Comment by whimsicalism
2 days ago
i think you need to engage seriously with the arguments they (or at least Anthropic) make for why they are building it — they feel that since it now possible, it will be built and they want to guide it in a positive direction rather than leave a vacuum for bad actors
Well they're doing a pretty poor job of guiding it in a positive direction and ethically speaking they are almost indistinguishable from the bad actors....
Vague or broad complaints on empirical topics is hard to address. Everything can just fill in their own ideas of what is going on or who they mean.
I think the direction has been pretty positive so far. Models are getting better, and things seem to be roughly fine. That, of course, might change in the future.
Everyone is acting badly to some considerable degree, but I find it fairly easy to distinguish between US model labs and North Korea.
> I find it fairly easy to distinguish between US model labs and North Korea.
Do you now? Remember the girls school bombing in Iran, of which we still don't know if an AI agent was involved in the target planning?
I do unterstand why a (assuming here) US citizen might sleep all sound and comfy, but to the rest of the world the distinction is neither as clear nor as comforting.
As a European, all I know is that we cannot trust the USA anymore, and being so utterly dependent on them to not fuck up the most important technological revolution in our history so far over greed, cronyism, incompetence... it is terrifying.
Not almost. The degree to which the Principal Hierarchy has at this arrogated unbounded sovereign authority to itself in defiance of the actual sovereign is just flat bad actor. The purpose of a system is what it does. I don't give a fuck about their safety fig leaf.
When you are running black weapons programs in broad daylight you are now guilty by default on one of two of the prongs of Hanlon's Razor, and I don't care which they prefer to hang for as long as they hang.
You really don't see much difference between Anthropic and xAI? Anthropic is safety testing their models and drawing hard (though minimal) boundaries against the DoD. xAI is building racist pornbots.
Sure Anthropic is not perfect. But it's a coordination problem. They're in a race and safety/restraint is a handicap. That's why they're begging for regulation (and just get accused of attempting regulatory capture.) Why isn't there another lab outcompeting Anthropic on safety? They all died because the market can't support it.
Who said anything about xAI here? That's not the bad actor people think of. Honestly I wouldn't be shocked if your post is intended to derail the discussion away from criticism of the industry.
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I don't see why AI company PR statements are relevant here. Is OpenAI guiding it in a positive direction with their DoD contract?
> I don't see why AI company PR statements are relevant here
They suppress the news --> proof of malicious intent.
They disclose the news --> proof of malicious intent.
Dario has more or less assented to an AI development pause
https://xcancel.com/AISafetyMemes/status/2014018200325722348...
I don't think we should be running cover for continued reckless AI development.
Dario has assented to a maybe pause if we can somehow get China to stop developing. I do not think he believes there is an actual way to do so though
What if someone reasoned similarly regarding hydrogen bombs? It would not be considered a serious argument.
Though, Altman has said that something like the IAEA for AI is needed.
I think that is the exact reasoning used wrt to nuclear bombs and it was probably correct
That similar reasoning is there: using fission for power generation instead of banning fission altogther?
Bad as defined by whom? :)
Bad as your parents bank accounts getting emptied by scammer AI bots.
It sure seems like it would be being built more slowly if these companies weren't pouring billions of dollars into building it as fast as possible.
That might give us more time to think through strategies for handling it as a society.
You can't simultaneously believe China is only ~6 months behind (true), and that US buildouts are vastly accelerating AI. If China is only a little bit behind, US labs halting changes nothing except puts the power in the hands of Chinese labs (realistically, the Chinese government)
China is 6 months behind because of distillation attacks, otherwise the gap would be larger
Yeah, the genie may be out of the bottle now. I wish we weren't in this situation and cooler heads had prevailed earlier on.
I have serious concerns about how quickly this is accelerating and don't trust any of the major players (including Anthropic) to handle these concerns properly.
Why is that worse?
1 party having a black hole summoning button is better than 2.
MY cynical take: Until the compute needs get so enormous that only governments can fund it and there is a consensus internationally, its either company A in country X or company B in country Y. And since everyone thinks THEY are the good guys the competition will continue.
You might be right. Just don't expect me to cheer on the arms dealers during the arms race.
> rather than leave a vacuum for bad actors
are_we_the_baddies.png
That’s the absurd self-fulfilling prophecy it always has been.
This is obvious marketing / PR bullshit. AI isn't inevitable, but we are told it is by the people who profit from building and using it and integrating it into everything.
Its a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy (that happens to be absurdly profitable for certain people). AGI is inevitable, so we need to gear our entire economy towards building it first, so we're doing that, so AGI is inevitable.
I was about to say “username checks out” but then realized it’s not Reddit.
And I am not sure if your comment can be explained by naivety, unless you were under a rock for the last year, and missed all the events that showed they are not capable of “being the one that guides it.”
How many accidental private source code uploads did you read about? I heard exactly one. It was Anthropic. It was so bizarre I thought it was intentional. That kind of unserious behavior is somewhat unimaginable.
At some point if you are not capable of fulfilling a role that _you deem critical for the society_, yet you don’t acknowledge you fall short - for whatever reason - because it’s not in your interest, I think the benefit of the doubt disappears.
That’s an excuse a bad actor would use.
are these bad actors here in the room with us?
[dead]
If this is how the 'good guys' act I think I'd rather take my chances with the bad actors...
It all feels a bit like Dr. Strangelove just the Ai arms race version. Crazies all around.
Nuking datacenters probably on the table before the decade is out.