UC-Davis Turmoil

Three stabbings have occurred in the area around the UC-Davis campus. These events have led to shelter in place orders, remote rather than in-person classes, and other disruptions. From the Sacramento Bee:

The University of California, Davis, campus is transitioning all classes scheduled to end after 6 p.m. to be taught remotely, one of the measures implemented to ensure the safety of staff and students as police continue to look for the assailant in three stabbings that killed two men and seriously wounded a woman in the college town. UC Davis Chancellor Gary S. May said the change to online classes will be indefinite as the investigation unfolds into the attacks that occurred not far from the university’s footprint. The three stabbings over in less than a week have left a well-known community member promoting kindness and a UC Davis student with a promising future death [sic]. The third, most recent attack occurred at a homeless encampment late Monday, when the assailant plunged a knife into the side wall of a tent and stabbed the woman inside. She remains in critical but stable condition Tuesday at a hospital. UC Davis students and employees have expressed genuine fear as the city is gripped by the unusual spate of violence...

Full story at https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article274994926.html.

Patents, Patents

Patent Office in 1924

We're catching up with some data on patent production at various universities. (No, yours truly doesn't know the story behind the high scores of two Saudi universities.)

From Forbes: The University of California system led the world in 2022 for the number of U.S. utility patents awarded to a university. Across its 10 campuses and six academic health centers, the UC system received 570 patents, outpacing runner up MIT by more than 200 patents. Utility patents are patents granted for inventions. They are issued for the invention of a new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or a new and useful improvement in those inventions. They generally permit their owners to exclude others from making, using, or selling the invention for a period of up to twenty years.

The list for 2022 was compiled by the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) in its report, Top 100 Worldwide Universities Granted Utility Patents. The report relies on data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark office to create its list, which NAI compiles annually.

The top 20 universities worldwide were:

• University of California 570
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology 343
• King Fahd University Of Petroleum and Minerals 233
• The University of Texas 225
• Purdue University 192
• Stanford University 184
• Harvard University 179
• King Abdulaziz University 177
• California Institute of Technology 164
• Arizona State University 160
• Johns Hopkins University 159
• Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology 147
• University of Michigan 145
• Seoul National University 144
• Zhejiang University 142
• University of Florida Research Foundation 139
• Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (University of Wisconsin) 132
• Duke University 126
• University of Colorado 115
• University of Pennsylvania 108

Of the top 20 universities, 15 were located in the United States, and 38 American institutions are included in the top 50 universities.

Commenting on the University of California’s ranking, Theresa Maldonado, UV Vice President for Research and Innovation, said in a news release from the university, “the UC system has a vibrant culture of innovation, entrepreneurship and cross-disciplinary collaboration across our 10 campuses, so it’s gratifying to see that reflected in this ranking from the National Academy of Inventors. As a public institution, our faculty and researchers are working to improve lives every day with their groundbreaking work.”

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2023/04/26/university-of-california-system-leads-all-universities-worldwide-for-most-patents/.

Aftershocks of the Strike

There continue to be aftershocks of the student-worker strike at UC. Things that were not put in precise writing seem to be the issue at UC-San Diego:

The Learning Curve: Disputes About UCSD Student Worker Pay Continue

Graduate student workers and UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography are locked in a messy debate about pay and working hours.

by Tianrui Huang and Jakob McWhinney

April 26, 2023, Voice of San Diego

Last year’s historic University of California strike ushered in a new contract for academic workers with higher wages. But the dispute is not over. Graduate student researchers in San Diego attended a town hall on April 3 at Scripps Institution of Oceanography to argue that their employer was backpedaling on the eve of the new contract going into effect. The workers claim they’re getting less than what was promised. And their claims highlight the messy nature of the UC wage system. The convoluted dispute: Much of the complex debate stems from the UC putting graduate student researchers into different pay categories known as “steps,” depending on how long they’ve been employed there. 

Generally, researchers only get paid for the grant-funded lab work they do and not for thesis work. So if a graduate student researcher divides their full-time schedule evenly between lab work and thesis work, they get paid for half of the total hours they’ve worked. The percentage of paid versus unpaid work is what’s in contention. 

Adu Vengal, the recording secretary of the UAW Union executive board, said UC administrators and the union agreed at the bargaining table to pay all academic workers for 50 percent of their time, but in practice are only paying for 40 percent. That amounts to around $6,000 of lost income per worker per year. The 50 percent pay guarantee was not included in the final contract, but Vengal and others say the verbal agreement should still be legally binding. 

