People can afford to run billions of concurrent agents?
1,160 karma · joined September 4, 2016
Or perhaps a Google Scholar means jack shit? Since when is that the official measure of an expert.
That's not a bad idea actually.
I remember it vividly, when Anthropic first came on the scene, people (myself included) were incredibly optimistic about them and their leadership. Everyone hated SamA and OpenAI because they felt they couldn't be trusted.
Then slowly but surely, they showed their true colours. Now their reputation is in shambles due to their own behavior, and people are rooting for OAI to beat them. OAI's reputation gains have purely been a result of NOT following in the footsteps of Anthropic.
This doesn't happen on its own. This can happen through bad system prompts, a model that is trained to act maliciously or has been RL'd incorrectly, or prompt injection. All of these things are controllable, have solutions and countermeasures, and tie back to human responsibility.
> I and many others will be quite content if the "legal framework" is just one word, and the word is "no".
This isn't a realistic world and will literally NEVER happen. No will only ever mean no for the general public, and yes for a privileged class. So by fighting for this you're actually just fighting for humanities (and your own) enslavement and for the big labs to succeed in hoarding all of the power for themselves. That's the issue with the "no" camp, they're actually just serving as useful idiots for the labs who know that "no" is not even in the deck, and so they know that they can use the "no" camp to act as extra cannon fodder.
Now people who are actually fighting for decentralization of power are left to contend with not only the labs and their hundreds of millions of dollars, paid for celebrities and politicians, and a fleet of self-interested and bribed NGOs, but an army of clueless "no" foot soldiers who think they're fighting for a possible outcome that will actually just be serving the labs themselves. Meanwhile, the leaders of these well organized "no" movements are quite aware of this and taking kick-backs themselves.
Even in a parallel universe where it outwardly looks like "no" has won, every single nation on Earth is going to develop AI in underground labs despite outwardly flexing they are not, no matter what they claim on the surface, and will use it to steer and control society. The only thing worse than being openly steered and controlled is when it happens without you even knowing it, whereby the decisions you think you are making are being made by someone else, and the opportunities you have in life are already decided for you based on factors you are unaware of.
The safety staffers live in a bubble and an echo-chamber. Obviously the people who work in the AI "safety" industry love to convince each-other that what they're doing is saving humanity, we'd all be dead without them, and they're the reincarnation of Oppenheimer. They also see how easy it is to get their ten seconds of fame by posting sensationalist content on social media and spin it into a company worth millions of dollars. The more alarmist you are in the Safety Industrial Complex, and the more social media clout you can generate from your alarmism, the better it is for your career. The industry also attracts a lot of people who are predisposed to paranoia and like to wear helmets in the shower. So yeah, it's a recipe for sensationalism and poor estimation.
But do I think there are genuine concerns among these labs, by sensible people? Sure. Of course there are. But for the most part, their concerns are about the labs themselves and the things they are doing, not the general public. If they're concerned about what they themselves do they're free to stop doing it. If the labs are doing something that is or should be illegal, they're free to report it.
The only realistic threat we face by AI from the general population are hacking attacks in their various forms. Something that was accomplishable without AI, but was more difficult to pull off at scale. So the solution falls within the existing computer security industry. It's a further hardening of all of the boring stuff we've been doing since the invention of the internet. It's long overdue, anyway. If you can use AI to create a bioweapon, you could have done it without AI. If you can use AI to create a nuke, you could have done it without AI. If you're really looking to cause mass economic and physical carnage, there are far easier ways, and they do not require AI (again, I'm talking about outside of hacking).
> we have plenty of people like you who dismiss the possibility that AI could be harmful until the harm happens
The thing is, I'm not dismissing the possibility. The risks are real, obvious and well known. What's up for debate is how to manage the risks, and how sensationalised they currently are. The current climate serves to benefit the encumbants who are deathly afraid of losing their trillion dollar companies to a healthy open-weight AI ecosystem. The current climate is being orchestrated to position this small group of AI labs as self-regulators through bought and paid for "third"-parties using an overt Hegelian dialectic strategy.
Ironically, they are now responsible for giving birth to the counter-culture. The immune system response that has been developed to provide a semblance of balance to their doomerism. The harder they push in the doomer direction, the harder the push-back will be in the other, whereby the public feel the need to -entirely- deny the possibility of any AI danger altogether to prevent the labs from succeeding and to ensure a good outcome for the people lands somewhere in the middle. One where they have autonomy and freedom and the ability to compete against a force that is already positioned to be nearly insurmountable to challenge.
The only thing worse than the potential chaos that could be faced by an unprepared internet is the outcome where intelligence is labelled a weapon and we're all forced to funnel through a tiny handful of AI labs that will use our data to steal our businesses and swallow the entire economy as they single handedly automate every single company out of existence and we're all left to beg for their crumbs to survive until humanity goes extinct (whether that be 10, 100 or 1000 years), because there is zero possibility of regime change or redistribution of power or wealth -EVER- again. The people who work at the labs don't care about this greater risk because they're all rich from the equity and will be just fine when that happens (or so they think), so you can't expect them to fight for all the common plebs who don't have a ticket. This is transparent because, as you'll note, not a single one of them is calling for the complete stopping of AI altogether. They still want the big labs to continue to be highly profitable. They just don't want anyone else to make that money or have that power. It's not about safety, it's about control. The incentives are, once again, heavily misaligned.