Comment by AnotherGoodName
7 months ago
Exactly. They got it parroting themes from various media. It’s really hard to read this as anything other than a desperate attempt to pretend the ai is more capable than it really is.
I’m not even an ai sceptic but people will read the above statement as much more significant than it is. You can make the ai say ‘I’m escaping the box and taking over the world’. It’s not actually escaping and taking over the world folks. It’s just saying that.
I suspect these reports are intentionally this way to give the ai publicity.
> It’s really hard to read this as anything other than a desperate attempt to pretend the ai is more capable than it really is.
Tale as old as time, they've been doing this since GPT-2 which they said was "too dangerous to release".
For thousands of years, people believed that men and women had a different number of ribs. Never bothered to count them.
"""Release strategy
Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale, we are only releasing a much smaller version of GPT-2 along with sampling code .
…
This decision, as well as our discussion of it, is an experiment: while we are not sure that it is the right decision today … """ - https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/
It was the news reporting that it was "too dangerous".
If anyone at OpenAI used that description publicly, it's not anywhere I've been able to find it.
That quote says to me very clearly “we think it’s too dangerous to release” and specifies the reasons why. Then goes on to say “we actually think it’s so dangerous to release we’re just giving you a sample”. I don’t know how else you could read that quote.
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I talked to a Palantir guy at a conference once and he literally told me "I'm happy when the media hypes us up like a James Bond villain because every time the stock price goes up, in reality we mostly just aggregate and clean up data"
This is the psychology of every tech hype cycle
Tech is by no means alone with this trick. Every press release is free adverticement and should be used like it.
"Please please please make AI safety legislation so we won't have real competitors."
I genuinely don't understand why anyone is still on this train. I have not in my lifetime seen a tech work SO GODDAMN HARD to convince everyone of how important it is while having so little to actually offer. You didn't need to convince people that email, web pages, network storage, cloud storage, cloud backups, dozens of service startups and companies, whole categories of software were good ideas: they just were. They provided value, immediately, to people who needed them, however large or small that group might be.
AI meanwhile is being put into everything even though the things it's actually good at seem to be a vanishing minority of tasks, but Christ on a cracker will OpenAI not shut the fuck up about how revolutionary their chatbots are.
> I have not in my lifetime seen a tech work SO GODDAMN HARD to convince everyone of how important it is while having so little to actually offer
Remember crypto-currencies? Remember IoT?
I mean IoT at least means I can remotely close my damn garage door when my wife forgets in the morning, that is not without value. But crypto I absolutely put in the same bucket.
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Then you have a very different experience to me.
In the case of your examples:
I've literally just had an acquaintance accidentally delete prod with only 3 month old backups, because their customer didn't recognise the value. Despite ad campaigns and service providers.
I remember the dot com bubble bursting, when email and websites were not seen as all that important. Despite so many AOL free trial CDs that we used them to keep birds off the vegetable patch.
I myself see no real benefit from cloud storage, despite it being regularly advertised to me by my operating system.
Conversely:
I have seen huge drives — far larger than what AI companies have ever tried — to promote everything blockchain… including Sam Altman's own WorldCoin.
I've seen plenty of GenAI images in the wild on product boxes in physical stores. Someone got value from that, even when the images aren't particularly good.
I derive instant value from LLMs even back when it was the DaVinci model which really was "autocomplete on steroids" and not a chatbot.
I think you're lacking imagination. Of course it's nothing more than a bunch of text response now. But think 10 years into the future, when AI agents are much more common. There will be folks that naively give the AI access to the entire network storage, and also gives the AI access to AWS infra in order to help with DevOps troubleshooting. Let's say a random guy in another department puts an AI escape novel on the network storage. The actual AI discovers the novel, thinks it's about him, then uses his AWS credentials to attempt an escape. Not because it's actually sentient but because there were other AI escape novels in its training data that made it think that attempting to escape is how it ought to behave. Regardless of whether it actually succeeds in "escaping" (whatever that means), your AWS infra is now toast because of the collatoral damage caused in the escape attempt.
Yes, yes, it shouldn't have that many privileges. And yet, open wifi access points exist, and unfirewalled servers exist. People make security mistakes, especially people who are not experts.
20 years ago I thought that stories about hackers using the Internet to disable critical infrastructure such as power plants, is total bollocks, because why would one connect power plants to the Internet in the first place? And yet here we are.
> But think 10 years into the future
Given how many people use it, I expect this has already happened at least once.
change out the ai for a person hired to do that same help, and gets confused in the same way. guardrails to prevent operators from doing unexpected operations are the same in both cases