Google researchers demand freedom to tell the world what they know about AI
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Usual noise from a very very small but very very vocal minority of trouble makers who are trying to force their own views on everyone else and run to the press to try and feel important and try to make a mountain out of a 3 or 4 person molehill.
I've not heard anyone at all talking about this in the office. Perhaps everyone is thinking it or talking about it privately, but I've not heard any of it period.
They're getting ignored by management because they're the usual agitators and over-opinionated who everyone hates dealing with. It's not surprising these people end up getting fired or let go, because no one likes working with them and so they don't get on good projects and don't get good feedback in reviews etc because they piss everyone else off. Then of course when they are fired (or jump before they are pushed) they run right back to the press about how they were sacked for reason X when really it's because they're a fucking jerk.
If this sounds like you: http://go/no-jerks is old has never been more applicable. Don't be a jerk.
Very close in feel to what the DoD used to be in the early 2010s
You don’t hear from people because they are afraid of consequences given their contracts.
Some people value truth over that. Annoying,eh?
What part of the post was ultra-nationalistic?
All very useful framing to discredit the actitivists without actually addressing the issues.
It's a way to distract and defuse the situation by ad hominem attacks, typical strategy for suppressing workers' rights or anything that inconveniences the status quo.
AGI can define goalposts that move every time A not-G I achieves a new milestone. That's fine. No matter what acronym you use to define it, artificial intelligence is objectively augmenting humans at the very edge of technology and science.
AI solving the problem it created? Woaow, the future is now!
There have been huge advances this year alone, and finally some productive results, but most of the things where AIs are used right now still are a net loss.
I used to think that it is very important to argue and convince people who are in denial so that they can e.g. prepare for it. But nowadays I have been thinking that being convinced of this scary proposition may also lead people to behave in destructive ways (also, I would like for us to spend less on AI, perhaps because it is so powerful), so maybe it's not so bad.
If people actually did appreciate it the economy would collapse immediately long before we've adequately "replaced" it, so there is something to be said for temporary denial until people working on the actual consequences have got something semi viable to deal with them in place.
You will need to explain that one. Becauase if economy colapses before the singularity, there will be no singularity.
There will be no datacenters, no ai, none of that super expensive stuff dependent on debt and disposable money.
In that case - and I wish it were not true - the AI companies need to ensure that society keeps running until the next stage is prepared. How? Probably by positioning themselves as an indispensable part of government, training an army of AI agents for all purposes where human physical and metal labor can be replaced, taking control of a large chunk of the economy.
So the thoroughly obnoxious insistence by the current AI snake oil salesmen that [EDIT] that they know the where the future lies and that we must follow their guidance (calculated to benefit themselves and likely wrong anyway) or be "left behind" wears thin. Go follow your own path and leave others to follow theirs in peace.
That or the usual moral problems with applications of the technology, as another commenter pointed out, particularly in military and policing. Bad, but not really a new revelation, unless they know of some particularly evil plans.
I mean they tell you the reason in the first paragraph? Or is reading tfa too much?
The article is just about them asking for changing the wording of contracts, not some super secret stuff they're dying to say and really can't.
Without the paywall: https://archive.is/fKI3D
If anything this points to a more moderate (but still bad) worry among the employees.
We have been living in a parody for some time now, so it feels normal.
Is probably the best description of the state of engineering today
If someone’s not even willing to stake their job on it, I don’t see why I’d be concerned. (And until they do, we’re just speculating about what they may or may not even say.)
The ability for a model to improve itself over time without outside intervention. As yet, no models yet have this capability, and LLMs specifically what with how they are constructed, are not likely to ever have it. They are frozen in carbonite at the time of their training.
That's not to say they can't use skills to appear somewhat worldly, things like searching the internet and what have you, but if you ask a model to strictly stick to data in it's training, it will do that and it will be stuck in whatever time in which it was built.
Energy is conserved, gravity exists, and LLMs aren't intelligent.
We will never prove LLMs are intelligent, we'll only prove humans are not.
> can't use skills to appear somewhat worldly
Duh, humans don't generally make up things whole cloth either, they access other information, books, tools, sensors, etc.
But I guess if you ignore enough information you can reach any position. It's up to the audience to decide which one of us this applies to.
A model being able to train a bigger model with marginally better capabilities is not what the hype was about.
I think there was some example of DeepMind models doing it, but under the control of a third party pen tester and the models stopped themselves.
Everyone hates on Google but they seem fairly competent at infra stuff. I don't think we've heard of any google-controlled (not third party using a Google model) felonies like we have from OpenAI and Anthropic?
