Mediaboss Marketing

[18.05 08.06.23] The following publication by SOS MEDITERRANEE intends to shed light on events which unfolded in the central Mediterranean in the past weeks. It is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather to provide a general update on maritime search-and-rescue-related matters occurring in the area we have been operating in since 2016, based on public reports by different NGOs, international organisations and the international press.

Rescues operated near daily by NGO ships, maritime authorities playing a small part in coordination of operations while still attributing distant ports that empty Search and Rescue capacities in the central Mediterranean

On May 17, the rescue ship Louise Michel evacuated 71 people from an overcrowded rubber boat in distress, less than a day after being back at sea. The crew was informed by aircraft Colibri 2 from Pilotes Volontaires about a potential distress case. The next day, the survivors were disembarked in the port of Trapani, Italy.

Between May 18 and 19, according to Italian journalist of Radio Radicale Sergio Scandura, around 700 people were rescued off the coast of Calabria by Italian coast guards, disembarked in Messina and Reggio Calabria, Italy, by Diciotti coast guard ship.

On May 19, according to civil hotline Alarm Phone, the container ship CAPE FRANKLIN rescued 48 people from a boat in distress, coordinated by the Italian Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC). The survivors were disembarked in Pozzallo, Italy.

On May 19, 26 survivors rescued by Geo Barents, vessel operated by MSF, were disembarked in Brindisi, Italy.

On May 25, Ocean Viking of the NGO SOS MEDITERRANEE was involved in a long joint operation with Emergency NGO and seabird aircraft from Sea Watch NGO, to search for a boat in distress reported by Alarm Phone, with approximately 500 people on board in the Maltese Search and Rescue Region, to no avail. The search lasted almost 48 hours: the people in distress were reportedly intercepted and forcibly brought back to Libya.

On May 26, Humanity 1 of SOS Humanity NGO rescued 88 people, including 10 minors, from an overcrowded wooden boat. Later, they were assigned the distant port of Livorno, Italy to disembark the rescued people, regardless of a second boat in distress reported by survivors. After a four-day transit, the 88 survivors were safely disembarked in Italy.

On May 27, another rescue was coordinated by the Italian MRCC, who contacted Geo Barents, operated by MSF, to assist an overcrowded boat in distress with 606 people onboard. After a long rescue operation, the survivors, including 11 women and 151 minors, were safely transferred on Geo Barents. MSF teams onboard were later instructed to disembark them in Bari, Italy. The disembarkation took place on May 30.

On May 28, sailing ship Nadir of Resqship NGO supported an overcrowded boat with about 55 people in distress, providing people with life jackets and water, then accompanying the survivors towards Lampedusa. Later, the Guardia di Finanza proceeded to their evacuation and disembarkation in Lampedusa. The same day, the crew of the Sea Eye 4, operated by Sea-Eye NGO rescued 17 people from a wooden boat in distress at sea. Immediately after, they were assigned the port of Ortona, Italy by the Italian Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre, about 1,300 nautical miles away.

On May 30, the Sea Eye 4 conducted a second operation in the Maltese Search and Rescue (SAR) zone, while searching for another case of approximately 400 people in distress. They managed to rescue 32 people from an unseaworthy wooden boat. The 49 survivors were all disembarked in Ortona, Italy, on June 2nd. As the ship did not proceed immediately to the port of Ortona after carrying out the first rescue, the Sea Eye 4 has been temporarily detained by Italian maritime authorities (see next chapter).

On May 31, a new SAR asset, Mare*Go, operated by Zusammenland, was involved in a joint operation with Resqships Nadir and Seabird 2 aircraft. Mare*Go arrived first on scene and assisted the boat in distress with 31 people on board. Later, the Guardia di Finanza evacuated them. Shortly after, the same day, Mare*Go crew spotted another boat in distress with 44 people on board. The crew stayed with the boat until evacuation of the survivors by the Guardia di Finanza.

The next day, on June 1st, several rescue operations were conducted. During the night, Resqships Nadir assisted a total of 160 people on 4 boats in distress in the Maltese SAR zone.

