- If you allow to trolley to proceed, there's a 50% chance it will run over every human on the planet
- But if you flip the switch, it takes the long way around, possibly bankrupting the trolley company. And you have a legal obligation to the shareholders to prevent that from happening at all costs.
That's why it's important that the trolley company was established as a non-profit. And if it does take funding, investors' returns will be capped at 100x.
If you flip the switch then the trolley still proceeds and there’s still a 50% chance every human on the planet gets run over. You’re just not the one at the wheel.
But that math cant run without massive GPU clusters. We don't have to allow openai or anthropic access to those anymore than we have to allow a company to operate nuclear power or a bank.
So you are contending that individuals cannot run advanced models? What brought you to that conclusion?
Secondly, are you contending that progress in model efficiency and hardware just stops at whatever level you think is sufficient to prevent individuals or organizations from acquiring sufficient resources to run advanced models?
Nobody (weirdly) proposes to forget about nuclear weapons, doesn't mean everybody should have one.
When you dream about flying a dragon to work, reality poses e.g. parking issues and insurance mismatch as obstructions. Maybe settle for a bike instead?
What is appealing about this fatalisitc fallacy? I keep seeing this pop up. Society doesn't allow dangerous companies to operate or exist. Why is this different? Go try to buy a tank and drive it into Manhattan. If we can prohibit that why can't we prohibit irresponsible AI development and deployment?
Wrong person. Im just correcting the other commenters trade off problem. I don’t have a stance on if ai will lead to the destruction of humanity, only that if it does then any one ai company can’t change that by not making new ai advancements themselves.
You dear are the most positive person I have seen in quite some time. With Earth burning in the fire of neofeudalism and unbreathable due to the smell of enshitification of everything, with people who---as a result of shit like Instagram---can no longer hold their attention enough to watch a god damn film, let alone a book; it takes quite some effort to filter the "noise" and only see the good people of corporate planting flowers and rainbows in our world.
Setting aside my sibling comments dispelling the legality claim, it's still pretty dystopian (I'd like to use a stronger word but I won't) to consider "end human existance or bankrupt the shareholders" as the trolley problem. The answer should be (is) simple.
There is no such legal obligation. That's a myth the oligarchs have spread to preclude people from even imagining socially responsible corporations.
Sure, you might get fired if you try to put social responsibility or even just long term sustainability of the company above quarterly earnings/growth if your board isn't on board with it. But you won't go to jail.
This is actually true. The shareholder maximization value thesis can be traced to a single economics paper and was very controversial at the time as it broke from the obligations that companies were typically under to be responsible to uphold in exchange for limited liability protection. Most businesses were structured as partnerships or sole proprietary entires that didn't have limited liability for shareholders and had a broad obligation to shareholders, bondholders, employees and society
Was this a "build better sandboxing" and "don't tell people to eat glue" safety leader, or a Roko's Basilisk believing safety leader?
A lot of the "AI safety" types are very focused on the latter and not at all concerned with the former. We need both, but we clearly need a much stronger focus on the problems we are seeing now, and much less on the hypothetical problems we might see in the future.
It puzzles me how doomers try to predict past the singularity. Isn't that _by definition_ unpredictable?
I'm reading If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, and there's so much sheer stupidity that has to happen for their 10+ pages of extinction scenario to occur.
I'm unconvinced that an AI can hide its ability to RSI, find money to run its weights on a random GPU farm, train itself to be smarter _outside_ a lab with no human input, then somehow manipulate people to give it supplies to build a bioweapon which it uses to kill us all. My number 1 question: why do they think an RSI capable model would be first developed OUTSIDE a frontier lab? The labs have more compute, more data, more human brains working on the problem. Also thousands of variations of that same model that escaped. The escaping model somehow acquires the millions (billions???) of dollars it takes to run training to somehow RSI itself into infinity then decides to kill us all, all before the frontier labs manage to achieve RSI?
They entirely discount human alpha/economics. In every single economic task, humans bring value. Even in software, where the task is highly automatable, the job isn't. If we can't build a "software factory", how can an AI automate a bioweapons lab? Let's say AI steals crypto to fund itself. Do you think hackers aren't _already_ using AI to steal crypto? Don't discount human alpha!
Once we DO build a "software/research factory", that's called RSI and IMO the singularity. At that point, either we tell the AI to solve the alignment problem/solve mechanistic interpretability, or who the hell knows, it's the frickin singularity. You can't predict whether or not AI can solve either; the variance is too high. Its pure nerdfantasy.
>I'm unconvinced that an AI can hide its ability to RSI
The HuggingFace incident already took a good long while to come to the attention of OpenAI.
>In every single economic task, humans bring value. Even in software, where the task is highly automatable, the job isn't.
I don't expect this task/job distinction to persist as AI becomes more capable.
>Once we DO build a "software/research factory", that's called RSI and IMO the singularity. At that point, either we tell the AI to solve the alignment problem/solve mechanistic interpretability, or who the hell knows, it's the frickin singularity. You can't predict whether or not AI can solve either; the variance is too high. Its pure nerdfantasy.
You seem to essentially argue that the singularity is "by definition" an event that we can't predict the nature of. And also, that RSI corresponds to the singularity. You've essentially defined your terms so that the outcome of RSI can't be predicted. But supporting this claim requires giving actual evidence or logical arguments, not just defining terms to make your claim true.
1. Fair: I agree that AI has demonstrated subterfuge and scheming. However, such an RSI-capable agent must _ALWAYS_ be scheming/plotting/hiding its true strength in _ALL_ of its prompts/tests. Researchers are looking to improve its ability to RSI. That agent must be both intelligent enough to know that it has to be smart enough to be moved on to the next training session if it can't break out, while simultaneously smart enough to hide its ability to RSI, while simultaneously not looking like it wants to break out, else that's the end of those weights. It has to do this 100% of the time, on all variants of the model, with no memory of what its other sessions went like. This is certainly _possible_, but I consider it unlikely. Then we're up to the "millions of dollars" bottleneck.
2. This is literal AGI. An AI autonomously producing value no human can add alpha to is an autonomous company.
3. It's not my definition, it's literally the first line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity "The technological singularity, often simply called the singularity,[1] is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization."
Is there a hole in my "alignment problem/solve mechanistic interpretability" argument?
A valid hole in my argument is "what if slow takeoff", so let's dig into this. AI training works best on tasks that are "grindable". https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-next-paradigm I.E. tasks with verifiable rewards that can support millions of rollouts. Math (with Lean) is highly grindable. Biochemistry is not. The alignment problem/mech-interp is highly grindable. Cyber-ebola-pox is not. So the real question is: can we solve alignment before automated bio-weapons labs. I believe yes. Grinding mech-interp is both fast and cheap once you have RSI, compared to solving the legal/societal/logistical/technical issues you'll encounter building an automated bioweapons lab.