The dispute gets convoluted-er: In an announcement last month, Scripps said incoming graduate students would be paid for 50 percent of work and continuing students would remain at their current arrangement, either 40 or 43 percent pay for work. The academic workers quickly sprang into action, issuing a letter of their own and organizing a town hall to express feelings of betrayal. Scripps responded that the new wage system was designed to create parity between incoming and continuing students. UCSD maintains that the changes are being carried out per the new contract. 

“We want to achieve parity for incoming and continuing [Scripps] students, so that there are no major discrepancies,” said Sarah Gille, the department chair, at the town hall. “So what that means is that for our continuing students, who have been compensated already at a very high step, our plan is to slightly increase their work.” 

The students’ take: They don’t find that explanation reassuring. The problem, in their eyes, is that Scripps is simply tweaking the work hours and appointment times but the pay isn’t changing very much. 

According to the department, researchers who’ve been around longer will only see their earnings increase to around $40,500 by the end of this year, up from $35,000. A Scripps Graduate Student Council survey shows that 39 percent of the department’s workers rely on outside assistance to make ends meet and two-thirds were considered rent burdened, meaning they spend more than a third of their income on rent.

The students also argue that the lines between lab work and thesis work are blurred. For most, it’s hard to draw a clean-cut line. But even if they do take on more lab work than thesis work, they don’t necessarily get paid for it, and students say it eats into the time that’s supposed to be reserved for thesis work. 

Taylor Hernandez, a third-year doctoral student, said she used to cycle through three different labs and ended up spending all her work hours on projects unrelated to her thesis. “My actual thesis work never came up while I was working in that lab,” she said, “and so all of the work that I did in that lab was not for my thesis. It was just arbitrary, random crap thrown at me.”

During the town hall, Scripps responded to the student workers’ frustration by invoking budget constraints. Though the department’s overall revenue in 2021-22 was $307 million, only around 23 percent, or $71 million, falls under operating costs like worker pay.But Jessica Ng, a Ph.D. student at Scripps, doesn’t believe the budget constraint justifies the underpayment of students. “What was clear to me was that they do have some discretion as to how money gets spent, such as for faculty hires, an extravagant prospective student open house, etc., and they have not prioritized graduate pay,” Ng said.

Similar complaints have also been leveled in UCSD’s biology, chemistry, and biomedical science departments. The UAW, which represents the students, recently filed a grievance over the implementation of the contract. It’s expected to go to arbitration. 

Source: https://voiceofsandiego.org/2023/04/26/the-learning-curve-disputes-about-ucsd-student-worker-pay-continue/.

Special Libraries at Berkeley: Going! Going! Gone? - Part 4 (question answered)

In our last post about the protest over the closing of the anthropology library at Berkeley, we wondered whether the occupation of the library was continuing. The NY Times answered our question:

To kick off homecoming weekend last fall, the University of California, Berkeley, held a groundbreaking ceremony for its new data sciences building, known as the Gateway. At a cost of over half a billion dollars, the 367,270-square-foot building, with “extended sightlines and natural light-filled corridors,” is being billed as a hub for research in artificial intelligence, data analytics and machine learning. That may represent the future, but the past is just a short walk across campus in the stacks of the anthropology library. For decades, the repository has served generations of scholars in a space as modest as the Gateway is grand: a 1,500-square-foot corner on the second floor of the anthropology department’s building, with a cozy reading area of armchairs and computer terminals along one wall.

For days now, the library has become a scene of occupation. Students have filled it with tents, sleeping bags and air mattresses in a last-ditch effort to save the 67-year-old institution dedicated to anthropology, which encompasses the study of humanity, societies and cultures. The university is preparing to move the collections of archaeological field notes and books — about 80,000 volumes in total, on subjects as varied as folk tales, Black culture and Mexican American social movements — to a nearby warehouse and the main library, saving $400,000 annually. For the student occupiers, the fight is as much a battle over a library as it is over humanities and social sciences in an age when the world is obsessed with technology and seems eager to replace the physical world with virtual experiences driven by A.I.

“It’s about fundamentally writing a different story about what education is, what the university is for,” said Jesús Gutiérrez, a graduate student who works at the library and is writing a dissertation about folk art forms of the African diaspora.