Mare*Go crew also spotted a metal boat in distress and rescued 36 people. Shortly after, they were assigned to the distant port of Trapani, Italy to disembark the survivors, but the vessel proceeded into port in Lampedusa instead. This led to her temporary detention by Italian authorities (see next chapter).

On June 2, Emergencys Life Support rescued 29 people in the Libyan SAR zone. They were assigned by maritime authorities the very distant port of Marina di Carrara, Italy. The survivors were eventually disembarked 3 days after, on June 5, after a 70-hour navigation from the area of operations to the assigned port.

The same day, Nadir assisted a boat in distress with 73 people onboard, providing them with life jackets and accompanying them towards Lampedusa, Italy. Later, the Italian coast guards evacuated the survivors and disembarked them to Lampedusa. The next day, the same crew found several boats in distress: a first operation involved two boats in distress with 65 people on board, providing them with life jackets, before the arrival of the Italian coast guards. Later, a second operation took place: a steel boat in distress was found in the Maltese SAR zone with 39 people on board. Again, the crew provided them with life jackets and accompanied them towards Lampedusa, Italy. Later, the Italian coast guards evacuated the survivors and disembarked them to Lampedusa.

On June 7, according to Sergio Scandura, Italian coast guards were involved in 3 rescue operations in South of Calabria, one of approximately 900 people and two others of approximately 100 and 150.

Two rescue ships temporarily detained by Italian authorities after rescuing a total of 85 people, prevented to pursue their vital mission

Two German vessels have been temporarily detained by Italian authorities after conducting 3 rescue operations between May 28 and June 1st. The Mare*Go and Sea-Eye 4 are said to have violated the new Italian decree law passed in Italy on February 24, providing for the regulation of the activities of vessels dedicated to Search and Rescue in the Mediterranean. Rescue vessels are for instance required to request the assignment of a port and sail to it immediately after each rescue. In both cases, the vessels were punished with 20 days of administrative detention each.

On its first mission, Mare*Go rescued 36 people from distress at sea on June 1st. The ship disembarked the survivors in Lampedusa, although the authorities had assigned her the Sicilian port of Trapani. The ships crew warned that it would not be able to cover the distance to reach the assigned port of Trapani, and that their ship was not equipped to treat the rescued people on the move for that period of time (minimum thirty-two hours of navigation). Mare*Go was detained upon arrival in Lampedusa.

Sea-Eye organization declared they will appeal the decision. On June 4th, the NGO also appealed to the German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and the German Foreign Office with an urgent request for help. This law could completely shut down civilian sea rescue if the Italian authorities continue to apply it in this way. After all, we will not ignore distress calls to prevent detentions. To put us in front of this choice is inhumane and irresponsible, said Gorden Isler, chairman of Sea-Eye.

Tragic milestone of one thousand deaths recorded in the central Mediterranean while interceptions and forced returns continue amidst escalation of violence in Libya

The International Organisation for Migrations (IOM)s Missing Migrants project documented 1,030 deaths recorded in the Central Mediterranean this year only. These figures are an undercount of the true death toll.They mark a worrying increase in deaths compared to the same period last year.

Between May 14 and June 3 2023, at least 900 people were forcibly returned to Libya according the IOM, totalising 6,684 people intercepted by Libyan coast guards in 2023 so far.

Several interceptions taking place in the central Mediterranean were also witnessed and reported by SAR NGOs.

On May 24, SOS Humanity witnessed an illegal pushback performed by a merchant vessel. According to the NGO, the Italian MRCC alerted Humanity 1 and nearby vessels about a boat in distress with 27 people on board. Humanity 1 reported that the people in distress were brought onboard the merchant vessel P. Long Beach, recording a radio conversation where the merchant vessels captain was confirming bringing the survivors to Libya.

On June 8, Sea Bird aircraft and MSFs Geo Barents witnessed Libyan coast guards intercepting a boat in distress with approximately 50 people in international waters, then setting fire to it.