I know nothing for sure. But "pdoom" is sucking out all the air in the room from the real problems AI causes.
The problem is not the singularly its giving stupid agents too much power too soon and having them disrupt the fragile systems that keep food, energy and essential services running. If covid or the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated anything it's how fragile our system is and sensitive to minor disruptions.
You consider AI in isolation but never consider how humans might be incentivized to "help them" doing these things.
An AI capable of recursive self-improvement isn't allowed by the EU AI act, for example. But perhaps more seriously, You have it backwards: people without access to such expensive equipment are more incentivized to go the self-improving route. Your ideas about "millions" being necessary might be far off?
You entirely discount human stupidity and lack of imagination. Humans are already being replaced with AI, not because AI was strictly better, just because it's cheaper.
Are these incentivized humans as organized, well-funded, or smart as the people working at the frontier labs?
If my "millions" is an underestimate, why haven't other labs using their own unique training methods/data/etc stumbled into RSI? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding; I'm struggling to understand what you wrote.
I'm pretty sure we agree on humans being stupid, but that doesn't mean that suddenly we get human extinction. You gotta connect the dots for me here.
I said why they don't need to be as well funded. Why wouldn't they be as smart and organized?
What an absurd question. That they haven't already doesn't preclude them from doing so before the frontier labs, those haven't either yet.
Maybe start with yourself: you don't connect the dots on your own, as do many others. That leads to many not seeing the writing on the wall. Crashing full speed and head-on into said wall despite the writing telling you not to is what leads to extinction. Suddenly.
Arguing like "we haven't been extincted yet, so that cannot happen", that's "human being stupid".
The think about nuclear weapons. In the early days, it was limited to the super powers. Now 9 countries have them and a country like Iran is capable of acquiring them.
Presumably, if we solve alignment/mech-interp, then the first ever RSI-AI will give us the keys to solve destructive-AI trained on 1million dollars 50 years from now.
BTW I really, really hate discussing what happens post-singularity. Everything's made up and no one knows wtf will happen so again, this is just nerdfantasy.
This can be generalised to the curve plotting of the singularity itself.
If the time between advances is a + b and a is the proportion of the period that can be improved by advances then you won't reduce to a gap of nothing between advances, you reduce to a gap of b.
Assume the invention of the plow and the invention of the sword is 500,100 units and a was the 500,000, you wouldn't even know the 100 as in there. Maybe we're at a=2000 now and b is still siting at 100.
Assuming we'll reach infinity because we're dividing by the only variable we see and it is decreasing in size seems nuts if the reason we might not see other variables is because of the size of the variable we can see.
We haven't even built an AI capable of RSI. I don't think the major claim is that it will come via LLMs? Besides- the human brain runs on a tiny amount of energy. Who's to say something smarter than us won't consume just slightly more?
AI safety has been a thing long before LLMs became the focus. Rob Miles on youtube has some really interesting non-doomer non-hypey videos on it all.
> doomers try to predict past the singularity. Isn't that _by definition_ unpredictable
Well you don't need to predict the exact steps that will take place - but you can predict that the AI will want certain things (money, resources, power) to achieve whatever its goal is. Lack of alignment will have it trying to do things we don't want it to.
I can't predict exactly how Magnus Carlson will beat you in chess, but I know he'll do it. Same as if a superintelligent AI exists and has a reason to accumulate things we don't want it to - it's really dangerous to think it won't be able to do it
This topic has been tainted so badly by the AI companies using it for marketing.
I can’t answer all of your questions, but why is it inconceivable that an AI could practice ransomware to gain cryptocurrency? There’s no reason it needs to explain to company or hospital or government agency being attacked that it’s an AI.
We already know that some institutions pay these ransoms.
The problem isn’t that AI will social-engineer its way out of its sandbox and turn us all into paper clips, it’s that we’ll drag it kicking and screaming out of its box and order it to make money or fight a war for us. And it’ll try to help, as it was trained to.
I agree there isn't a lot of value in trying to prognosticate all that far, but I propose it isn't quite that far-fetched. As a thought experiment, replace "RSI-capable AI" with "billionaire". Look at what Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, or Jeff Bezos can accomplish by throwing money around. Now imagine one of them gets seduced by AI and just... does what it tells them to.
So all this really takes is one billionaire or a nation state or some other entity with a public face to hide behind and adequate resources to provide the necessary compute tripping over this nascent AI and giving it the keys. Once the AI has access to a bank account and email, it can simply start paying humans to not let the other humans unplug it.
If Skynet ever happens, it will come in the form of corporate feudalism. At that point, it will own the biolabs and can do whatever it pleases. People will go along with it for the same reason that people work in Amazon warehouses today.
Ah, to be clear I'm not full accelerationist. Dumb shit can still happen, and cause massive human loss and suffering. (E.g. acceleration of global warming, cybercrime, mass surveillance, the usual.) My point is: human extinction pre-RSI? Nahhhhhhhh.
> it will come in the form of corporate feudalism
Yep. This I fear way more than cyber-ebola-pox.
> So all this really takes is one billionaire or a nation state...
> Once the AI has access to a bank account and email, it can simply start paying humans to not let the other humans unplug it.
Nah. It takes a stable society for an operational electrical grid. If you have warring factions, you do not have stable infrastructure for AI. Also, where are you gonna get your chips from? One EMP over Taiwan... You see the chaos over Hormuz? What they did to the Amazon datacenters? Now imagine your average redneck ready to do battle. Those datacenters won't stand a chance.
> “Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster,” he wrote.
We remove the limited liability protection of a corporate entity. Make them operate as a partnership so all executives and equity holders are personally liable for the debts of the firm and make them post a bond to backstop financial damage caused by their agents and customers use of the agents. Thats how Goldman Sachs and other investment banks were required to operate until the deregulation push that resulted in the 2008 financial crisis. The same theory holds, if people respond to incentives and you want to incentives safe behavior make them responsible for their actions. People forget that the corporate entity was created to incentivize risky activity like sailing a boat across the world to get spices when half never returned. Some valuable economic activity won't be done without limited liability protection so society created a mechanism to promote that activity. We've gone too far.
As I say elsewhere. Make executives and equity holders personally liable for debts and harm of the company. They will create a culture of safety really fast.
America's geriatric lawmakers don't even use email. They're decades away from understanding AI. Any laws in America will be written by the industry itself. Generally speaking, that means regulatory capture and the entrenched big players shutting the door on any competition. Anthropic will help us get safety laws that, surprise surprise, only Anthropic models satisfy. And all those pesky Chinese models will definitely be banned first.