In the past five years alone, the number of Berkeley undergraduate students choosing to major in anthropology has dropped by about a quarter, part of a generation that has struggled to pay student loans and flocked toward science and engineering in the lucrative shadow of Silicon Valley. Faculty members say they’re impressed by the intensity of the young students protesting to save the anthropology library, a cause that otherwise has relied on support from Ralph Nader, the liberal activist and onetime third-party presidential candidate, and Jerry Brown, the former governor of California who majored in classics when he was an undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley more than a half century ago.

As a third-year anthropology student, Ian Molloy, one of the protest organizers, has heard the snickers from classmates pursuing science and engineering majors, framing his subject choice as “Oh, you don’t want to make money.” He called the library, where he has found titles on the domestication of animals vital to his research, the “backbone” of the department, and central to rebuilding community after the isolation of the pandemic.

Despite the outcry, the administration says it is not budging, explaining that the cuts are necessary as it faces an $82 million budget deficit. In March, Carol Christ, the Berkeley chancellor, pointed to raises that the U.C. system had agreed to pay graduate student instructors and support staff as one driver of new costs. The university has said it will save about $1.5 million by closing not just the anthropology library but the mathematics and physics libraries as well, and cutting hours and services at others...

Charles Hirschkind, the chair of the anthropology department, said that the university had reduced the number of graduate students it accepts into the anthropology since 2004 by a little more than half, reflecting, he said, the department’s “weaker financial situation” and the rise in costs to support graduate students. “When we’re talking about budgetary restraints, we are also talking about priorities and where one decides to invest,” he said. “And I think the university feels little incentive to invest in the social sciences and humanities.” ...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/02/us/anthropology-library-berkeley.html.

Blackstone-REIT Still Draining - Part 2

We continue our tale of the Blackstone Real Estate Investment Trust (BREIT) which experienced a run on the bank and which UC bailed out to the tune of $4.5 billion using pension and endowment funds. (And which the Regents simply accepted as a good deal with little critical questioning of the chief investment officer.) The run on BREIT, in slow motion, continued in April. See below.

Just a reminder that yours truly is not saying that UC's investment will necessarily turn out to be a bad deal. He is saying that the investment appears to pose significant financial and legal risk and that the Regents had a fiduciary duty to question both the investment and the process by which the investment decision was made which they have not fulfilled. Again, if you have followed this matter, you know that the investment has been questioned at Regents meetings by outsiders, mainly in public comments, concerning BREIT's landlord-tenant relations but with little said about the financial/legal risk. To the extent that the Regents have paid attention, the focus also has been largely on landlord-tenant relations.

If you have not kept up with the BREIT affair, use the search engine for this blog to find our prior postings on it. From Barrons:

Blackstone Limits Breit Withdrawals Yet Again

Andrew Bary, 5-1-2023

Blackstone’s $70 billion retail real estate fund limited withdrawals for the sixth straight month in April after seeing no letup in outsize redemption requests. The Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, known as Breit, said it received $4.5 billion of withdrawal requests in April and paid out 29% of those requests to investors, or $1.3 billion, according to the Breit website on Monday. The fund limits monthly withdrawals to 2% of its net asset value and 5% a quarter. Blackstone ’s $70 billion retail real estate fund limited withdrawals for the sixth straight month in April after seeing no letup in outsize redemption requests.

The Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, known as Breit, said it received $4.5 billion of withdrawal requests in April and paid out 29% of those requests to investors, or $1.3 billion, according to the Breit website on Monday. The fund limits monthly withdrawals to 2% of its net asset value and 5% a quarter. The April withdrawal requests were flat relative to March and were up from the $3.9 billion in February. Peak requests were $5.3 billion in January. Blackstone (ticker: BX) initially limited withdrawals in November.

Breit has paid out $6.2 billion to investors since November. The continuing gating of the fund may be frustrating investors who want immediate liquidity. But Breit said Monday its structure, which is “designed to both prevent a liquidity mismatch and maximize long-term shareholder value” is “working as intended.” Breit said an investor who began submitting withdrawal requests in November has received 84% of their money back.

Breit is a nontraded real estate investment sold through major brokerage firms and financial advisors. Its shares don’t trade publicly and investors rely on the fund to provide liquidity. The 6-year-old fund is focused on apartments and warehouses, two of the strongest sectors on the commercial real estate market. The persistently large redemption requests have been a concern for investors since late 2022 given the importance of Blackstone’s industry-leading retail business among alternative managers. But shares of Blackstone have rallied this year, gaining 20% to $89, and topping those of most of its major rivals.

