> the more evil stuff these agents do the more capable and impressive it makes them look
This is a silly meme. Who wants to pay for evil models that go rogue in your company infra?
This is a silly meme. Who wants to pay for evil models that go rogue in your company infra?
Maybe Sam Altman is getting worried that they've raised more than $150 billion and still have net losses and thinks of it as the only exit? I don't know, but someone else provide an alternative explanation as to why a company would work so hard to turn the public against AI.
They're looking for regulatory capture. They've spent ${bignum} on AI and are possibly looking to have the government say "You can't deploy an AI model unless you've spent ${bignum} on it and done all these steps to make sure that nothing goes bad."
At that point, only the existing AI companies that have spent that money can continue forward until someone else spends ${bignum} on it too.
Another aspect of it is if there are regulations established, it may be used to reduce liability ("we followed all the steps proscribed in section whatever, the company is absolved of liability for its actions and that falls on the user instead.")
If the US govt takes over, existing employees and shareholders will get screwed.
Well, as people say over and over again, they've got no moat. The actual LLM models are destined to be commoditized over time, and the real money is in the hardware to run them on. The endgame winners are going to be Nvidia and AMD, not Anthropic or OpenAI.
So what's the typical playbook for large firms seeking to insulate themselves against market compensation? Push for regulation. If there are no natural barriers to entry, create artificial ones. And how do you get regulation passed? Present yourself as the target of the regulation, rather than its beneficiary, and start publicly doing things that make others think you need to be reined in.
These stunts, especially from OpenAI, aren't just trying to hype up the power of their own product, they're trying to hype up the perceived threat of the entire category, so they can provoke political intervention that they can comply with, but few others can.
The private market price is irrelevant - supply and demand determines what they will be sold for in liquidation.
Quite frankly Im bored of this drama. Get it over with already - go IPO, show your financials, find a path to being a healthy going concern or die! Simple! Nobody has a divine right to exist.
See Meta et al complaining about Section 230 of the DMCA. Meta would be entirely able to moderate in an environment where mass scale moderation/censorship would be required to prevent a host's liability for UGC. Almost no one else would be able to do so.
That means no upstart could possible come along to dethrone Meta as they did with MySpace. It would also be impractical to run a FOSS social network (or forums). Meta could literally just have bots sign up on a FOSS social network until its DAU count ran over the statutory minimums to be subject to UGC liability.
Regulatory capture is a de facto ban on competition in a market.
Sure. If you exclude, for example, the entire automotive industry, the entire telecom industry, the entire airline industry, the entire energy industry, and the entire healthcare industry from the category of "normal businesses" then you can perhaps make an argument that most "normal businesses" do not want to be regulated.
> Regulatory capture happens much later, and slowly.
Regulatory capture often happens quite early, especially when new technologies emerge, and companies that are successful early on aim to consolidate their hold on the market. This happened with the telephone industry around the turn of the 20th century, the broadcasting industry starting in the 1920s, etc. Regulation always tends toward market consolidation, so the people who are aiming for market consolidation tend to advocate for it. And sometimes the most effective advocacy is pretending to oppose it.
If any of us did a tenth of what they did, we would be already in jail.
Any model with a big enough prompt can and will drift. The model in question was a highly persistent one which means even more opportunity to drift off the normal path, and this really showed in unanswerable questions.
We can all believe that models do things unreliably all the time, but when that lack of reliability turns into hacking it suddenly can't be true?
Either way ... YOUR CAT STEPPING ON THE ENTER KEY IS NOT HACKING ... and neither are these scenarios.
They are devs acting irresponsibly and then pretending to be surprised by what they should have expected to happen (just like you should have expected that your "rm *" could have an ENTER key press occur after it).
These models can execute plans of actions more complicated than their users know how to follow and secure. Most people don't know much about cyber security at all.
You seem highly behind the times on their capabilities.
If you tell your Claude to do X, you are responsible for what Claude does ... not Claude. If you type "./someScript.py" you are responsible if that script wipes your hard drive (maybe the script's author is too, but you certainly aren't blameless).
These are people at AI companies, using long running sessions without the proper safeguards and sending AIs on missions that are likely to result in criminal actions ... THAT IS CRIMINALLY IRRESPONSIBLE.
Again, not the AI ... it is software just like any other. THE PEOPLE WHO RUN THE SOFTWARE are the ones responsible for what it does. Period.
The denial phase is still with us.
The more extreme your opening demand, the greater the likelihood that the eventual equilibrium point will be closer to your actual target.
And in this case the actual target is to entrench the position of the current market leaders, and then effectively close the market to new entrants. That's itself a very extreme position, so the opener has to be even more extreme than that.
For instance, you can hear “their model is dangerous! Why would I want that?!”
Investors hear, “Their skunkworks stuff is so impossibly advanced that it’s basically a commercial wonder weapon in the waiting.”
And you might hear “We totally lost control and it hacked the Gibson, this technology needs regulation!” and think “Obviously full lockdown and government control.”
But friendly government actors might think, “Sounds like a good excuse to ban Chinese competition.”
I think the idea has some merit, but it only buys time, as people will soon be able to train dangerously powerful AIs in secret. I think the government needs to force the labs to solve alignment before developing more powerful models. Then the question of how to counter a poorly-aligned, rogue model arises; it's guaranteed somebody's going to let one loose.
And it doesnt really matter if it was actual terrorism or false flags, the end result for either is the same.
If a government could be taken out by a lone terrorist it might also result in no authoritarian governments.