Hacker News Reader

Comment by __loam | Hacker News Reader

Honestly after what happened with the OpenAI board, it's kind of hard to take the AI safety people seriously. I think there are real problems with Gen AI systems including data privacy, copyright, the potential for convincing misinformation/propaganda, etc, but I'm really not convinced a text generator is an existential threat to the species. We need to take these problems seriously and some of the AI safety discussion makes that really difficult.

View on HN

> I'm really not convinced a text generator is an existential threat to the species.

Well said - there's been too much "Skynet going rogue" sci-fi nonsense injected into this debate.

"'m really not convinced a text generator is an existential threat to the species"

Except it's not only a text generator. It now browses the web, runs code and calls functions.

And yet we've survived Emacs.

You’re thinking short term, applying safety to todays LLMs. No one is claiming todays tech poses and existential threat.

Others are looking at the trajectory and thinking about the future, where safety does start to become important.

All large scale human atrocities required a centralized government imposing on the public a technocratic agenda.

“AI safety” advocates are recreating that problem, now with AI spice.

How about we don’t create actual problems (technocrats imposing disasters on the public) because we’re fighting the scourge of hypothetical pixies?

> Some large scale human atrocities

FTFY

>No one is claiming todays tech poses and existential threat.

really now, friend?

In terms of trajectory, I'm not really convinced we can do much better than we are now. Moore's law is ending in the next decade as we hit fundamental physical limitations in how many transistors we can pack on a chip. The growth in computational power is going to slow down considerably at a time when ai companies are struggling to get more gpu compute to train new models and run inference. OpenAI themselves supposedly stopped sign ups because they're running out of computational resources, to the point that it's impacting research. I don't see us getting much better than GPT-4 on Von Neumann machines without expelling ludicrous amounts of capital or a see change in how we fundamentally do computation. It's hard to get around the fact that LLMs are already extremely expensive to run.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com