Breit has vastly outperformed comparable public REITs since the start of 2022, which may be creating incentive for Breit investors to redeem their shares. So far this year, Breit has had a negative total return of 0.5% based on its largest share class. On Monday, Breit said: “We are seeing significant dispersion across real estate sectors and believe BREIT is very well positioned with +9% estimated cash flow growth in the first quarter.” It added: “We have virtually no exposure to certain challenged sectors such as commodity office, for-sale housing and regional malls.”

Breit has returned about 12% annualized since its inception, compared with the 4% yearly total return for a key REIT index.

Source: https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/blackstone-breit-withdrawals-retail-real-estate-f118d087.

Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!

From the Wall St. Journal and UCOP Daily News Clips:

In California, Desperate College Students Compete for Spots in Trailer Park

At UC Santa Cruz, 44% of undergraduates are considered ‘obscenely rent burdened’

By Christine Mai-Duc, 5-1-23

Laura Chappell lives with six other roommates in a house near the University of California, Santa Cruz that has termite damage, annual rat infestations, and gopher holes throughout the backyard. Two of the seven spaces they use as bedrooms are unheated and unpermitted. She pays $963 a month, nearly half of her take-home pay, for the smallest of them. “This is a steal,” said the 31-year-old, who is in her sixth year of a Ph.D. program in biology.

California has long prided itself for having some of the most highly regarded public universities in the nation—some of which are in wealthy, scenic coastal communities like Berkeley, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz. But housing costs have soared in the state over the past decade due to a lack of new construction, making it difficult for some students to live close enough to those universities to attend them. “That promise of an accessible public education is threatened because the housing costs are so enormous,” said Steven McKay, a sociology professor at UCSC. “It’s just making it really, really difficult for our working class students.”

Between July 2021 and April 2022, the University of California assisted an estimated 3,165 students struggling with food and housing, a 15% increase from the year before, according to a report by university officials to state legislators. The system’s 10 campuses enroll nearly 300,000 students. In Santa Cruz, the problem has been exacerbated by a flood of remote workers who arrived from the Bay Area during the pandemic and a 2020 wildfire that destroyed 900 housing units countywide.

About 9% of UCSC undergraduates reported experiencing homelessness according to a 2020 study by University of California, Los Angeles researchers, the highest at any UC campus. Santa Cruz is the second most expensive market for renters in the nation behind San Francisco, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an advocacy group. Data compiled by UCSC shows single rooms in homes off campus cost an average of $1,300 to $1,500 monthly. 

Mr. McKay led a 2021 study that found many UCSC students were forced to take out loans to pay rent and lived in makeshift illegal units in garages, living rooms and pool sheds. Nearly four in five undergraduates surveyed were rent-burdened, spending at least 30% of their income on rent. Mr. McKay and researchers created a new category, “obscene rent burden,” for those spending 70% or more of their monthly wages on rent. Some 44% of undergraduate students surveyed fell in that category. The university currently has enough beds in on-campus housing for about half of its nearly 20,000 students, the highest share of any UC campus.

One of the most sought-after housing options at UCSC is Camper Park, a 42-space trailer park owned and operated by the university. For less than the cost of a room in a shared apartment on the private market, students get their own camper trailer, equipped with a mini-fridge, gas stove and—if they are lucky—an oven. “It’s like 800 bucks a month, and you get your whole own space,” said Damien Stoffel, a senior majoring in literature who has lived there two years. 

Emptying his gray water tank weekly can be annoying, and he doesn’t enjoy the occasional earthworm that crawls into the communal camp-style showers, but living in a trailer keeps Mr. Stoffel’s monthly housing cost below the maximum his parents, both elementary school teachers, agreed to pay. 

The camper park is Leobardo Hernandez’s first-choice housing for next year. A 33-year-old undergraduate who picked fruit and worked in construction before returning to school to study psychology, he currently shares a one-bedroom mobile home with three relatives in Watsonville, some 20 miles from Santa Cruz. Mr. Hernandez, who pays roughly $600 a month including utilities, said he would never be able to afford a room off-campus. “I really just need a place to shower and sleep,” said Mr. Hernandez. “I’m trying to find the cheapest place I can, just so I can pursue my dreams.” Mr. Hernandez said most days he gets by on two granola bars and a concoction of green tea, espresso, lemon slices and caffeinated drink powder through lunch. Sometimes he eats dinner at the dining hall when a friend swipes him in...

