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Comment by chinathrow

3 hours ago

If they believe it, they can stop. All of them. There's no sign though that any pacing/slowdown or whatever is in place, zero.

21 comments

chinathrow

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yes_man  3 hours ago

OpenAI claims to have paused the training of their ”most capable” models: https://apnews.com/article/ai-openai-anthropic-agents-rogue-...

Of course I am not making an argument for them being honest as there could be entirely other reasons to a pause (like financial ones). Just pointing out ”no signs of pacing” is not true

  • jquery  15 minutes ago

    If you read between the lines, that's not exactly a pause. That's just them lamenting that unsupervised training has temporarily hit a limit, and using that as yet another reason the industry needs to be regulated so that OpenAI, Claude, and MechaHitler are the only approved AIs.

    • meowface  12 minutes ago

      Oh my god, we have these "it's regulatory capture!" populists even on HN now? I thought we were better than this.

      They want coordinated action to prevent a multipolar trap and potential catastrophe by future superintelligent AI (which may emerge quite rapidly if RSI ever hits an inflection point). It's not rocket science. The rules would apply to everyone. The rules they're advocating for are not "only OpenAI and Anthropic can make AI".

perching_aix  3 hours ago

I don't think that's how the market works. Anti-slavery regulation didn't stop slavery either, just moved it abroad. Same for trash handling regulations, it's just shipped abroad. Falling behind on useful AI capability is obviously not in the interest of anyone, so either all players coordinate, or an arms race towards ??? it is.

It may very well be self serving what they're saying, but that doesn't mean it isn't simultaneously true.

  • benrutter  3 hours ago

    > I don't think that's how the market works

    I think you're sort of right, but then I'd have found it very strange / deeply suspicious, if during the time of slavery being legal, advocates of abolitionism were practicing slave-owners.

    If you think AI is going to destroy humanity, it still feels absolutely crazy to leap to "well I might as well be the one to profit from destroying humanity".

    • perching_aix  3 hours ago

      Quick search does suggest to me that a number of - even prominent - abolitionists were slave owners, but I'll be honest, the topic is hardly my specialty.

      As for the other point, crazy, cynical, and even unethical as it may come off, it is hardly inconsistent with how people generally behave when met with hard limits (i.e. making the most of what's available, and approximating the desired state if that is unattainable). This is just a variation on the same.

      Something could be said about "what if they're mistaken", but if all players are making a mistake, then that makes little practical difference; it may as well be real.

      1 reply →

  • dns_snek  3 hours ago

    > Falling behind on useful AI capability is obviously not in the interest of anyone

    Hence the argument that they're either full of shit, or psychopaths who need to be stopped at all costs.

ForHackernews  3 hours ago

There was a NYT piece about this recently. They are believers in a millennialist cult in which the arrival of an omnipotent machine-god is thought inevitable, and the only question is whether it will be "aligned" (good) or "misaligned" (evil).

They are the good heroes racing to make sure they bring forth the Aligned God because if they fail, surely the bad people will raise the Misaligned Devil.

Ref w/gift link https://x.com/sapinker/status/2096236079477096630

  • jquery  1 few seconds ago

    Thank you for that gift link, I had no idea that Altman and other leading figures in American AI had such close ties to that raving lunatic Eliezer Yudkowsky. It explains so much about why China is approaching AI like it's a friendly technology but American CEOs keep blabbering on about the End Times.

  • meowface  35 minutes ago

    Pinker unfortunately has very little clue what he's talking about here. I eagerly await Scott Alexander's inevitable essay response to him.

  • _kb  3 hours ago

    The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a god is a good guy with a god.