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..
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
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.