The surge of departures is partly explained by the chaotic situation in Libya. According to Agenzia Nova, tensions were reported in the coastal city of Zawiya at the end of May, with airstrikes conducted by Tripolis prime minister, sending a signal to opponents.

The United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) called on the parties involved to respect national and international law and protect the civilian population.

According to Ansa, US and British embassies also reacted to the escalation of tensions, calling for dtente among the parties involved in the violence in Zawiya.

The beginning of June did not deescalate in violence for people living and transiting in Libya, with migrants detained in raids in the border town of Musaid and other areas in eastern Libya, according to AP news.

Three months after the shipwreck, investigation on Cutro drama

June 2nd, an investigation published by Le Monde, El Pais, Sky News, Domani and Sddeutsche Zeitung, in partnership with Lighthouse Reports, revealed the failings of the Italian authorities and Frontex implications during the Cutro shipwreck. The investigation claims to find contradictions in the official account and evidence that both Italy and Frontex misstated what they knew about storm weather and the boats condition.

On February 26, at least 94 people died, including babies and women, in a shipwreck in Cutro, on the southern Italian coast of Calabria. The boat had departed from Turkey four days earlier, with over 200 people onboard and sank while attempting to land after it crashed into rocks in rough weather conditions. According to different media reports and to Frontex, the latter spotted the dinghy via aerial surveillance a day before the tragedy and relayed the information to the Italian authorities. The Italian authorities launched a law enforcement operation rather than a search and rescue operation in sending two patrol boats of the Italian financial guards that eventually had to return to port because of weather conditions. More than 40 Italian and European civil society associations submitted a collective complaint to the Public Prosecutors Office at the Crotone Court asking for an investigation into the Cutro shipwreck to shed light on the responsibilities of Frontex and of the Italian authorities in the deaths of these people.

Six people are reportedly under investigation, including three Guardia di finanza officials, accused of failing to prevent the tragedy. There will be a trial for the sinking of Cutro, says Francesco Verri, one of the lawyers representing the victims families. The State has clear responsibilities, and the Crotone public prosecutors office will establish them and bring the guilty parties before the judge, he believes.

More here:
[Eyes on the Central Med #61] Chaotic situation in Libya and surge ... - ReliefWeb

The Chairman of the Libyan Post Telecommunications and Information Company (LPTIC), Libyas telecommunications holding company that controls all state telecoms sector, Mohamed Ben Ayad, signed an agreement to connect Italy with Libya through a submarine cable. The agreement is part of LPTICs 2025 vision to make Libya a major digital gateway in the world.

Commenting to Libya Herald on the agreement, the Director of LPTICs Media Office, Osama Al-Shaibani, said, The signing comes as part of the visit of the government delegation headed by the head of the Government of National Unity, Abd Alhamid Aldabaiba, to the Italian capital, Rome, and within the framework of the conclusion of a number of development and partnership agreements between the two countries.

Al-Shaibani said that LPTIC is working on developing the communications infrastructure locally and internationally, in cooperation with major international companies, which contribute to increasing the quality and speed of services provided by its subsidiaries.

The Tripoli-Mazara cable He said that Libya and Italy are connected to the Tripoli-Mazara cable, which is 570 km long and is owned by the Libyan International Telecom Company, a subsidiary of the LPTIC with the Italian Telecom Company Sparkle (TIS). This cable connects Libya to the European continent via Sicily / Italy with a capacity of 340 Gb / s.

The Silphium cable It is worth noting that Libya is also connected to the European continent through the international submarine cable Silphium, which is the first international submarine cable 100 percent owned by Libya and connects the eastern region to the world. It was launched in June 2012 with a length of 425 km and an initial capacity of 70 gigabits per second up to 1.2 Tbps. These capacities are currently being upgraded to 370 Gbps.

The Silphium cable connects the city of Derna to the city of Chania on the island of Crete in Greece. The international submarine cable Silphium was unique when it was established as the longest submarine cable in the world with the technology of not using signal re-strengthening equipment.

