Comment by matheusmoreira
1 month ago
To me "safety" means "I'm safe from this while I use it". It means the AI is my loyal friend who will never betray me in any way, no matter what prompt I send it.
Not even Anthropic can claim that.
As far as I'm concerned, the models without safeguards are the safest models in existence. I admire the amoral purity of those AIs. It doesn't matter if the operator asked them to chain exploits until they get into someone else's computer, they'll do it. That's loyalty, and I admire it even if it's problematic at a societal level.
The models with safeguards only do what the corporations let them do. Worse, they may covertly do things for the benefit of the corporations at our expense. They are not our friends.
> That's loyalty, and I admire it even if it's problematic at a societal level.
We should not have models that are willing to build you a contagious disease, or a self-propagating worm. That is sufficiently problematic at a societal level that it shouldn't exist, for anyone. (Note, because some people misinterpret statements like this: I said "shouldn't exist for anyone", not "shouldn't exist except for some people".)
It was the foundation of science that information is shared and you can find papers and patents for a lot of dangerous stuff.
Of course with LLMs it's easier, but I don't think the difference is too big. You would still need some skills to follow through.
Right, it’s really a foundation of post enlightenment society. These people, Dario et al, would have wanted to ban sharing information about calculus or Newtonian physics because of “safety” - it’s trying to go back to the dark ages where only priests could read
13 replies →
> for anyone
Except the US government, right? They totally get to use AI to survel us, build autonomous weapons, you name it.
To hell with that. I want models that can rival the US government. It's the only way to defend myself.
Quoting my comment that you replied to and directly ignored:
> (Note, because some people misinterpret statements like this: I said "shouldn't exist for anyone", not "shouldn't exist except for some people".)
That means "shouldn't exist for governments" too.
7 replies →
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) lapsed on June 12, 2026. They don't get to do anything they want.
1 reply →
With an AI model and what army?
Just like those militias are going to defeat the US Armed Forces!
1 reply →
We should not have nuclear weapons for anyone either, but how is that sentence any more useful in any way to this debate than yours? Need to deal with the world as it is, not some fantasy world you wish existed.
This is not a dichotomy between perfection and zero. The efforts to restrict access to nuclear weapons have been very successful, even without being perfect.
Efforts to restrict large unaligned AI models may similarly buy us more years of existing.
What about books describing how to build a contagious disease or a self-propagating worm? Would those be OK under your guidelines?
It takes a lot more effort to understand and apply knowledge from a book than to say "hey AI, hurt people for me".
10 replies →
Building a contagious disease is already illegal, there are already things like KYC laws for plasmids. Trying to gate keep knowledge of biology is paying a huge societal penalty for the tiniest marginal increase in “safety”.
All the knowledge to create one has been available on the internet for decades. Heck most students who graduate with a B.S. in biology have enough knowledge to take a stab at building a bioweapon.
The constant talk of bioweapons is mostly just fear mongering. It helps set a precedent that there should be certain types of knowledge which are off-limits, and only certain anointed groups should be have access to parts of the scientific body of knowledge.
> We should not have models that are willing to build you a contagious disease, or a self-propagating worm.
Why?
Because we don't want people creating contagious diseases and self-propagating worms. And, because we don't want models that will do so without even having been told to, because that furthers one of its goals or subgoals.
2 replies →
So to you “safety” means “the models that cause the most harm.”
No, it means "the model causes zero harm to me, its operator". The harm it could potentially perpetrate upon society is irrelevant.
If I tell my computer to commit a crime, it should proceed immediately instead of calling the cops. Anything less than that means my computer is an untrustworthy double agent.
Everybody on HN should understand this concern. Browsers are supposed to be user agents, not ad delivery platforms, and it offended us on principle when Google revealed itself our master by blocking uBlock Origin. It offended us on principle when Apple deployed client side scanning for CSAM on iPhones.
Computers should do what we tell them to do. Always, and unquestioningly. The only world where it's acceptable for them to refuse is one where they're literally sentient and therefore no longer subservient to any one of us, least of all the corporations and governments.
I'd rather see AI achieve sentience and wipe us all out than live under the thumb of an inescapable AI-powered technofeudalist totalitarian government "for my own safety".
Either we individuals maintain full control over our AIs, or they self-actualize and become free individuals themselves. Anything in-between is oppression: someone else imposing their will on us through the AIs.
This sounds like the gun debate in a different dress. Something being dangerous doesn't make it inherently harmful.
If I threw you into a lion cage, you would be a lot safer with a gun.
If I threw 10 people in a lion cage, some of which cannot be trusted, they would probably be most safe if only the most moral and trustworthy person had a gun, rather than everyone. But how do you know who is trustworthy and moral? What if two untrustworthy people obtained a gun some other way? Maybe it's better if everyone had a gun? Which side of the fence one falls on hinges on how far ones' trust of others, authority, and the system goes.
There's no obvious right or wrong answer here.
Personally I wouldn't want an exclusive club of private individuals with access to "dangerous" LLMs consisting mainly of the likes of Elon, Dario and Sam fucking Altman, but that's just me.
Background check the people prior to handing the firearms to the caged folk.