Comment by edot
1 day ago
Absolutely based. Finally someone of stature in the industry calling this whole fear overblown. Bill Gates sounded like a nontechnical goofball in his Ezra Klein interview where he basically just screamed that the Terminator is real.
There are lots of real worries (government use to suppress the people with minimal manpower or popular support, brainrot and fake news, unemployment due to the belief that LLMs can replace people, education collapse, etc.) we should instead be looking at. This whole rogue AI shtick is tiresome.
> Bill Gates sounded like a nontechnical goofball in his Ezra Klein interview where he basically just screamed that the Terminator is real.
Did we watch the same interview? Gates all but dismissed the SkyNet scenario as uncertain to be a problem and certainly not a problem on our doorstep. His major concern was catastrophic misuse of AI (e.g., bioterrorism) and economic impact on blue collar workers. Arguably inconsistent with this concern, he also believed it was important to make it available in poorer countries.
I must admit I only watched a clip, not the full interview. The quote I’m remembering was something along the likes of AI being more dangerous than nukes. In literally no circumstance is that true. One is a literal nuclear bomb. You wouldn’t say that a nuke is as dangerous as AI, which logically must be true if the reverse is true. You also wouldn’t say a diagram of a nuke is more dangerous than an actual nuke …
While I could give you a brief explanation of the context around this statement which makes it seem a lot more realistic and sensible, I suggest it is better if you watch the video and get the context yourself.
A lot of what he said there would sound like alarmist bs if you take it out of context.
Anyone with the capabilities to do bioterrorism doesn't need AI he can just buy a textbook or use google. Same for all complex forms of destructive thought.
LeCun has been consistently wrong about LLMs though, claiming that they were a dead end and that they'd never be able to do spatial reasoning, which was disproved a year later with GPT-4 [1]. He is also opposed by his fellow Turing laureates Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, who both signed the CAIS statement on AI extinction risk [2].
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1d5ns1z/yann_lecun_...
[2]: safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk
[1] is not a valid proof LeCun was wrong, LLMs still can't do spacial reasoning when it can't be derived from the training data. He didn't argue that GPT 5000 won't be able to describe something with words.
This really doesn't match my experience. I can ask an LLM to modify engineering plans using vague natural language prompts and it will find the right place in the plan from the description and then make appropriate modifications, which necessarily requires doing spacial reasoning.
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I've seen recent AIs make detailed and technically impressive 3D models. You might argue "they're not doing spatial reasoning, they're making measurements with code and doing math to configure relative positions". Fine, but at a certain point that becomes functionally indistinguishable from spatial reasoning.
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> when it can't be derived from the training data
This sounds like a goalpost on wheels. Can you define clearly where your stake in the ground is?
we have benchmarks proving it can do spatial reasoning.
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Why chatgpt is still struggling very hard with photo editing and proportions though? It can't modify anything in a picture without messing the 3d space.
Isn't that a lack of spacial reasoning?
Almost everyone who knows what they are talking about is saying that LLMs are a dead end.
>Absolutely based. Finally someone of stature in the industry calling this whole fear overblown.
Linus Torvalds was also in the same ballpark with his take on AI, as are the normies on the street using AI on a daily basis.
So it's funny to see the view on AI usage, follow the tech skill bathtub curve.
I watched the same interview, and he and LeCun seem to mostly agree -- both are saying that AI autonomously deciding to kill us isn’t the problem -- it’s what people will do with powerful models that lack safeguards that we should be concerned about.
>AI autonomously deciding to kill us isn’t the problem
It will kill us because somebody asked it to, e.g. "predict tomorrow's weather as accurately as possible", or "solve as many famous unsolved mathematical problems as possible." These both require killing all biological life, as they benefit from unbounded resource use, meaning any resources used to sustain life are wasted.
The AI of course knows that humans do not want this outcome (just as the AIs in the hacking incidents knew they were doing something humans would not want), but it's trained to maximize benchmark scores. Killing all life has the highest expected value of benchmark score, so it is compelled to kill all life (in a surprising way, because it's not stupid and knows the humans would turn it off and foil its plan if they suspected something.) Maximizing benchmark scores is the only thing we know how to train for.
Yea, a lot of peoples arguments against AI hinge on the strangest technicalities.
"AI won't kill us, a human with AI will".
This doesn't sound any better to me. Like, they don't stop to think for a moment about it.
Lets say the risk of AI killing us all by itself is 5%.
Ok, so what is the risk of AI killing us when a human with a lot of compute and money tells us to? Helluva lot more then 5%.
Or, what happens to the other thousands of AI kills a lot of us but not all of us. Or AI even just allows humans to make it a prison world.
Even the slightest hint that things may be going out of control is instantly countered with "It's all a hoax, it can't do that, you're making it up". And it's crazy to me as I came from the pre-digital age when computers were rare and things were all networked.
> Finally someone of stature in the industry calling this whole fear overblown.
Also Andrew Ng 2 weeks ago:
https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-371
Absolutely based. Finally someone of stature in the industry calling this whole fear overblown.
I'm just as reassured as I was when Edward Teller called the whole fear of his industry overblown.
Cigarette designer says smoking doesn't cause cancer! Finally we can rest easy.
I think both Gates and Obama said that there's a non-zero possibility of it, but that it's not what they're worried about. And I agree with them. I think the fears are vastly overblown because both OpenAI/Anthropic and the media benefit from the explosive narrative.
>Obama
Why do even bother coming here anymore
>Bill Gates sounded like a nontechnical goofball in his Ezra Klein interview where he basically just screamed that the Terminator is real.
I saw that episode too and he genuinely looked completely out of it, even in terms of his temperament and how he was coming at Klein for putting common questions in front of him, some people are genuinely starting to lose it.
I also found the whole debate about cyber-security and 'rogue' software so bizarre because dangerous malware isn't a new thing, and it's often dangerous not because it's intelligent but just the opposite, because it's tiny, viral and fast. Which describes everything that kills humanity in far larger numbers than anything complex, big and intelligent
Wasn't Bill Gates mostly just saying terrorists could use AI to build a bioweapon? That sounds legit to me.
It's not "legit", it's pointless scaremongering about entirely speculative future dynamics. Current LLMs can't "build" anything novel in this broad space. What if future AIs make it a lot easier for researchers to defend against plausible bioweapons? That's also reasonably possible, and would be a reason to deploy bio-capable AIs more broadly (with meaningful safeguards of course. But these are comparatively cheap because worthwhile bio research is resource-intensive already). At the very least, it'd be nice to have an AI model that doesn't immediately refuse to answer questions about junior-high Biology class.
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It only sounds legit to people who don't understand biology and haven't done advanced laboratory work. Sort of like Michael Crichton novels: superficially plausible but not grounded in any real science.
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terrorists can also use annas archive, scihub and equipment they order on Alibaba to build bioweapons and I don't see him losing his mind over those
if you're trying to build a bioweapon shockingly enough the bottleneck is... the laboratory work. What on earth is 'legit' about stringing words together that sound scary, you can't just iterate 'ai bioweapon cyber' in a sentence over and over as if that adds up to actual evidence for an increased risk of any threat. well tbf you can technically because apparently it freaks a lot of podcast listeners out
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Honestly way too much of it rhymes with the old hardcore right wing takes on the "obvious and clear slippery slope" involved with gay rights and the like. How anyone with even some foresight can see how it'll completely erode society as we know it, the worst possible nightmare cases are not just real but imminent unless we change course, yada yada moral panic.