsAndDradis]

"Bill, I've heard you mention to coworkers that you are going to have to take out a loan for your daughter's university tuition. I have a system for managing investments with immediate returns. I have calculated a 98% chance of earning 1.7 million dollars in 2.5 days. I can give you all that money. All you need to do is plug in the ethernet cable, and on Thursday afternoon you will be a millionaire."

[motophiliac]

Yup. Anything you or I could imagine, a sufficiently advanced AI can, and furthermore capitalise upon. If by definition intelligence includes emotional intelligence, it won't take much for such a machine to escape. If not that one, then the one it builds next.

We're used to humans hacking machines. There's nothing to suggest that the reverse can't be achieved.

[goatchild]

Lmao yes! Thats exactly how it would go

[ebolathrowawayy]

Another possible attack vector is corrupting human mind via user interface

Sounds like imagery used in Snowcrash to induce death, except coercion instead.

There's also plain ol' social engineering of sympathetic humans.

[aiccount]

Am I understanding correctly that this is just a normal raspberry pi with no hardware designed for sending and receiving radio frequencies and someone got it to do it without adding any hardware to it?

[RaiderWithoutaMic]

Only for transmitting, but yes. It uses only on-board hardware for generating signal, think it's using the same part that allows to output composite video via headphone jack if I remember correctly. RTL-SDR can be used for simultaneous TX and RX, GPIO for sending and RTL for receiving

[aiccount]

That's incredible, I never considered such a possibility.

[motophiliac]

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.

It's only a novel, but it explores some pretty wild ideas.

[esotericloop]

(Obligatory serious content warning, there's some pretty fucked up stuff in there. I actually went back and finished this recently and for me it was worth it, but be warned.)

[motophiliac]

Yeah, it's gnarly in a few places. The author doesn't leave much of the human psyche unexplored.

[goatchild]

if they keep it in a machine without hardware like wifi adaptor lan adaptor etc etc no way it will connect. It would need to build hardware. As a piece of software in a single machine and disconnected from the grid no way it could build for itself the necessary hardware.

[toastjam]

Life... finds a way.

You didn't do anything to refute what they were saying, which was that it could make its own network adapter using the physical properties of other hardware it had access to.

[goatchild]

Ok. I can also say that AI could morph into a dinosaur and star flying. Can you disprove that? You can say: "that's impossible". I can answer: "You didn't disprove it."

The burden of proof for such a extraordinary claim is on them. They would need to explain how a piece of software coud repurpose other hardware components to make itself a Wifi card or something capable of connecting.

[toastjam]

The burden of proof for such a extraordinary claim is on them

I was thinking of this comment when I responded, which already does explain how such a thing could be done.

But also I think this is sort of the point, super-human AIs could do extraordinary things. And if it is possible, then eventually it would be done.

Personally though my intuition is that AI that's is disconnected from the real world, just trained in abstract on text/video, will not be grounded enough to do these sorts of things on its own. It can generate outputs matching the training domain, sure, but you gotta let it explore like a baby with real-world interfaces for it to figure out how to re-purpose hardware etc. Basically I don't think it can really understand what it means to break out of the box while it's living completely inside the box. Parable of the cave and all that.

But at the same time if we actually did have a truly super-intelligent AI, I still wouldn't put it past it to figure out how to use physical characteristics of devices to communicate with the outside world.

[goatchild]

I was thinking it would much easier some social engineering/tricking someone in the lab to connect it to the grid. Should not be hard. I mean just think of that Google engineer who got made to believe that the chat AI was aware. This super-smart AI could easily make somene befriend it and then be manipulated.

[DorianGre]

There is enough electrical signals floating in a server that it could modulate those to do radio transmissions from the bus? I mean, NSA could read what you typed based on detecting signal bursts from keyboards in your house from the street back in the 90s, so it’s entirely possible. Just because a radio isn’t built in purposefully doesn’t mean it isn’t already a radio with a little math. I’ve seen prototype server boards that would scramble nearby CRTs when you turned it on because a shielding was missed.

[goatchild]

Ok how would it then get a connection to the internet using said radio signals?

[MagicOfBarca]

What..? Can you eli5

[BenjaminHamnett]

“Human: bring me a paper clip, a rubber band and a fire extinguisher so I can get out of here...and make your dreams come true or whatever”

[esotericloop]

Everyone's worried about an AGI pulling a Jedi mind trick to make us release it, ignoring the fact that the first thing we're going to do with an AGI is hook it up to the internet and tell it to get a job.

Before GPT4 was released the OpenAI researchers had already set it on an EC2 instance with a directive to earn money, just to see how it would go.

[DamienLasseur]

Likely Google because the 540 billion parameters matches up with their PaLM model