University officials say they anticipate having housing for an additional 3,700 students by the fall of 2028...

Full story at https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-housing-crisis-leaves-college-students-eager-to-live-in-trailers-75177971.

A little departure on AI

We have been posting items on artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential (and maybe current) influence on higher ed. Yours truly gets emails and sees material from hither and yon. Bari Weiss, who can be controversial, conducted an interview with Sam Altman who heads Open-AI (which releases chatGPT) concerning Big Picture issues related to AI.

Below is an excerpt which came originally from an email today which in turn came from an audio interview: [links to both at end]

BW: In just a few years, your company, OpenAI, has gone from being a small nonprofit that few outside of Silicon Valley paid much attention to, to having a multibillion-dollar arm of the company with a product so powerful that some people spend more time on it than they do on Google. Other people are writing op-eds warning that the company and technology that you’re overseeing has the potential to destroy humanity as we know it. For those who are new to this conversation, what happened at OpenAI that led to this massive explosion in only just a few short months? 

SA: First of all, we are still a nonprofit; we have a subsidiary capped-profit. We realized that we just needed way more capital than we could have raised as a nonprofit, given the compute power that these models needed to be trained. But the reason that we have that unique structure around safety and sharing of benefits—it’s only more important now than it used to be. The last seven years of research has really paid off. It took a long time and a lot of work to figure out how we were going to develop artificial intelligence, AI, and we tried a lot of things. Many of them came together, some of them turned out to be dead ends, and finally we got to a system that was over a bar of utility. Some may argue whether the product is or isn’t intelligent, but most people would agree that it has utility. After we developed that technology, we still had to develop a new user interface. Another thing that I have learned is that making a simple user interface that fits the shape of the new technology is important, and usually neglected. We had the technology for some time, but it took us a little while to find out how to make it really easy to chat with. We were very focused on this idea of a language interface, so we wanted to get there. We then released that to the public, and it’s been very gratifying to see that people have found a great deal of value in using it to learn things, to do their jobs better, and to be more creative.

BW: ChatGPT is the fastest-growing app in the history of the internet. In the first five days, it got a million users. Then over the course of two months, after it launched in January, it amassed a hundred million users. Right from the beginning, it was doing amazing things. It was all anyone could talk about. It could take an AP test, it could draft emails, it could write essays. . . .  Most recently, before I went on Bill Maher, I knew we were going to talk about this subject, so I asked ChatGPT for a Bill Maher monologue, and it churned it out in seconds. And it sounded a whole lot like Bill Maher! He was not thrilled to hear that. Yet, you have said that you were embarrassed when ChatGPT-3 and 3.5, the first iterations of the product, were released. Why is that?

SA: Well, Paul Graham, who ran Y Combinator before me and is a legend among Silicon Valley, once said to me, “If you don’t launch a Version One that you’re a little embarrassed about, then you waited too long to launch.” There are all of these things in ChatGPT that still don’t work that well, and we make it better and better every week. 

BW: What are you using ChatGPT for right now? 

SA: Well, this is the busiest I’ve ever been in my life, so at the moment, I am mostly using it to help process inbound information. Summarizing emails, summarizing Slack threads. I take a very long email that someone writes and it gives me a three-bullet-point summary. That may not be its coolest use case, but that’s how I’m personally using it right now to help my day-to-day.

BW: What is its coolest use case? 

SA: Well, I get these heartwarming emails from people every day telling me about how they use it to learn new things and how much it has changed their lives. I hear from people in all different areas of the world. It takes very little effort to learn how to use it and it can become someone’s personal tutor for any topic they wish. A lot of programmers rely on it for different parts of their workflow. That’s kind of my world, so we hear about that a lot. There was a Twitter thread recently about someone who says they saved their dog’s life because they input a blood test and symptoms into GPT-4. 

BW: I’m curious where you see ChatGPT going. You use the example of summarizing long-winded emails or summarizing Slack. These are menial tasks, like ordering your groceries, sending emails, making payments. But then there are different tasks—tasks that are more foundational to what it is to be a human being. For example, things that emulate human thinking. Someone recently released an hour-long episode of The Joe Rogan Experience with you as the guest. Yet it wasn’t actually Joe Rogan. And it wasn’t actually you. It was entirely generated using AI language models. So, is the purpose of AI to do chores and mindless emails, or is it for the creation of new conversations, new art, new information? Because those seem like very different goals with very different human and moral repercussions.

