From a layman's perspective when it comes to cutting edge AI, I can't help but be a bit turned off by some of the copy. It seems it goes out of its way to use purposefully exhuberant language as a way to make the risks seem even more significant, just so as an offshoot it implies that the technology being worked on is so advanced. I'm trying to understand why it rubs me particularly the wrong way here, when, frankly, it is just about the norm anywhere else? (see tesla with FSD, etc.)

yes I also have that impression. If you consider the concrete objectives, this is a good announcement:

- they want to make benchmarking easier by using AI systems

- they want to automate red-teaming and safety-checking ("problematic behavior" i.e. cursing at customers)

- they want to automate the understanding of model outputs ("interpretability")

Notice how absolutely none of these things require "superintelligence" to exist to be useful? They're all just bog standard Good Things that you'd want for any class of automated system, i.e. a great customer service bot.

The superintelligence meme is tiring but we're getting cool things out of it I guess...

We'll get these cool things either way, no need to bundle them with the supernatural mumbo-jumbo, imo.

My take is that every advancement in these highly complex and expensive fields is dependent on our ability to maintain global social, political, and economic stability.

This insistence on the importance of Super-Intelligence and AGI as the path to Paradise or Hell is one of the many brain-worms going around that have this "Revelation" structure that makes pragmatic discussions very difficult, and in turn actually makes it harder to maintain social, political, and economic stability.

There's nothing "supernatural" about thinking that an AGI could be smarter than humans, and therefore behave in ways that we dumb humans can't predict.

There's more mumbo-jumbo in thinking human intelligence has some secret sauce that can't be replicated by a computer.

Not if the "secret sauce" is actually a natural limit to what levels of intelligence can be reached with the current architectures we're exploring.

It could be theoretically possible to build an AGI smarter than a human, but is it really plausible if it turns out to need a data center the size of the Hadron Collider and the energy of a small country to maintain itself?

It could be that it turns out the only architecture we can find that is equal to the task (and feasibly produced) is the human brain, and instead the hard part of making super-intelligence is bootstrapping that human brain and training it to be more intel?

Maybe the best way to solve the "alignment problem", and other issues of creating super-intelligence, is to solve the problem of how best to raise and educate intelligent and well-adjusted humans?

What if this, what if that? Do you have evidence that any of those things are true?

Where is your evidence that we're approaching human level AGI, let alone SuperIntelligence? Because ChatGPT can (sometimes) approximate sophisticated conversation and deep knowledge?

How about some evidence that ChatGPT isn't even close? Just clone and run OpenAI's own evals repo https://github.com/openai/evals on the GPT-4 API.

It performs terribly on novel logic puzzles and exercises that a clever child could learn to do in an afternoon (there are some good chess evals, and I submitted one asking it to simulate a Forth machine).