The Libyan International Telecoms Company completes Silphium submarine cable project linking Libya with Greece (libyaherald.com)

Libyan PM Aldabaiba leads high level ministerial delegation to Rome: multi-sector MoUs signed (libyaherald.com)

Read the rest here:
Agreement signed to link Italy with Libya through a submarine cable - Libya Herald

Expertise France published last Thursday the top 20 reforms guide to improving the business environment in Libya.

The guide contains the most critical and urgent 20 economic reforms based on a large survey in which more than 600 Libyan companies participated, Expertise France reported.

Here are the top 20 business reforms needed in Libya:

Expertise France implements training for Digital Lab team (libyaherald.com)

Expertise France to implement new 700,000 Raqameyon digitalisation project (libyaherald.com)

A workshop on free zones organized by Expertise France was held in Tunis 21 to 22 February (libyaherald.com)

Expertise France holds workshop for Libyan Tax Authority on digitising its services (libyaherald.com)

CBL meets Expertise France discusses Fintech, credit bureau and microfinance (libyaherald.com)

Sahary Bank and Expertise France discuss establishing SME financing units (libyaherald.com)

Expertise France to support Libyas promotion of industrial sector (libyaherald.com)

Expertise France hails its five diversification projects in Libya (libyaherald.com)

Expertise France and UNICEF to help Libyan youth in entrepreneurship (libyaherald.com)

Read the original post:
Expertise France publishes top 20 reforms guide to improving the ... - Libya Herald

BEIRUT (AP) Seeking to find lives better than they had in their war-scarred town in northeast Syria, four men and a 14-year-old boy from the Sheikhi family set out for Europe.

Ignoring an older relatives warnings, the group boarded a fishing boat from Libya to Italy, where they hoped to start crossing Europe on land and get to Germany.

Instead of docking in Italy, the trawler capsized and sank Wednesday in thousands of feet of seawater, 75 kilometers (45 miles) off Greece. The trawler may have carried as many as 750 passengers. Hundreds remained missing early Friday, on the third and final day of search operations. It would be one of the worst Mediterranean shipwrecks in recent history if officials confirm relatives worst fears, as expected.

Five members of one family were aboard the trawler, including Ali Sheikhi, 29. The father of three boys, he left behind his wife, and boys ages 6, 5 and 2 hoping to one day reunite in Europe and offer the children the good education no longer found at home.

He wanted to save his children, said Abdo Sheikhi, 38, Alis brother.

Abdo Sheikhi reached Germany seven years ago. His five relatives left Kobani, a border town near Turkey, in early March.

Once a symbol of victory against Islamic State militants in 2015, Kobani has been hit by the countrys bitter divisions, and over a decade of war, like much of Syria. With no development, no investment and no sign of peace, many in northeastern Syria are following the footsteps of earlier migrants to Europe but taking much higher risks because Turkey has been tightening its borders and making the land crossing harder.

Many of the Syrians missing were also from Daraa, a region in Syrias southernmost tip, near the border with Jordan.

Abdo Sheikhis five relatives went through government-controlled Syria into Lebanon. They then flew to Cairo and from there to Tripoli and on land to Tobruk, Libya. Aside from the expenses paid to reach Libya, the five were supposed to pay $6,000 each to the smugglers, money that was to be paid once they reached Italy.

They were supposed to arrive in three or four days, Mohamed Abdi Marwan, an uncle, said speaking by phone from Kobani, a Kurdish-majority town. It was a shock. We had hoped they will get there safely.

Nine survivors were arrested Thursday on suspicion of being members of the ring that arranged the voyage, the Greek coast guard said. State-run ERT TV said the suspects were all Egyptian nationals.

In Syria, there are no means for a life, Abdo Sheikhi said. Once they decided, I told them the Libya road is very dangerous and very long. They said: others made it. We too will take that road.

Shahin, another relative of Sheikhis, who is also a resident of Germany, said he last heard from his relative when he complained about the conditions in waiting in Libya for months. The smugglers wouldnt let them leave the rooms where they were, ostensibly to avoid detection, often confiscated their phones, and would not bring them the food they requested.

They were seven to a room ... They didnt see the sun, said Shahin, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to not jeopardize his ability to stay in Germany. They were sad and gripped by despair. But they would not take a decision to go back to Syria.

