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Comment by barelyauser | Hacker News Reader

It's just sad. The Manhattan project was necessary and it was successful. It also developed the technology for clean nuclear energy. But at the end of the day the reality of this world is that technology is a two edge knife. US government promptly bombed Japan, and other countries rightfully rushed to develop their own bombs.

I feel the same with AI. Most people struggle to make ends meet. Meanwhile our brightest minds are developing AI and will hand it over to people who don't care about the rest of us. Models will be closed, data will be closed. Why? You get my point?

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Re Manhattan project, somebody else would have figured it out, is there a side you'd rather had got there first? The cat was already out of the bag.

More to the point, openAI makes chatbots that use matrix multiplication to provide believable sentences, and a few similar things. This isn't and never will be nuclear power. Nobody is working or, or close to, any sentient or dangerous AI (dangerous in a way that a regular computer program couldn't be). The applications in contemplation here are better searching, low end copywriting, some kind of smart assistant.

(On a technical level, there's very cool stuff going on, but there is not societal risk, other than the fallout from s big hype bubble)

> This isn't and never will be nuclear power.

Looking forward to this aging like milk. Virtually everyone in the industry believes AGI will happen, and virtually everyone agrees that it is going to permanently change humanity like we've never seen before.

Lol

It's all Andrej's fault.

This just a classical false dichotomy. Because we spend resources on one thing doesn't mean we can't spend resources on another, and it doesn't mean resources for one thing are being taken away from another. It's not a zero sum game.

Time and resources are finite. We cannot allocate the same resource twice.

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