Yoshua Bengio Launches LawZero: A New Nonprofit Advancing Safe-by-Design AI

[Sytten]

This guys annoys me a an entrepreneur because he gets a sh*t ton of government money and it starves the rest of the ecosystem in Montreal. The previous startup he made with that public money essentially failed. But he is some kind of hero of AI so it's an easy sell for politicians that need to demonstrate they are doing something about AI.

[fidotron]

This is accurate, and what's impressive is how well this is scrubbed from the internet. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_AI

You'd have no idea about the fact most of the money came from the Quebec pension fund (which is then where the ServiceNow money went). For that you have to go to https://betakit.com/element-ai-announces-200-million-cad-ser... or https://www.cdpq.com/en/news/pressreleases/cdpq-expands-its-... Managing to spend $200M on AI in 2019 and having nothing to show for it in 2025. Quite impressive with hindsight.

[appleaday1]

This is misinformation and you are sharing some very dangerous things online.

[nemomarx]

Is there any indication you can actually build hard safety rules into models? It seems like all current guard rails are basically just prompting it extra hard.

[glitchc]

Yes it's unlikely that hard safety rules are possible for general intelligence. After billions of years of trying, the best biology has been able to do is incentivize certain behaviours. The only way to prevent seems to be to kill the organism for trying. I'm not sure if we can do better than evolution.

[Natsu]

> It seems like all current guard rails are basically just prompting it extra hard.

I bet they'll still read me stories like my dear old grandmother would. She always told me cute bedtime stories about how to make napalm and bioweapons. I really miss her.

[Der_Einzige]

Yes: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05907

[arthurcolle]

Some smart people seem to think you can just put it in a big isolated VM with special adversarial learning to keep it in the box

[candiddevmike]

> basically just prompting it extra hard

If prompting got me into this mess, why can't it get me out of it?

[yumraj]

Won’t neutering a model by using only safe data for training create a safe model?

[throwawaymaths]

not 100% hard, but download deepseek and ask it some sensitive questions and see what it says if youre unconvinced that some level of alignment cant be achieved by brute forcing it into the weights

[delichon]

Asimov's Zeroth Law of robotics:

  A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

"Robots and Empire" is a nice discussion of the perils of LawZero. IMHO if successful it necessarily transfers human agency to bots, which we should be strenuously working to avoid, not accelerate.

[Animats]

This seems to be a funding proposal for "Scientist AI."[1] Start reading around page 21. They're arguing for "model-based AI", with a "world model". But they're vague about what form that "world model" takes.

This is a good idea if you can do it. But people have been bashing their head against that problem for decades. That's what Cyc was all about - building a world model of some kind.

Is there any indication there that they actually know how to build this thing?

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15657

[fidotron]

> Is there any indication there that they actually know how to build this thing?

Nope. And it's exactly what they were trying to do at Element AI, where the dream was to build one model that knew everything, could explain everything, be biased in the exact required ways, and be tranferred easily to any application by their team of consultants.

At least these days the pretense of profit has been abandoned, but I hope it's not going to be receiving any government funding.

[moralestapia]

A nonprofit, just like OpenAI ...

I don't get the "safe AI" crowd, it's all ghost and mirrors IMO.

It's been almost a year to the date since Ilya got his first billion. Later, another two billion came in. Nothing to show. I'm honestly curious since I don't think Ilya is a scammer, but I can't imagine what kind of product they pretend to bring to the market.

[jsnider3]

AI safety is a genuinely hard problem.

[didibus]

Interesting thing to keep an eye on.

Though personally, I'm not sure if I'm most scared of issues of safety with the models themselves, or more so in the impact these models will have on people's well being, lifestyles, and so on, which might fall under human law.