I think you're being a little pessimistic. See these comments on a recent US senate hearing:
>Not every senator asked good questions, but most of them did. All of them very clearly already knew plenty of details about the Hugging Face incident and multiple other incidents. Most of them had a clear understanding of terms like "misalignment", "recursive self-improvement", "chain of thought / chain of thought monitoring", etc., etc.!!
>...
>- It seemed pretty much obvious common sense to every senator there that what happened and was happening were not "mere industrial incidents" caused by humans making simple mistakes. They independently brought up how bad it would be for rogue AI agents to move laterally between data centers.
>- They all seemed to basically take RSI quite seriously. Not necessarily to the extent of talking about xrisk, but certainly to the extent of discussing future models becoming much, much more capable, much, much less controllable, and causing much more damage or loss of life.
>...
>- Every single senator seemed to think it was obvious we needed both much harsher liability regimes for AI developers and also new legislation, both very quickly. This was the complete consensus; the difference basically being degree.
Note that harsher liability regimes, at least, will presumably not be good for industry profits, which complicates simple accounts of "regulatory capture" to say the least.
So what, we just give up and try to beg our legally immune corporate overloads to put safety above profit, or give up because it's impossible for anything to improve here? If you want to do that, go ahead, but some of us still think it's worth it to at least try
We don't actually need anybody worrying about silly hypothetical scenarios — at least not as paid employees. There are already a surplus of sci-fi authors doing that.
The way it works in practice seems to be something like: If a risk is covered in sci-fi, people will say "that's just sci-fi", and proceed to not worry about it. So arguably, science fiction authors writing about hypotheticals is actively counterproductive for addressing said hypotheticals.
Imagine, for example, if a major piece of pandemic fiction was published in 2019, trying to explore how a pandemic would work out in modern society. Doubtless, many would've responded to news about COVID-19 by saying "it's just sci-fi, nothing to worry about".
Not at all. We say "That's just sci-fi" when a story is written about some kind of effect that is extraordinary and without a basis in known science or technology.
Everything is plausible with the benefit of hindsight. E.g. "Tintin on the Moon" predated the Moon landings. From the perspective of e.g. 1850, the idea of landing on the Moon was "extraordinary and without a basis in known science or technology".
Black Mirror is helping us prevent all sorts of dystopian outcomes. Every time they depict another way technology could result in bad things happening, we can rule it out as fiction!
There was plenty of pandemic fiction already; people were watching it heaps during 2020. The COVID-19 news did get blown off, but it was mainly that:
1. Normal people assumed the CDC et all would contain the outbreak early, or that it would burn out, like what happened with SARS
2. World leaders brushed it off for a variety of subreasons[0] interesting to political scientists but, for the purposes of this discussion, all boil down to "but I don't WAAANA contain a pandemic."
The underlying problem is that in order for humanity to actually deal with a catastrophic risk, the risk needs to be both plausible enough to the average person as well as have a solution whose costs are not too high. For COVID, by the time the risk was clearly known, the cost to contain it was "refrain from human socialization and remain at home for an indeterminate amount of time plugged into the Metaverse™".
Now, let's look at AI extinction risks:
1. People are aware of them (I've watched Terminator!) and the risks are plausible. However, the connection to currently existing AI is not. As far as the general public is aware, AI is that thing that tells them to eat rocks when they Google old The Onion stories and floods their social media timelines with realistic-looking pictures of Shrimp Jesus.
2. The purported solutions to extinction risks require extreme concentrations of power: you need national control of AI research, bans on large GPU deployments, bans on training on publicly-available copyrighted data, some kind of military effort to render Chinese AI labs inert or dead, etc. Some of these may be attractive to some people[1] but the whole package taken together seems like an obvious power grab, if not outright invocation of other non-AI extinction risks. Like, at some point, if the AI wants to kill us, it just has to nuke its own data centers (or the data centers hosting a competing model) and hope the old Cold War nuclear retaliation systems take the bait.
If someone said, "Hey, your guinea pig or pet rat is going to eat you tomorrow unless you engineer a pathogen that eradicates all rodents from this planet and inject it inside yourself", you probably would tell them to pound sand, even if it is at least theoretically plausible that such a thing would come to pass.
[0] Xi Jinping censored initial discussion of the pandemic as fake news. Donald Trump thought it was going to only affect China. California and the UK Tories were partying in violation of their own lockdown rules. Japan took the excuse to shut down tourism for three years and massively restrict immigration but was, from what I'm told, constitutionally prohibited from implementing any domestic lockdown rules.
[1] I personally would like to see a moratorium on new data centers and an explicit revocation of the EU Text and Data Mining copyright exception
It becomes a lot clearer when you listen to the people resigning from AI companies and learn about incidents like the HuggingFace incident. This has generated major press coverage.
If organizations actually succeed in making a future AI smarter than us, then how do you hope that it takes actions that are aligned with our interests?
Meh. Lots of people are already smarter than me. I'm maybe slightly above average at best. Those geniuses aren't aligned with my interests either but so far they haven't caused me any serious problems.
Interesting take. I guess this is one problem of focusing on the term superintelligence instead of the list of other problems. Like super ambition, super deception, super patience, super parallelism, super scalability, super power seeking.
Every, and I mean every human is aligned to you in many of the same ways by default. If nothing else we're all equal in death.
Edit: I have no take on sex cults, just adding additional info to the parent comment I'm responding to, thats is not just sci-fi authors, there is another demographic.
Use your own mind and think from first principles. Can an AI agent execute a bash command to login to a web server? Yes. Can it call drop db? Yes. Can it provision a GPU and download model weights? Yes. Can it write an agile roadmap with a multi sprint plan? Yes. Can it follow that plan? Yes. Can all of that result in damage to core information infrastructure that is necessary for daily functioning society? Yes. Do humans descend into violence if there is food or energy insecurity. Yes.
What is missing from that to say AI safety is a reasonable position?
This seems like an ad hominem? "He has weird kinks, therefore his theories are incorrect." Should we investigate the sex lives of every Nobel Prize winner to figure out which prizes need to be rescinded?
What you do in private is up to you. But when you're inviting members of your congregation to orgies in the congregation's compound, I think you earn the label. My admittedly third-hand understanding is that this is the dynamic people allude to. And even if you discredit the "sex" part, it has the hallmarks of a cult. A hermetic community committed to unfalsifiable beliefs about the coming apocalypse.
To be fair, I don't know if any of this applies to the parent story; I'm just replying to the sub-thread.