Perhaps this is why we have not heard though!
On Friday, a Google executive responded to the internal discussion about the non-disparagement clause and said that the company would not enforce it for workers who had left the company.
“We’ve always encouraged an open dialogue about safety and responsibility,” a Google spokesperson said in an email Tuesday. “Recently, we’ve updated our terms for new hires, which included removing the post-termination aspect of non-disparagement clauses.”
The company does not enforce non-disparagement clauses after people leave Google, and it has dedicated, internal channels for workers to escalate concerns to top leaders, the spokesperson said.I think it's reasonable to assume that if it's not worth breaking the NDA, it's likely not an existential threat for the vast majority of humanity.
Now, does that mean that people who currently work upper-middle class knowledge work jobs aren't in for an exceedingly harsh economic reality check? Absolutely not.
But that's not really as serious as an existential threat to humanity.
On the one hand, you've potentially got an indeterminate number of future comfortable years based on a subjective assessment of how long you think it takes catastrophe to materialize, with the downside that you can't warn anyone and so no one will stop the coming catastrophe.
On the other hand you've got the immediate assurance of your current career being gone and high likelihood that you'll struggle financially as a result, with the upside that you can provide a warning to the public that they will almost certainly ignore and catastrophe comes anyway.
Given the risk/reward assessment of those two options, what do you pick?
Listen, I understand that, owing very likely to our differing backgrounds, you and I think differently.
Where threats are concerned, I'm a simple soldier and as such I see things simply.
I would raise the alarm without a second thought. I honestly don't know how anyone could reasonably believe they would have any other option?
Please understand, it's a job. I spot a threat to my unit, I report it up the chain of command.
It's not about whether or not there is a negative impact on me. It's not even about whether or not it serves a greater good; nor whether there is an ultimate benefit to my unit; nor whether I get brownie points when whatever you deem divine evaluates my soul in the hereafter.
It's my job to report. So I report.
I've never once considered the things you're talking about now when I was in any such situation. It was just a job.
Here's the thing, it kind of made me just automatically think a certain way. I know that if I see an existential threat, I'm reporting it. I believe anyone would. Not for benefit. Just because that's what you do. If you see a mass shooting in progress, you call the cops. I don't think there is a single person who thinks about negative impact or greater good. It's just automatic.
I was only saying that if the NDA would prevent them from reporting, then, to my mind, the threat is likely not existential. But, again, I do make room for the possibility that not everyone thinks like me. I just think it's very likely that people think exactly as I do when faced with that level of threat.
Maybe I'm wrong? That's fine.
The downside risk to yourself doesn't have to be existential for the upside to not be worth it.
Coming at this from a completely different angle, other people may see their duty to the law and the agreements they've signed as being more morally binding over their behaviors than their social obligation to raise the alarm. Not everyone uses the same formula to calculate which duty is most important.
Theoretically, retaliating against whistleblowers is seriously illegal stuff. But in practice these regulations are seldom enforced. And even if your (former) employer does not retaliate openly, there might still be "invisible" retaliation, or the risk of other large employers just blacklisting you by default.
May I ask? Why should I show faith and grace to the people actively involved in turning our society into a Big Brother program? People who work with the DoD to build war machines? Directly or indirectly involved, they either know what they’re doing or choose to look the other way, for money.
Please enlighten me, what is the faith and grace approach I should be stating?
If v2 to v3 is out of the wild for you then you really do not have any idea what you’re talking about. I cherry picked a few examples to demonstrate how evil the core of Google really is, regardless of the people who work on less evil teams there. It doesn’t matter how nice most of the employees there are, they’re still helping the money machine ad engine core of Google plow ahead and knowingly so. They protect and enable the bad actors by working on the lesser parts of Google.
Another example of how evil Google and it’s workers are, they recently announced that they’ll start scanning people’s emails again to serve ads. I didn’t hear of the Gmail team being upset and leaving. That’s because their fat paycheck makes them smile while thinking about how they helped build the service that tokenizes email makes them frown. So they don’t think about it and turn away.
I have worked at plenty of giant corps to know how this works, you’re not going to fool me with this “have faith and grace in the Google employees, they’re not all evil, just a few. The rest just hang out there nicely.”
1. Full disclosure. 2. Run for your life. 3. Live in exile.
2. sideload Signal
3. find a verified reporter on Bluesky, etc. with public Signal contact info
4. destroy phone thoroughly afterwards, not just screen but chips
If they want to do that free of consequences, tough luck.