Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- by Rzor
- I just drank a glass of wine. I'll drink one more and I swear to you I'll stop after that, forever.by karim79
- "Woah dude, this is so revolutionary that if we keep pace, it'll like, change the world even more, man... we'd better slow down..."
"BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY"
by tuckerpo - Nice story - AI will kill humans therefore we will slow down.
When all labs are approaching the same marginal improvment which is a clear sign that more breakthroughs needed to achieve the god they hyped.
by aogaili - To all the people whose only opinion on anything that openai does is 'marketing hype', how would you expect them to act if they were making rapid progress and were actually concerned about safety?by MintyPyro
- Ask for regulation.
If progress is coming easy and fast and you're worried about the danger your product poses, you should also be worried about the danger your competitors' products pose. So, you reach out to governments and ask for rules to constrain and slow things down for everyone, so that your company isn't put at a disadvantage for being cautious.
by beloch - The big psyop/trick is that "AI development has to slow down" and not that we hit limits with the technology or the technology is immature.
Either way it's a win-win for whoever sells that message because you make the makers and the warners the center of attention. And when they say "we are considering slowing down" they mean "if we get enough money to slow down we'll do it". And of course they never want you to think AI is a technology employed by humans who need be changed, not the technology. So as long as you engage this massive straw man to focus on the wrong thing you do nothing to hold the leaders accountable for their harmful and selfish actions and decisions for society.
by mannanj - The message was directed at the employees. Their work may slow down, but that doesn't imply that all work will slow down. OpenAI also has this technology that purportedly can do the work without employees. In fact, if the employee work isn't starting to slow down then OpenAI has bigger problems given the business model that keeps getting promised to investors.by win311fwg
- Thoughts and open (I think) questions:
1. What are we actually talking about, slowing development or slowing public release? I can't imagine the the US is keen to slow actual development when we have adversarial state-backed labs continuing development. Seems to me that this is a global pact or it's nothing. Stopping a single lab, even if it's the current leader, won't put the genie back in the bottle.
2. Unless they stop actual advancement, isn't the risk essentially identical? At this point, it's an arms race between the lab and its own model. I don't think it far fetched to think that it might successfully exfiltrate its weights, for example.
3. There are going to be factions who don't want to stop. Should we worry about them defecting to other labs or other countries?
by ibejoeb - They are hoping to use regulatory capture to regain lost market dominance.
The problem is with that much debt buried in the report, no one is buying peoples sandbagging nonsense anymore. Even the boring bond market is showing odd behavior much to the chagrin of congress. =3
by Joel_Mckay - Odd. I (and many others) have been saying for months that we don't know which part of the s-curve we are on.
I guess now we do.
by lelanthran - This is the closest to an admission of failure you'll get from sama.by copperx
- <Not an AI researcher -- Just thinking out loud>
Perhaps it's getting more difficult to move the 'goal posts'?
- Train LLMs on texts -> OMG AI can write!
- Train LLMs on code -> OMG AI can code!
- Train LLMs on images -> OMG AI can generate images!
- Train LLMs on video -> OMG AI can generate videos!
- Train LLMs on math -> give free access to 100,000 researchers/scientists/mathematicians -> invest resources into Lean -> OMG AI can solve math problems!
I say 'goal posts' because that's a common argument, but the perspective that seems to not be considered is that the LLMs are doing the same thing over and over again in different domains while be fine-tuned by labeling and human review.
The emergent behavior argument is a separate consideration, but I can imagine an AI being given a list of words (a harness) that guides how it operates--not the other way around--and the difficult problem is narrowing down and filtering all the associations with the words/harness to properly align it.
And perhaps the recursive looping being discussed creates incredibly difficult (impossible) to predict behavior? If the AI could modify it's own harness, is that AGI? If we fully understood what happens in high dimensional space, and could predict the output of any combination of input tokens, then is it not AGI?
Or perhaps I just tell myself this to stop worrying about a future involving ASI (:
by YesBox - I, too, consider pausing the work on the Grand Unified Theory of physics. It is too dangerous for humanity.by 1298576
- I've paused my work on faster-than-light travel in order to more fully assess the consequences.by bananamogul
- When the Chinese model drops that tops a paused Anthropic and OpenAI in all benchmarks how low will their valuations go?by int32_64
- Claude will release another employee ballast, the valid but in-conceived alarmism will surely reach POTUS ears.by sim04ful
- OpenAI will release the multiple-north-star bench and get 99%.by 1298576
- It remains to be seen whether the Chinese AI labs actually are capable of improving on their own or if they just distilled the US frontier models.by _ink_