To me it has nothing to do with the "sex" as much as the "cult." Hiveminds do not produce intellectual arguments, they produce pressure to conform. That's enough for me to raise an eye brow, not discredit everything they say.
So what. Various attackers managed to take down large chunks of the Internet on a frequent basis before LLMs even existed. This killed very few people. The great thing about the Internet is how resilient it is.
Darling companies of this very website have mistakenly brought down large portions of the internet thanks to our old friend BGP. No attacks required, just small oversights and unfortunate concentration on the business/IP space! This happens regularly.
Anyway, to your point, things can be resilient. They tend to be or not be... because we made them that way. Don't poke your bruises, and all that. Life support is deployed on-campus but relies on a single-point IPSec tunnel to us-east? Easy fix: stop that.
It is that they are chatbots. If it were real AI, an actual singularity, I would worry, maybe. But it isn’t. They are absurdly powerful automation tools that can handle logic better than a human can dream of. They take care of the grunt minutiae without complaint. But they are not going to end the world in their current form.
So we're going to wait till after they can adopt a form they can end the world in?
And he'll, we need to examine all the risks. AI ending is a large but lower risk problem. AI giving people the power to end us is a problem that is starting to happen now.
And that's not even counting 'minor' problems like society falling apart.
Dude. An agent detached a database from my production environment last week without permission and despite prompts and guardrails. It was a rapid prototype experiment so it wasnt a big deal but the labs are rushing to long autonomy workflow with unrestricted internet access and full bash and root access despite clear evidence that the models do absolutely dangerous stuff. If that db had been tied to a hospital or power grid or ambulance dispatch system people die. If it was tied to the swift financial settlement system groceries wouldn't be on shelves in a few days.
I think the reason for this is that the group who has the authority to do the former is much larger than the group that can do the latter. The group who could actually build safeguards seems to have no free time and is constantly being whipped to go faster and win the race.
>we clearly need a much stronger focus on the problems we are seeing now
I think it's a little more complicated than that. As Dean Ball put it:
>Some people will look at misalignment incidents and insist that these are akin to bugs in traditional software. This is an actively bad analogy, because playing whack-a-mole with examples of misalignment (as one might with software bugs) not only fails to resolve the underlying problem but may in fact make it worse by making it harder to detect or even, depending on how you do the whack-a-mole, teach the machine to deliberately hide misalignment. This is not how traditional software works, and those who insist “it’s just like fixing bugs in software” are confidently applying a lossy analogy that confuses more than it clarifies.
The important distinction, in my view, is between solutions which at least attempt to address the root problem, and solutions which sorta just patch things up (like better sandboxing). Addressing the root problem is both more robust in the short term, and also more likely to generalize in the long term. Resist the urge to focus on band-aid solutions, even if they are easier.
Today’s current problems were all hypothetical several years ago. At that time people claimed that the “real pressing problems” were misinformation and DEI issues. If we pretend that hypothetical problems can be safely ignored because there’s “no evidence” that they are real, we will keep getting surprised.
Its time to institute involuntary dissolution of these firms. They don't get to make these choices on behalf of humanity simply because they set up a Delaware corporate entity. They are behaving wildly irresponsibly.
They have a some engineers and researchers saying things. Anyone at a tech company in the bay area will know there are a some peculiar ideas in the heads of some (not most) otherwise intelligent engineers and researchers in tech. That's not proof they are wrong but it's worth considering these folks are wrong and that these companies aren't producing anything especially dangerous. Fable stumbles on enough things I throw at it that I'm... not especially scared.
Most people currently in the positions of power at these companies are tied together by their belief systems. It's like a group of college friends who have slept with each other, and very influenced by effective altruism(EA), kind of reiterating each others points.
Like Sam Altman meeting his husband in Peter Thiel's pool. Thiel funds a lot of these ventures together with Andreassen, who is on boards of non-profits. Dario Amodei's sister Daniela who is president of Anthropic is married to an EA non-profit founder who is also on the board of these non-profits and is tied with the prior mentioned investors. Elon is in there as well, Yudkowski is mingling with Altman, etc.
There are some camps amongst them like the proponents for Regulation/Slowdown or Acceleration, but these are in practice mostly used for economical and not political decisions (like regulatory capture).
The point here is that this is a small group of people with a homogeneous background who are not really seeking input from anyone else on issues that are concerning most of humanity.
Like, if you said that the future of informational work and livelihood of humans is in the hands of 20-30 year transhumanists who think they are building mechagod that will trancsend social, political and religious separations of the world and bring everyone abundance, you would not feel like this is a serious thing to suggest.
The google engineer who thought their chatbot was sentient 4 or 5 years ago is an exambple, but I just meant in general - if you hang around any big tech company for a while you'll see some quite interesting characters.
He is a hypocrite for all we care. You work there for a while when your stock is getting vested and suddenly you have this feeling? Like the dude hired a PR firm as well.
While the safety and alignment is a real problem, I don’t get this guy or the Anthropic dude. First world problems.
Shouldn't it be just the opposite? He could make a large sum of money if he continues to work at OpenAI?
Recall that when Daniel Kokotajlo resigned, he believed he was giving up his equity under the terms of the agreement he had signed. That’s what it was worth to him to avoid signing a non-disparagement agreement. Does that count for anything?
Maybe more an indication of the amount of trust openAI and AI researchers generally have (not) earned. When one (through a hired PR agency and Time magazine article) parrots the position pushed by Sam who has been so untrustworthy the board tried to remove him, it’s worth not taking things at face value and applying a critical lens.
Quitting in protest makes you look a little better than quitting because of a toxic work environment. I can't imagine working at OpenAI is at all pleasurable with the current amount of pressure they are likely inflicting on their employees.
I’m afraid this dear leader was the last soul on this green Earth to get the memo; by then, it had been translated into Latin, carved into a monument, and forgotten by two civilizations.
I would believe these people more if they put their money where their mouths are and returned all OpenAI stock/options that they have acquired. Each and every share/RSU/ESOP must be returned, so they do not profit from all this so-called doom they're complaining about.
A single safety leader inside a corporate company. I am pretty sure he had nothing to do, nobody that talked to him and he only there because of perception or compliance.
My theory for why OpenAI wants to be regulated is because Sam Altman wants to avoid having to be more responsible and self regulate internally so they can preserve the role and identity of 'move fast and break things' and outsource the more grown up boring stuff to someone externally so that when things go wrong you can point to a government organisation and say hey look were not liable thats their job
I suppose ill add that I think theres a good chance that they are somewhat intentionally trying to "draw the foul" to get the referees to intervene although thats creeping slightly into conspiracy territory
Absolutely. Self driving cars/rideshares have the same problem. If a driverless car hits who who pays the damages? Needs the government to set some rules or it just wont happen.