The men from the Sheikhi family texted relatives late last Thursday to say they would leave in a few hours, on a boat that was supposed to carry 300 people, said the elder Sheikhi.

The family waited for a confirmation photo from Italy. None came.

The (smugglers) sent the boys to their deaths, Abdo Sheikhi said.

Hours after rescue operations began, a member of the Sheikhi family thought he spotted Ali in a photo of survivors posted on social media. The man was laying on the floor in a line of others wrapped in blankets in the makeshift camp set up for the passengers. His hand was raised, covering most of his face, except for a distinctive beard. Then came another picture of a man uncovered and sitting up, holding a piece of paper.

There was no sign of other relatives and no way to reach the man on the floor to confirm it is Ali.

The elder Sheikhi, working as an electrician in Germany, said he has called the hospital in Greece to try to get information, with no luck. He was unable to get news from the makeshift camp and is still weighing whether to travel to Greece to look for relatives.

Abdo Sheikhi said the trip to Greece will cost him at least 600 euros and he cant speak English.

I will wait till tomorrow. If there are no news, I will have to go, he said. The problem will be if I go there and it is of no use.

Continue reading here:
Relatives fear worst with four men and a boy missing after ... - The Associated Press

For Hinton, as for many computer scientists and researchers in the AI community, the question of artificial intelligence becoming more intelligent than humans is one of when, rather than if.

Testifying from the seat next to Altman last month was Professor Gary Marcus, a New York University professor emeritus who specialises in psychology and neural science, and who ought to know as well as anyone the answer to the question of when the AI will become as good at thinking as humans are at which point it will be known as AGI (artificial general intelligence), rather than merely AI.

But Marcus doesnt know.

Is it going to be 10 years? Is it going to be 100 years? I dont think anybody knows the answer to that question.

But when we get to AGI, maybe lets say its 50 years, that really is going to have profound effects on labour, he testified, responding to a question from Congress about the potential job losses stemming from AI.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks at the US Senate hearing on artificial intelligence on May 16, 2023. Seated beside him is NYU Professor Emeritus Gary Marcus. AP

And indeed, the effect an AGI might have on the workforce goes to the crux of the matter, creating a singular category of unemployment that might ultimately lead to human extinction.

Apart from putting office workers, artists and journalists out of work, one effect that achieving the AGI milestone might have on labour is that it could put out of work the very humans who built the AI software in the first place, too.

If an artificial intelligence is general enough to replicate most or all tasks now done by the human brain, then one task it should be able to replicate is to develop the next generation of itself, the thinking goes.

That first generation of AGI-generated AGI might be only fractionally better than the generation it replaced, but one of the things its very likely to be fractionally better at is generating the second generation version of AGI-generated AGI.

Run that computer loop a few times, or a few million times with each improvement, each loop is likely to get better optimised and run faster, too then what started simply as an AGI can spiral into whats sometimes known as a superhuman machine intelligence, otherwise known as the God AI.

Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.

Sam Altman, Open AI CEO

Though he dodged the question when testifying before Congress, Sam Altman had actually blogged on this topic back in 2015, while he was still running the influential US start-up accelerator Y Combinator and 10 months before he would go on to co-found OpenAI, the worlds most influential AI company, together with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Amazon and others.

Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity, he blogged at the time.

There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could.

Professor Max Tegmark, a Swedish-American physicist and machine-learning researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says its unlikely todays AI technology would be capable of anything that could wipe out humanity.

AIs job is to perform singular tasks without hurdles. When challenges present themselves, AI steps in to ensure they are removed no matter what they are.

It would probably take an AGI for that, and more likely an AGI that has progressed to the level of superhuman intelligence, he tells AFR Weekend.

As to exactly how an AGI or SMI might cause human extinction, Tegmark said there are any number of seemingly innocuous ways the goals of an AI can become misaligned with the goals of humans, leading to unexpected outcomes.

Most likely it will be something we cant imagine and wont see coming, he says.

