Comment by swiftcoder
1 hour 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 done that, We just take a crowbar to Pandora's box and see what happens.