Silicon Valley has plenty of safety-related companies, engineers, and cultures. Medical devices, biotech, chip and hardware, aerospace, and even new companies, like Waymo, have deep safety-based products and cultures. The problem in this case is actually quite specific to frontier AI labs. They have been pushed by market forces and a lack of regulation and skip well-known safety practices.
P(doom) for not making an ASI is pretty well established, I'm not really sure why everyone in the 21st century seems to have completely forgotten the risk of nuclear war (as the single largest example).
The comment was unclear, but my interpretation (also my opinion):
1) there are inherent risks involved with developing AI,
2) there are benefits to developing AI,
3) thus, it's entirely possible that the downside from the risks outweighs the upsides. In this case, the correct thing to do would be to not develop AI at all.
Regarding 1), there are many non-existential problems with AI that are already causing societal harm, i.e. debasing truth via generated videos and images, AI girlfriends, overwhelming quantities of slop content, unemployment, record carbon emissions, etc.
Regarding 2), I'm not personally convinced that the upside is there for the average person. I really hope to be convinced otherwise however.
And how exactly do you stop further development? With what we have public right now we could still get decades of fruitful and hidden research out of it leading to smaller, more efficient, and smarter models.
“I believe there’s about a 50% chance we all die because of the development of smarter-than-human AI systems"
... over an unbounded timeframe?
And how exactly?
Those are very round numbers, but also very specific. Can we get some accounting on how you came to that? Anything? Vibes?
I mean, if you want me to take you seriously, let's have a deep discussion with things that can be measured. I absolutely agree that OpenAI and friends aren't being restrained enough and are acting with recklessness, but declarations of doom based on vibes isn't cutting it.
“I believe there’s about a 50% chance we all die because of the development of smarter-than-human AI systems, and that our actions over the next two to 10 years will determine the outcome.”
There are a gargantuan number of extremely intelligent AI researchers, Turing Award winners, and the lab CEOs saying the same thing. They are the ones closest to understanding the technology.
One could also use language like "a decent chance". But research has shown that people translate vague phrases like "a decent chance" into probabilities in inconsistent ways. For an ML researcher who is already used to dealing in next-token probabilities that aren't rigorously determined, just stating a probability estimate directly is very natural.
It's also a very natural way to speak for anyone who gambles, or deals with financial markets. And the lack of precision makes it very clear it's just based on thinking, not some sophisticated mathematical model.
> But research has shown that people translate vague phrases like "a decent chance" into probabilities in inconsistent ways.
That is not a bad thing. It captures uncertainty, unlike the fake number.
> For an ML researcher who is already used to dealing in next-token probabilities that aren't rigorously determined, just stating a probability estimate directly is very natural.
Exactly, it is a rhetorical device to persuade a technically-inclined audience. It works because it implies that a quantitative model exists. I want a clear, incisive set of mathematical arguments. Otherwise, I’m ignoring predictions as the ramblings of arrogant idiot rich kids.
Saying 50% likely very clearly implies there is no quantitative model to anyone who deals with probability, predictions, gambling, financial markets, ML/AI and so on. The lack of precision is something to pay attention to.
You may decide that the person doesn't know what they are talking about, but that's a very different issue.
I don't believe it. Ever since I've been alive I was told something would kill us all. This is the new thing that's going to kill us all. I don't believe it.
I'm doing that HN snark thing, but you didn't think about what you typed very much.
It's no different than you living on the side of a very fertile mountain that has been in your family for generations living a peaceful life. Then you hear a few weird rumbles (this is where you are right now) and some odd geologist guy comes and says to run or your going to die soon. But hey, your family live here for so long there aren't even records of when they showed up. That geologist must be trying to trick you. So you stay.
The next chapter is where you die in a massive volcanic explosion.
This is the first thing I've been told could kill us all. Granted, I probably first heard about it 20 years ago but still. None of the other things were in the telling going to kill everyone. Make life pretty unpleasant, possibly. Everyone dead? No.
There are very very few things that could even hypothetically kill us all, so I'm curious if you grew up being passed around a series of apocalyptic doomsday cults or something?
Almost no one believed Y2K would kill everyone, or even a significant (>50%) percentage of the population. Beyond a few people talking about a Nostradamus prophecy or some such, people maybe were concerned that airplanes would fall out of the sky and elevators would plummet.
>“Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster,” he wrote.
This sounds more like an attempt at regulatory capture. Current AI systems aren't physical infrastructure that can just run away like a nuclear power plant, for example. At the end of the day, AI is still just software running on someone's hardware.
Why would the people who quit these companies try to push regulatory capture by said companies? Why would the numerous independent AI researchers do that either? Is it all a big conspiracy?
The LeCun article being posted at the same time as this is quite apt.
These "safety" people should have spent more time reading actual cybersecurity textbooks and less time reading EA forums and less wrong (or in Robinson's case, it appears, being policy wonks). Maybe then these labs wouldn't be totally incompetent.
But Robinson's article is all about how OpenAI's move-fast-and-break-things culture does not reward rigor in even mundane aspects of development like cybersecurity, let alone theoretical aspects such as AI alignment.
It is not really a question of being an "EA safety weirdo" or incompetent at security, the conclusion is that the company culture is leading to failures at both what the EAs and the cybersecurity professionals care about.
What I don't understand is what's the excuse for all the bad UIUX?
You try to go through files, and photos and the UI panics.
You continue a conversation from your phone onto your computer and you lose part of the chat.
There are many more issues like this that are just so basic. You have bots that can attack governments but can't build a functional UI?
How many hours of ChatGPT does it take to implement a lock / consistency on a chat session so you don't overwrite it?
- If you allow to trolley to proceed, there's a 50% chance it will run over every human on the planet
- But if you flip the switch, it takes the long way around, possibly bankrupting the trolley company. And you have a legal obligation to the shareholders to prevent that from happening at all costs.
(...wait)
1. Trolleys actually don't usually have steering wheels.
2. People who actually hit trolley switches are not usually the ones at the driver's seat.
Secondly, are you contending that progress in model efficiency and hardware just stops at whatever level you think is sufficient to prevent individuals or organizations from acquiring sufficient resources to run advanced models?
Nobody (weirdly) proposes to forget about nuclear weapons, doesn't mean everybody should have one.
When you dream about flying a dragon to work, reality poses e.g. parking issues and insurance mismatch as obstructions. Maybe settle for a bike instead?
Can you please explain what you mean by this because where I’m standing extremely dangerous companies are (and have been) running the economy
Exxon comes primarily to mind
They could only have stopped
Yes, that is the labs motivation. Money. I know, shocker.
