Below the fatalism though, I've been excited for this day ever since I saw "2001" in the matinee theater as a kid (and also as a kid: played against a Tic Tac Toe computer at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago).
And that I can run some of these models locally? Heady times for my inner kid.
I've tried (and struggled) to understand how they work as well so that I am not ignorant on the subject—so that I can have an opinion a little better than a layman's.
You've been excited for the arrival of AI ever since you saw a movie about a murderous AI who tries (and mostly succeeds) to wipe out the entire human crew of its ship? Dr. Strangelove also got you psyched up for a nuclear war, I guess?
On the contrary, I think that less capable models could be used for several, largely positive, applications.
I also think that narrow AI models developed for specific scientific applications (e.g., protein folding, weather predictions...) are in general beneficial for humanity.
I totally agree with the benefits of the smaller models, but it's the large frontier models, potentially or accidently removing the security barriers from those can cause things far worse than the "hugging face" incident..
I will not be, we engineered it, so it is an artificial type of intelligence, and given the dumb things they do with consistency, I find it quite the stretch to call it super or intelligent
I think the current generation more closely resembles a spaghetti throwing machine at the first point of difficulty, this is not how intelligent beings like ourselves approach these situations.
Frontier models are, indeed, already too capable and too dangerous. I would have been more comfortable if a stop of the development occurred 12 months ago. However, the second best moment to press the "stop" button is now.
But why would they stop when they have a clear path up? They don't care about the people they just care about growing their wallets. I don't see them ever pressing the stop button aslong as results are there, also I do think that results will probably deteriorate, as I would like to believe transformers will hit a limit or rather a bottleneck, perhaps several bottlenecks. Where progress will massively slow down.
Of course they won't stop by themselves
Let's pretend US and EU agreed to slow down development, what would stop China or other countries outside "west" from continuing?
I think that international coordination would be very difficult when AI is a national competition.
I see negligence as I look past the fear mongering from our dysfunctional media ecosystem
Perhaps more about the huge frontier models being developed at openai or antrophic.
Or perhaps the controversial stuff being associated with Palantir.
People are starting to ask questions, I mean a lot are just worried, I had so many people tell me they were pro-ai a few years back, but now they just have that worried face whenever you mention it.