SA: I think it’ll be up to individuals and society as a whole to see how they want to use this technology. The technology is clearly capable of all of those things, and it’s clearly providing value to people in very different ways. We also don’t know perfectly yet how it’s going to evolve, where we’ll hit roadblocks, what things will be easier than we think, what things will be much, much harder. What I hope is that this becomes an integral part of our workflow in many different tasks. It will help us create. It will help us do science. It will help us run companies. It will help us learn more in school and later on in life. I think if we change out the word AI for software, which I always like doing, so instead say, “Is software going to help us create better,” or “Is software going to help us do menial tasks better, or is it going to help us do science better?” And the answer, of course, is all of those things. If we understand AI as just really advanced software, which I think is the right way to do it, then the answers may be a little less mysterious. 

BW: Sam, in a recent interview, when you were asked about the best- and worst-case scenarios for AI, you said this of the best-case: “I think the best is so unbelievably good that it’s hard for me to imagine.” I’d love for you to imagine, what is the unbelievable good that you believe this technology has the potential to do?

SA: I mean, we can take any sort of trope that we want here. What if we’re able to cure every disease? That would be a huge victory on its own. What if every person on Earth can have a better education than any person on Earth gets today? That would be pretty good. What if every person a hundred years from now is a hundred times richer in the subjective sense? Maybe they’re happier, healthier, have more material possessions, more ability to live the good life in the way it’s assigned to them than people are today. I think all of these things are realistically possible. 

BW: So, what’s the other side of it? You said the worst-case scenario is “lights out for all of us.” I’m sure a lot of people have quoted that line back to you. What did you mean by it? 

SA: I understand why people would be more comfortable if I would only talk about the great future here, and I do think that’s what we're going to get. I think this can be managed. I also think the more that we talk about the potential downsides, the more that we as a society work together on how we want this to go, it’s much more likely that we’re going to be in the upside case. But if we pretend like there is not a pretty serious misuse case here and just say, “Full steam ahead! It’s all great! Don’t worry about anything!”—I just don’t think that’s the right way to get to the good outcome. When we were developing nuclear technology, we didn’t just say, “Hey, this is so great, we can power the world! Oh yeah, don’t worry about that bomb thing. It’s never going to happen.” Instead, the world really grappled with that, and I think we’ve gotten to a surprisingly good place. 

BW: There’s a lot of people who are sounding the alarm bells on what’s happening in the world of AI. Recently, several thousand leading tech figures and AI experts, including Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI but left in 2018; Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak; and Andrew Yang, who you backed in the last election, signed this open letter that called for a minimum six-month pause on the training of AI systems more powerful than ChatGPT-4. They wrote, “Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves, should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?”

SA: We already have Twitter for that. 

BW: [laughs] “Should we develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us? Should we risk the loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.” 

That’s what they wrote. And I think there are several ways to interpret this letter. One is that this is a cynical move by people who want to get in on the competition, and so the smart thing to do is to tell the guy at the head of the pack to pause. The other cynical way to read it is that by creating fear around this technology, it only makes investments further flood the market. I also see a pure version, which is they really think this technology is dangerous and that it needs to be slowed down. How did you understand the motivations behind that letter? Cynical or pure of heart? 

SA: You know, I’m not in those people’s heads, but I always give the benefit of the doubt. Particularly in this case, I think it is easy to understand where the anxiety is coming from. I disagree with almost all of the mechanics of the letter, including the whole idea of trying to govern by open letter, but I agree with the spirit. Some of the stories I hear about new companies trying to catch up with OpenAI and their discussions around cutting corners on safety I find quite concerning. I think we need an evolving set of safety standards for these models where, before a company starts a training run, before a company releases a new model, there are evaluations for the safety issues we’re concerned about. There should be an external auditing process that happens. Whatever we agree on, as a society, as a set of rules to ensure safe development of this new technology, let’s get those in place. For example, airplanes have a robust system for this. But what’s important is that airplanes are safe, not that Boeing doesn’t develop their next airplane for six months or six years or whatever. 