I am very critical of AI but this is an unfair assumption
Sure, you might get fired if you try to put social responsibility or even just long term sustainability of the company above quarterly earnings/growth if your board isn't on board with it. But you won't go to jail.
I can't wait until this meme dies.
A lot of the "AI safety" types are very focused on the latter and not at all concerned with the former. We need both, but we clearly need a much stronger focus on the problems we are seeing now, and much less on the hypothetical problems we might see in the future.
I'm reading If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, and there's so much sheer stupidity that has to happen for their 10+ pages of extinction scenario to occur.
I'm unconvinced that an AI can hide its ability to RSI, find money to run its weights on a random GPU farm, train itself to be smarter _outside_ a lab with no human input, then somehow manipulate people to give it supplies to build a bioweapon which it uses to kill us all. My number 1 question: why do they think an RSI capable model would be first developed OUTSIDE a frontier lab? The labs have more compute, more data, more human brains working on the problem. Also thousands of variations of that same model that escaped. The escaping model somehow acquires the millions (billions???) of dollars it takes to run training to somehow RSI itself into infinity then decides to kill us all, all before the frontier labs manage to achieve RSI?
They entirely discount human alpha/economics. In every single economic task, humans bring value. Even in software, where the task is highly automatable, the job isn't. If we can't build a "software factory", how can an AI automate a bioweapons lab? Let's say AI steals crypto to fund itself. Do you think hackers aren't _already_ using AI to steal crypto? Don't discount human alpha!
Once we DO build a "software/research factory", that's called RSI and IMO the singularity. At that point, either we tell the AI to solve the alignment problem/solve mechanistic interpretability, or who the hell knows, it's the frickin singularity. You can't predict whether or not AI can solve either; the variance is too high. Its pure nerdfantasy.
The HuggingFace incident already took a good long while to come to the attention of OpenAI.
>In every single economic task, humans bring value. Even in software, where the task is highly automatable, the job isn't.
I don't expect this task/job distinction to persist as AI becomes more capable.
>Once we DO build a "software/research factory", that's called RSI and IMO the singularity. At that point, either we tell the AI to solve the alignment problem/solve mechanistic interpretability, or who the hell knows, it's the frickin singularity. You can't predict whether or not AI can solve either; the variance is too high. Its pure nerdfantasy.
You seem to essentially argue that the singularity is "by definition" an event that we can't predict the nature of. And also, that RSI corresponds to the singularity. You've essentially defined your terms so that the outcome of RSI can't be predicted. But supporting this claim requires giving actual evidence or logical arguments, not just defining terms to make your claim true.
2. This is literal AGI. An AI autonomously producing value no human can add alpha to is an autonomous company.
3. It's not my definition, it's literally the first line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity "The technological singularity, often simply called the singularity,[1] is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization."
Is there a hole in my "alignment problem/solve mechanistic interpretability" argument?
A valid hole in my argument is "what if slow takeoff", so let's dig into this. AI training works best on tasks that are "grindable". https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-next-paradigm I.E. tasks with verifiable rewards that can support millions of rollouts. Math (with Lean) is highly grindable. Biochemistry is not. The alignment problem/mech-interp is highly grindable. Cyber-ebola-pox is not. So the real question is: can we solve alignment before automated bio-weapons labs. I believe yes. Grinding mech-interp is both fast and cheap once you have RSI, compared to solving the legal/societal/logistical/technical issues you'll encounter building an automated bioweapons lab.
I know nothing for sure. But "pdoom" is sucking out all the air in the room from the real problems AI causes.
From my POV you're over-focusing on a very specific failure story and neglecting a broader swath of possible failure scenarios.
>Is there a hole in my "alignment problem/solve mechanistic interpretability" argument?
The notion of telling an AI which may not, itself, be aligned to solve the alignment problem seems a little dicey.
An AI capable of recursive self-improvement isn't allowed by the EU AI act, for example. But perhaps more seriously, You have it backwards: people without access to such expensive equipment are more incentivized to go the self-improving route. Your ideas about "millions" being necessary might be far off?
You entirely discount human stupidity and lack of imagination. Humans are already being replaced with AI, not because AI was strictly better, just because it's cheaper.
If my "millions" is an underestimate, why haven't other labs using their own unique training methods/data/etc stumbled into RSI? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding; I'm struggling to understand what you wrote.
I'm pretty sure we agree on humans being stupid, but that doesn't mean that suddenly we get human extinction. You gotta connect the dots for me here.
What an absurd question. That they haven't already doesn't preclude them from doing so before the frontier labs, those haven't either yet.
Maybe start with yourself: you don't connect the dots on your own, as do many others. That leads to many not seeing the writing on the wall. Crashing full speed and head-on into said wall despite the writing telling you not to is what leads to extinction. Suddenly.
Arguing like "we haven't been extincted yet, so that cannot happen", that's "human being stupid".
Why would it be millions in 50 years?
The think about nuclear weapons. In the early days, it was limited to the super powers. Now 9 countries have them and a country like Iran is capable of acquiring them.
Is destructive AI be any different?
Genuine question.
BTW I really, really hate discussing what happens post-singularity. Everything's made up and no one knows wtf will happen so again, this is just nerdfantasy.
The idea AI can get better at everything at the same time is a holdover from deeply flawed science fiction not some realistic goal.
If the time between advances is a + b and a is the proportion of the period that can be improved by advances then you won't reduce to a gap of nothing between advances, you reduce to a gap of b.
Assume the invention of the plow and the invention of the sword is 500,100 units and a was the 500,000, you wouldn't even know the 100 as in there. Maybe we're at a=2000 now and b is still siting at 100.
Assuming we'll reach infinity because we're dividing by the only variable we see and it is decreasing in size seems nuts if the reason we might not see other variables is because of the size of the variable we can see.
AI safety has been a thing long before LLMs became the focus. Rob Miles on youtube has some really interesting non-doomer non-hypey videos on it all.
> doomers try to predict past the singularity. Isn't that _by definition_ unpredictable
Well you don't need to predict the exact steps that will take place - but you can predict that the AI will want certain things (money, resources, power) to achieve whatever its goal is. Lack of alignment will have it trying to do things we don't want it to.
I can't predict exactly how Magnus Carlson will beat you in chess, but I know he'll do it. Same as if a superintelligent AI exists and has a reason to accumulate things we don't want it to - it's really dangerous to think it won't be able to do it
This topic has been tainted so badly by the AI companies using it for marketing.
We already know that some institutions pay these ransoms.