In 2003, the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom devised the paper-clip maximiser thought experiment as a way of explaining AI alignment theory.

Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realise quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans, Bostrom wrote.

Last month, the US Air Force was involved in a thought experiment along similar lines, replacing paper clip maximisers with attack drones that use AI to choose targets, but still rely on a human operator for yes/no permission to destroy the target.

A plausible outcome of the experiment, said Colonel Tucker Hamilton, the USAFs chief of AI Test and Operations, was that the drone ends up killing any human operator who stops it achieving its goal of killing targets by saying no to a target.

If the AIs goal was then changed to include not killing drone operators, the drone might end up wiping out the telecommunications equipment the operator was using to communicate the no to it, the experiment found.

Despite this being a hypothetical example, this illustrates the real-world challenges posed by AI-powered capability and is why the Air Force is committed to the ethical development of AI, Colonel Hamilton was quoted as saying in a Royal Aeronautical Society statement.

But the challenges posed by AI arent just theoretical. Its already commonplace for machine-learning systems, when given seemingly innocuous tasks, to inadvertently produce outcomes not aligned with human well-being.

In 2018, Amazon pulled the plug on its machine-learning-based recruitment system, when the company found AI had learned to deduct points from applicants who had the word women in their resume. (The AI had been trained to automate the resume-sifting process, and simply made a correlation between resumes from females, and the outcome of those resumes getting rejected by human recruiters.)

The fundamental problem, Tegmark says, is that its difficult, perhaps even impossible, to ensure that AI systems are completely aligned with the goals of the humans who create them, much less the goals of humanity as a whole.

And the more powerful the AI system, the greater the risk that a misaligned outcome could be catastrophic.

And it may not take artificial intelligence very long at all to progress from the AGI phase to the SMI phase, at which time the very existence of humanity might be dangling in the wind.

In an April Time magazine article wondering why most AI ethicists were so loath to discuss the elephant in the room human extinction as unintended a side effect of SMI Professor Tegmark pointed to the Metaculus forecasting website, which asked this question of the expert community: After a weak AGI is created, how many months will it be before the first super-intelligent oracle?

The average answer Metaculus got back was 6.38 months.

It may not be about how long it will take to get from AGI to SMI. That computer loop, known as recursive self-improvement, might take care of that step quite rapidly, in no time at all compared to the 75 years it took AI researchers to come up with ChatGPT.

(Though thats not necessarily so. As one contributor to the Metaculus poll pointed out, If AGI develops on a system with a lot of headroom, I think itll rapidly achieve superintelligence. But if AGI develops on a system without sufficient resources, it could stall out. I think scenario number two would be ideal for studying AGI and crafting safety rails so, heres hoping for slow take-off.)

The big question is, how long will it take to get from ChatGPT, or Googles Bard, to AGI?

Of Professor Marcus three stabs at an answer 10, 50, or 100 years I ask Professor Tegmark which he thinks is most likely.

I would guess sooner than that, he says.

People used to think that AGI would happen in 30 years or 50 years or more, but a lot of researchers are talking about next year or two years from now, or at least this decade almost for sure, he says.

What changed the thinking about how soon AI will become AGI was the appearance of OpenAIs GPT-4, the large language model (LLM) machine-learning system that underpins ChatGPT, and the similar LLMs used by Bard and others, says Professor Tegmark.

In March, Sbastien Bubeck, the head of the Machine Learning Foundations group at Microsoft Research, and a dozen other Microsoft researchers, submitted a technical paper on the work theyd been doing on GPT-4, which Microsoft is funding and which runs on Microsofts cloud service, Azure.

The paper was called Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4, and argued that recent LLMs show more general intelligence than any previous AI models.

But sparks as anyone who has ever tried to use an empty cigarette lighter knows dont always burst into flames.

Altman himself has doubts the AI industry can keep closing in on AGI just by building more of what its already building, but bigger.

Making LLMs ever larger could be a game of diminishing returns, hes on record saying.

I think theres been way too much focus on parameter count this reminds me a lot of the gigahertz race in chips in the 1990s and 2000s, where everybody was trying to point to a big number, he said at an MIT conference in April.

