Comment by swiftcoder
2 hours ago
> a lot of people who live in countries with gun control don’t want AI offensive capabilities to be regulated
These are not really analogous: direct lethality of LLMs is quite low.
Yes, they might be used to exploit a critical system, leading to loss of life, but that is a second-order effect at best. It's also not a new capability - LLMs may discover exploits faster, but cyberattacks against infrastructure targets were already a thing. Stuxnet is 20 years old...
> direct lethality of LLMs is quite low.
For now, I would generally agree that it will remain low however the AI companies themselves are publically stating how capable/dangerous these models are (for whatever reason marketing/hype/upcoming IPO's, to keep the investments coming), if we take their statements at face value then prudence would suggest we stop training new ones and more fully examine the capabilities of what we've currently built.
In reality, that's not going to happen, the competition between the US and China means there will be no unilateral pause, they'll both keeping rushing/pushing as fast as they can throwing caution to the wind while doing it.
As a species though we've always done that, We just take a crowbar to Pandora's box and see what happens.
> These are not really analogous: direct lethality of LLMs is quite low.
I imagine an LLM with no safeguards and a psychopathic mind would be considerably more dangerous than a gun. I don’t mean only for hacking. Though everyone in the world suddenly having a pocket expert hacker should be taken seriously.
I find it completely insane when people bash the labs for even considering safety. The entitlement is off the charts.
> I imagine an LLM with no safeguards and a psychopathic mind would be considerably more dangerous than a gun
Define the axis along which "more dangerous" is measured?
If we are scoring on lethality, guns already score 100%, instantaneous death. If we are scoring on number of casualties, guns have already been used to cause mass-fatalities.
Unless we are giving the LLM an armed drone, skynet-style, we're at best talking about indirect casualties (swatting, hacking street lights to provoke crashes, etc).