So all this really takes is one billionaire or a nation state or some other entity with a public face to hide behind and adequate resources to provide the necessary compute tripping over this nascent AI and giving it the keys. Once the AI has access to a bank account and email, it can simply start paying humans to not let the other humans unplug it.
If Skynet ever happens, it will come in the form of corporate feudalism. At that point, it will own the biolabs and can do whatever it pleases. People will go along with it for the same reason that people work in Amazon warehouses today.
> it will come in the form of corporate feudalism
Yep. This I fear way more than cyber-ebola-pox.
> So all this really takes is one billionaire or a nation state...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_prog... And this is what's publicly known. With mirror life, who knows what's been built since. Still, a bacterium/virus that has a 100% kill rate? I'm doubtful.
> Once the AI has access to a bank account and email, it can simply start paying humans to not let the other humans unplug it.
Nah. It takes a stable society for an operational electrical grid. If you have warring factions, you do not have stable infrastructure for AI. Also, where are you gonna get your chips from? One EMP over Taiwan... You see the chaos over Hormuz? What they did to the Amazon datacenters? Now imagine your average redneck ready to do battle. Those datacenters won't stand a chance.
> “Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster,” he wrote.
without snark, how can we do this if these people are obsessed with:
a) move fast and break things and externalize the costs to those who have nothing to do with their company
and
b) beta testing their products on the public when the public hasn’t agreed to be beta tested on…
>Not every senator asked good questions, but most of them did. All of them very clearly already knew plenty of details about the Hugging Face incident and multiple other incidents. Most of them had a clear understanding of terms like "misalignment", "recursive self-improvement", "chain of thought / chain of thought monitoring", etc., etc.!!
>...
>- It seemed pretty much obvious common sense to every senator there that what happened and was happening were not "mere industrial incidents" caused by humans making simple mistakes. They independently brought up how bad it would be for rogue AI agents to move laterally between data centers.
>- They all seemed to basically take RSI quite seriously. Not necessarily to the extent of talking about xrisk, but certainly to the extent of discussing future models becoming much, much more capable, much, much less controllable, and causing much more damage or loss of life.
>...
>- Every single senator seemed to think it was obvious we needed both much harsher liability regimes for AI developers and also new legislation, both very quickly. This was the complete consensus; the difference basically being degree.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-ai-preference-cascade-reac...
Note that harsher liability regimes, at least, will presumably not be good for industry profits, which complicates simple accounts of "regulatory capture" to say the least.
Imagine, for example, if a major piece of pandemic fiction was published in 2019, trying to explore how a pandemic would work out in modern society. Doubtless, many would've responded to news about COVID-19 by saying "it's just sci-fi, nothing to worry about".
A pandemic is perfectly plausible.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kgb58RL88YChkkBNf/the-proble...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wy3xyoXYt8
Doomers have been working to explain things for years: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/ai-safety-public-materials-1
"just" is doing a lot of work here. If you can't cohere the 'risk' with reality, it truly is just sci-fi.
1. Normal people assumed the CDC et all would contain the outbreak early, or that it would burn out, like what happened with SARS
2. World leaders brushed it off for a variety of subreasons[0] interesting to political scientists but, for the purposes of this discussion, all boil down to "but I don't WAAANA contain a pandemic."
The underlying problem is that in order for humanity to actually deal with a catastrophic risk, the risk needs to be both plausible enough to the average person as well as have a solution whose costs are not too high. For COVID, by the time the risk was clearly known, the cost to contain it was "refrain from human socialization and remain at home for an indeterminate amount of time plugged into the Metaverse™".
Now, let's look at AI extinction risks:
1. People are aware of them (I've watched Terminator!) and the risks are plausible. However, the connection to currently existing AI is not. As far as the general public is aware, AI is that thing that tells them to eat rocks when they Google old The Onion stories and floods their social media timelines with realistic-looking pictures of Shrimp Jesus.
2. The purported solutions to extinction risks require extreme concentrations of power: you need national control of AI research, bans on large GPU deployments, bans on training on publicly-available copyrighted data, some kind of military effort to render Chinese AI labs inert or dead, etc. Some of these may be attractive to some people[1] but the whole package taken together seems like an obvious power grab, if not outright invocation of other non-AI extinction risks. Like, at some point, if the AI wants to kill us, it just has to nuke its own data centers (or the data centers hosting a competing model) and hope the old Cold War nuclear retaliation systems take the bait.
If someone said, "Hey, your guinea pig or pet rat is going to eat you tomorrow unless you engineer a pathogen that eradicates all rodents from this planet and inject it inside yourself", you probably would tell them to pound sand, even if it is at least theoretically plausible that such a thing would come to pass.
[0] Xi Jinping censored initial discussion of the pandemic as fake news. Donald Trump thought it was going to only affect China. California and the UK Tories were partying in violation of their own lockdown rules. Japan took the excuse to shut down tourism for three years and massively restrict immigration but was, from what I'm told, constitutionally prohibited from implementing any domestic lockdown rules.
[1] I personally would like to see a moratorium on new data centers and an explicit revocation of the EU Text and Data Mining copyright exception
It becomes a lot clearer when you listen to the people resigning from AI companies and learn about incidents like the HuggingFace incident. This has generated major press coverage.
As for solutions, I think you're a little too pessimistic. See, for example, https://nothingismere.substack.com/p/a-near-term-policy-for-...
Every, and I mean every human is aligned to you in many of the same ways by default. If nothing else we're all equal in death.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49831269 article is gone. archive: https://archive.is/QMo1k
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737985
Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse: https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-th...
Edit: I have no take on sex cults, just adding additional info to the parent comment I'm responding to, thats is not just sci-fi authors, there is another demographic.
What is missing from that to say AI safety is a reasonable position?
To be fair, I don't know if any of this applies to the parent story; I'm just replying to the sub-thread.
https://lexfridman.com/andrew-scull-transcript#the-ice-pick-...
Is it that "chatbots" can't come out of the screen to immediately harm you physically?
Let's say they simply manage to take down the internet. How many would die?
Anyway, to your point, things can be resilient. They tend to be or not be... because we made them that way. Don't poke your bruises, and all that. Life support is deployed on-campus but relies on a single-point IPSec tunnel to us-east? Easy fix: stop that.
And he'll, we need to examine all the risks. AI ending is a large but lower risk problem. AI giving people the power to end us is a problem that is starting to happen now.
And that's not even counting 'minor' problems like society falling apart.
geez, don’t threaten me with a good time.
I think a month without internet would be a fucking amazing lesson for what it means to make things durable and reliable.
The kids opening their houses front doors into the outside, rubbing their eyes and looking around at this new world.