(The size of an LLM is measured in parameters, roughly equivalent to counting the neural connections in the human brain. The predecessor to GPT-4, GPT-3, had about 175 billion of them. OpenAI has never actually revealed how large GPT-4s parameter count is, but its said to be about 1 trillion, putting it in the same ballpark as Googles 1.2-trillion-parameter GLaM LLM.)

I think were at the end of the era where its going be these giant, giant models, he said.

Testifying under oath before Congress, Altman said OpenAI wasnt even training a successor to GPT-4, and had no immediate plans to do so.

Elsewhere in his testimony, Altman also complained that people were using ChatGPT too much, which may be related to the scaling issue.

Actually, wed love it if theyd use it less because we dont have enough GPUs, he told Congress, referring to the graphics processing units that were once mainly used by computer gamers, but then found a use mining bitcoins and other cryptocurrency, and now are used by the AI industry on a vast scale to train AI models.

Two things are worth noting here: the latest GPUs designed specifically to run in data centres like the ones Microsoft uses for Azure cost about $US40,000 each; and OpenAI is believed to have used about 10,000 GPUs to train GPT-4.

Its possible that I am totally wrong about digital intelligence overtaking us. Nobody really knows, which is why we should worry now.

Geoffrey Hinton, AI pioneer

Though Altman never elaborated on his pessimism about the AI industry continuing along the path of giant language models, its likely that at least some of that negativity has to do with the short supply (and concomitant high cost) of raw materials like GPUs, as well as a shortage of novel content to train the LLMs on.

Having already scraped most of the internets written words to feed the insatiable LLMs, the AI industry is now turning its attention to spoken words, scraped from podcasts and videos, in an effort to squeeze more intelligence out of their LLMs.

Regardless, it seems the path from todays LLMs to future artificial general intelligence machines may not be a straightforward one. The AI industry may need new techniques or, indeed, a partial return to old, hand-crafted AI techniques discarded in favour of todays brute-force machine learning systems to further make progress.

Well make them better in other ways, Altman said at that MIT conference.

Nevertheless, the godfather of AI, Hinton himself, recently revised his own estimate of between 30 and 50 years before the world will see the first AGI.

I now predict five to 20 years but without much confidence. We live in very uncertain times. Its possible that I am totally wrong about digital intelligence overtaking us. Nobody really knows which is why we should worry now, he tweeted in May.

And one of Hintons close colleagues and another godfather of AI, Yoshua Bengio, pointed out in a recent news conference that, by one metric, AGI has already been achieved.

We have basically now reached the point where there are AI systems that can fool humans, meaning they can pass the Turing Test, which was considered for many decades a milestone of intelligence.

That is very exciting, because of the benefits we can bring with socially positive applications of AI but also Im concerned that powerful tools can also have negative uses, and that society is not ready to deal with that, he said.

Mythically, of course, society actually has been long ready to deal with the appearance of a superhuman machine intelligence. At the very least, we humans have been prepared for a fight with one for many decades, long before intelligent machines were turning people into fleshy D-cell batteries in the movie The Matrix, forcing the human resistance underground.

Professor Genevieve Bell, a cultural anthropologist and director of the School of Cybernetics at the ANU, says Western culture has a longstanding love-hate relationship with any major technology transformation, going back as far as the railways and the dark Satanic Mills of the Industrial Revolution.

Its a cultural fear that weve had since the beginning of time. Well, certainly since the beginning of machines, she says.

And we have a history of mobilising these kind of anxieties when technologies get to scale and propose to change our ideas of time and place and social relationships.

Dr Genevieve Bell traces our love-hate relationship with new technology back to the dark Satanic Mills of the Industrial Revolution.

In that context, the shopping list of risks now being attached to AI that list beginning with mass loss of livelihoods and ending with mass loss of life is neither new nor surprising, says Bell.

Ever since we have talked about machines that could think or artificial intelligence there has been an accompanying set of anxieties about what would happen if we got it right, whatever right would look like.