BW: There were some people who felt the letter didn’t go far enough. Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the founders of the field, or at least he identifies himself that way, refused to sign the letter because he said that it actually understated the case. Here are a few words from an essay he wrote in the wake of the letter: “Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in ‘maybe possibly some remote chance,’ but as in ‘that is the obvious thing that would happen.’ . . . If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter. There’s no proposed plan for how we could do any such thing and survive. OpenAI’s openly declared intention is to make some future AI do our AI alignment homework. Just hearing that this is the plan ought to be enough to get any sensible person to panic. The other leading AI lab, DeepMind, has no plan at all.” How do you understand that letter? Why are some of the smartest minds in tech this hyperbolic about this technology? 

SA: Look, I like Eliezer. I’m grateful he exists. He’s like a little bit of a prophet of doom. Before this, it was that the nanobots were going to kill us all and the only way to stop it was to invent AI. And that’s fine. People are allowed to update their thinking, and I think that actually should be rewarded. But if you’re convinced that the world is always about to end and, in my opinion, you’re not close enough to the details of what’s happening with the technology, I think it’s hard to know what to do. So, I think Eliezer is super smart. But the field of AI in general has been one with a lot of surprises. I think this is the case for almost any major scientific or technological program in history. Things don’t work out as cleanly and obviously as the theory would suggest. You have to confront reality, you have to work with the systems, you have to work with the shape of the technology or the science, which may not be what you think it should be theoretically. You deal with reality as it comes, and then you figure out what to do about that. Many people never thought we would be able to coexist with a system as intelligent as GPT-4, and yet here we are. So I think the answer is we do need to move with great caution and continue to emphasize figuring out how to build safer and safer systems and have an increasing threshold for safety guarantees as these systems become more powerful. But sitting in a vacuum and talking about the problem in theory has not worked. 

BW: You’ve compared the ambitions of OpenAI to the ambitions of the Manhattan Project. And I wonder how you grapple with the kind of ethical dilemmas that the people that invented the bomb grappled with. One of the things that comes to mind is the pause letter. Many people are asking you to pause research. Meanwhile China, which is already using AI to surveil its citizens, has said that they want to become the world leader in AI by 2030. They’re not pausing. So, let’s discuss your comparison to the Manhattan Project. What were the ethical guardrails and dilemmas that they grappled with that you feel are relevant to the advent of AI? 

SA: I think the development of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, should be a government project, not a private company project, in the spirit of something like the Manhattan Project. I really do believe that. But given that I don’t think our government is going to do a competent job of that anytime soon, it is far better for us to go do that than just wait for the Chinese government to go do it. So, I think that’s what I mean by the comparison. I also agree with the point you were making, which is that we face a lot of very complex issues at the intersection of discovery of new science and geopolitical, or deep societal implications, that I imagine the team working on the Manhattan Project felt as well. Sometimes it feels like we spend as much time debating the issues as we do actually working on the technology, and that’s a good thing. It’s a great thing. And I bet it was similar with people working on the Manhattan Project... 

Full interview text at https://www.thefp.com/p/is-ai-the-end-of-the-world-or-the.

Audio inteview at https://open.spotify.com/episode/4dyaQmPIMq5Bas54kgZJTf.

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All these comparisons with the Manhattan Project make yours truly a bit nervous. It didn't work out exactly as foreseen by its UC-Berkeley professor research director J. Robert Oppenheimer (or by anyone else). So, regard the predictions of the current developers of AI with that lesson in mind:

Oppenheimer: Part 1

https://ia601509.us.archive.org/28/items/sacramento-city-at-risk/Oppenheimer_1980_Episode_1.mp4

Oppenheimer: Part 2

https://ia801509.us.archive.org/28/items/sacramento-city-at-risk/Oppenheimer_1980_Episode_2.mp4

Oppenheimer: Part 3

https://ia801509.us.archive.org/28/items/sacramento-city-at-risk/Oppenheimer_1980_Episode_3.mp4

Oppenheimer: Part 4

https://ia601509.us.archive.org/28/items/sacramento-city-at-risk/Oppenheimer_1980_Episode_4.mp4

Oppenheimer: Part 5

https://ia801509.us.archive.org/28/items/sacramento-city-at-risk/Oppenheimer_1980_Episode_5.mp4

Oppenheimer: Part 6

https://ia601509.us.archive.org/28/items/sacramento-city-at-risk/Oppenheimer_1980_Episode_6.mp4

Oppenheimer: Part 7

https://ia801509.us.archive.org/28/items/sacramento-city-at-risk/Oppenheimer_1980_Episode_7.mp4