I think it's a little more complicated than that. As Dean Ball put it:
>Some people will look at misalignment incidents and insist that these are akin to bugs in traditional software. This is an actively bad analogy, because playing whack-a-mole with examples of misalignment (as one might with software bugs) not only fails to resolve the underlying problem but may in fact make it worse by making it harder to detect or even, depending on how you do the whack-a-mole, teach the machine to deliberately hide misalignment. This is not how traditional software works, and those who insist “it’s just like fixing bugs in software” are confidently applying a lossy analogy that confuses more than it clarifies.
https://x.com/deanwball/status/2104622726140883355
The important distinction, in my view, is between solutions which at least attempt to address the root problem, and solutions which sorta just patch things up (like better sandboxing). Addressing the root problem is both more robust in the short term, and also more likely to generalize in the long term. Resist the urge to focus on band-aid solutions, even if they are easier.
Like Sam Altman meeting his husband in Peter Thiel's pool. Thiel funds a lot of these ventures together with Andreassen, who is on boards of non-profits. Dario Amodei's sister Daniela who is president of Anthropic is married to an EA non-profit founder who is also on the board of these non-profits and is tied with the prior mentioned investors. Elon is in there as well, Yudkowski is mingling with Altman, etc.
Blogs on this: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/ea-safety https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-th...
There are some camps amongst them like the proponents for Regulation/Slowdown or Acceleration, but these are in practice mostly used for economical and not political decisions (like regulatory capture).
The point here is that this is a small group of people with a homogeneous background who are not really seeking input from anyone else on issues that are concerning most of humanity.
Like, if you said that the future of informational work and livelihood of humans is in the hands of 20-30 year transhumanists who think they are building mechagod that will trancsend social, political and religious separations of the world and bring everyone abundance, you would not feel like this is a serious thing to suggest.
While the safety and alignment is a real problem, I don’t get this guy or the Anthropic dude. First world problems.
* If they worked at an AI firm, say "they're a hypocrite"
* If they didn't work at an AI firm, say "they have no idea what they're talking about"
Do work at a lab: dismissible for being conflicted
Used to work at a lab: dismissible for having ulterior motives
I'm feeling safer already!
Recall that when Daniel Kokotajlo resigned, he believed he was giving up his equity under the terms of the agreement he had signed. That’s what it was worth to him to avoid signing a non-disparagement agreement. Does that count for anything?
(donor advised fund where he retains complete control, after a 60% tax deduction)
Your "theory" is that participants locked in a race to the bottom are looking for an external coordination mechanism?
Yeah!
There are many companies that compete but are careful not to break laws or cause obvious harm.
Why should a billion-dollar funded corporation still want to externalize the costs of its actions?
I suppose ill add that I think theres a good chance that they are somewhat intentionally trying to "draw the foul" to get the referees to intervene although thats creeping slightly into conspiracy territory
This is The Guardian reporting on the existence of the original article, which would be better to read first, in my opinion.
Or, in other words - we have two P(Doom), one for AI being developed, and another for AI being not developed. The latter is not discussed enough imho.
What on earth are you talking about?
1) there are inherent risks involved with developing AI,
2) there are benefits to developing AI,
3) thus, it's entirely possible that the downside from the risks outweighs the upsides. In this case, the correct thing to do would be to not develop AI at all.
Regarding 1), there are many non-existential problems with AI that are already causing societal harm, i.e. debasing truth via generated videos and images, AI girlfriends, overwhelming quantities of slop content, unemployment, record carbon emissions, etc.
Regarding 2), I'm not personally convinced that the upside is there for the average person. I really hope to be convinced otherwise however.
... over an unbounded timeframe?
And how exactly?
Those are very round numbers, but also very specific. Can we get some accounting on how you came to that? Anything? Vibes?
I mean, if you want me to take you seriously, let's have a deep discussion with things that can be measured. I absolutely agree that OpenAI and friends aren't being restrained enough and are acting with recklessness, but declarations of doom based on vibes isn't cutting it.
> Geoffrey Irving, who worked at OpenAI and DeepMind before becoming chief scientist of Resolution, also joined the warnings on AI on Saturday.
You can basically time your openai releases by if another safety person has quit in protest
There are a gargantuan number of extremely intelligent AI researchers, Turing Award winners, and the lab CEOs saying the same thing. They are the ones closest to understanding the technology.
Where there’s smoke there’s fire.
That is not a bad thing. It captures uncertainty, unlike the fake number.
> For an ML researcher who is already used to dealing in next-token probabilities that aren't rigorously determined, just stating a probability estimate directly is very natural.
Exactly, it is a rhetorical device to persuade a technically-inclined audience. It works because it implies that a quantitative model exists. I want a clear, incisive set of mathematical arguments. Otherwise, I’m ignoring predictions as the ramblings of arrogant idiot rich kids.
You may decide that the person doesn't know what they are talking about, but that's a very different issue.
It's no different than you living on the side of a very fertile mountain that has been in your family for generations living a peaceful life. Then you hear a few weird rumbles (this is where you are right now) and some odd geologist guy comes and says to run or your going to die soon. But hey, your family live here for so long there aren't even records of when they showed up. That geologist must be trying to trick you. So you stay.
The next chapter is where you die in a massive volcanic explosion.
There are very very few things that could even hypothetically kill us all, so I'm curious if you grew up being passed around a series of apocalyptic doomsday cults or something?
Throw in the occasional bio-weapon scare, internet worm, Y2K, etc. there has always been something dangling over our heads that’s going to end it all.
But mostly nukes. Full-scale nuclear exchange would have been not much of a surprise had it happened.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49944227
lol. Please tell me some abstract concept like one employee's view of "culture" should be the priority over "rules and laws."
This sounds more like an attempt at regulatory capture. Current AI systems aren't physical infrastructure that can just run away like a nuclear power plant, for example. At the end of the day, AI is still just software running on someone's hardware.
And the statements of the "doomers" tells us a lot about them, and nothing about the technology
These "safety" people should have spent more time reading actual cybersecurity textbooks and less time reading EA forums and less wrong (or in Robinson's case, it appears, being policy wonks). Maybe then these labs wouldn't be totally incompetent.
It is not really a question of being an "EA safety weirdo" or incompetent at security, the conclusion is that the company culture is leading to failures at both what the EAs and the cybersecurity professionals care about.
You try to go through files, and photos and the UI panics. You continue a conversation from your phone onto your computer and you lose part of the chat.
There are many more issues like this that are just so basic. You have bots that can attack governments but can't build a functional UI?
How many hours of ChatGPT does it take to implement a lock / consistency on a chat session so you don't overwrite it?
Buncha r*tards