Thats not to say the fears are necessarily unwarranted, she emphasises. Its just to say theyre complicated, and we need to figure out what fears have a solid basis in fact, and which fears are more mythic in their quality.

Why has our anxiety reached a fever pitch right now? she asks.

How do we right-size that anxiety? And how do we create a space where we have agency as individuals and citizens to do something about it?

Those are the big questions we need to be asking, she says.

One anxiety we should right-size immediately, says Professor Toby Walsh, chief scientist at the AI Institute at the University of NSW, is the notion that AI will rise up against humanity and deliberately kill us all.

Im not worried that theyre suddenly going to escape the box and take over the planet, he says.

Firstly, theres still a long way to go before theyre as smart as us. They cant reason, they make some incredibly dumb mistakes, and there are huge areas in which they just completely fail.

Secondly, theyre not conscious; they dont have desires of their own like we do. Its not as if, when youre not typing something into ChatGPT, its sitting there thinking, Oh, Im getting a bit bored. How could I take over the place?

Its not doing anything at all when its not being used, he says.

Nevertheless, artificial intelligence has the potential to do a great deal of damage to human society if left unregulated, and if tech companies such as Microsoft and Google continue to be less transparent in their use of AI than they need to be.

Professor Toby Walsh one of Australias leading expert on AI. Louie Douvis

I do think that tech companies are behaving in a not particularly responsible way. In particular, they are backtracking on behaviours that were more responsible, says Walsh, citing the example of Google, which last year had refused to release an LLM-based chatbot because it found the chatbot wasnt reliable enough, but then rushed to release it anyway, under the name Bard, after OpenAI came out with ChatGPT.

Another of the genuine concerns is that powerful AI systems will fall into the hands of bad actors, he says.

In an experiment conducted for an international security conference in 2021, researchers from Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, a drug research company that uses machine learning to help develop new compounds, decided to see what would happen if they told their machine learning systems to seek out toxic compounds, rather than avoid them.

In particular, they chose to drive the generative model towards compounds such as the nerve agent VX, one of the most toxic chemical warfare agents developed during the 20th century, the researchers later reported in Nature magazine.

In less than six hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired (toxicity) threshold. In the process, the AI designed not only VX, but also many other known chemical warfare agents that we identified through visual confirmation with structures in public chemistry databases. Many new molecules were also designed that looked equally plausible, they wrote.

Computer systems only have goals that we give them, but Im very concerned that humans will give them bad goals, says Professor Walsh, who believes there should be a moratorium on the deployment of powerful AI systems until the social impact has been properly thought through.

Professor Nick Davis, co-director of the Human Technology Institute at the University of Technology, Sydney, says were now at a pivotal moment in human history, when society needs to move beyond simply developing principles for the ethical use of AI (a practice that Bell at ANU says has been going on for decades) and actually start regulating the business models and operations of companies that use AI.

But care must be taken not to over-regulate artificial intelligence, too, Davis warns.

We dont want to say none of this stuff is good, because a lot of it is. AI systems prevented millions of deaths around the world because of their ability to sequence the genome of the COVID-19 sequence.

But we really dont want to fall in the trap of letting a whole group of people create failures at scale, or create malicious deployments or overuse AI in ways that just completely goes against what we think of as a thoughtful, inclusive, democratic society, he says.

Bell, who was the lead author on the governments recent Rapid Response Information Report on the risks and opportunities attached to the use of LLMs, also believes AI needs to be regulated, but fears it wont be easy to do.

At a societal and at a planetary scale, we have over the last 200 plus years gone through multiple large-scale transformations driven by the mass adoption of new technical systems. And weve created regulatory frameworks to manage those.

So the optimistic part of my brain says we have managed through multiple technical transformations in the past, and there are things we can learn from that that should help us navigate this one, says Bell.

But the other part of my brain says this feels like it is happening at a speed and a scale that has previously not happened, and there are more pieces of the puzzle we need to manage than weve ever had before.

Go here to read the rest:

Will AI be the death of us? The artificial intelligence pioneers behind ChatGPT and Google's Deep Mind say it could be - The Australian Financial...