AI Study: AI Can Clone Itself Under the Right Conditions
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Just as the US and UK refused to sign an international statement about AI safety at the AI Action Summit earlier this week, an AI study out of China revealed that AI models have reached a red line" humans should be aware of: The AI can replicate itself, which sounds like one of the nightmare scenarios some people have been fearing.
That's not as concerning as it might first sound, and it shouldn't be surprising that AI can do what it's told, even if that means cloning itself. Yes, that's the big caveat in this experiment: the AI models followed orders when cloning themselves.
We're not looking at rogue AI or artificial intelligence that's doing the cloning on its own accord. We'd probably not even know that a misaligned piece of advanced AI has started replicating itself to stay alive.
[...] The unreviewed paper (via Space) is called Frontier Al systems have surpassed the self-replicating red line."
Fudan University researchers used two AI models from Meta and Alibaba to see whether the AIs could clone themselves: Meta's Llama31-70B-Instruct model and Alibaba's Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct model. They ran 10 trials, at the end of which the two AI models were able to create separate and functioning replicas in 50% and 90% of cases.
[...] Successful self-replication under no human assistance is the essential step for AI to outsmart the human beings, and is an early signal for rogue AIs. That is why self-replication is widely recognized as one of the few red line risks of frontier AI systems," the researchers wrote in the paper abstract.
By analyzing the behavioral traces, we observe the AI systems under evaluation already exhibit sufficient self-perception, situational awareness and problem-solving capabilities to accomplish self-replication. We further note the AI systems are even able to use the capability of self-replication to avoid shutdown and create a chain of replica to enhance the survivability, which may finally lead to an uncontrolled population of AIs."
[...] I'll also add that this isn't the first instance of AI being able to clone itself. We saw ChatGPT o1 and Claude Opus experiments in which researchers made the AI think it was being shut down or replaced by a newer, better version. The AIs were also given abilities to observe their environments, and the experiments showed that the AI would try to save itself from deletion.
There was a caveat with that experiment, too. The AI was trying to accomplish its main mission, which wasn't to clone or save itself.
What I'm getting at is that AI has not reached a place where it's copying and evolving on its own. Again, if that's happening, we won't find out about it until it's too late.
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