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- Hacker News
- Dario, Sam, and Elon are all on the same page on this.
So it's either they truly think AI is going to kill us all, or there's some other motives at play here.
I don't think these people could possibly agree on the color of the sky, so what could the other possible motives be, based on what we know?
OpenAI / Anthropic models have largely stopped advancing - that's not a good look when you're pre-IPO and Chinese models are catching up.
xAI is tracking behind, and whatever regulation it may be that paces the frontier, Musk is less likely to be affected by it. Therefore xAI should be pro-regulation that stiffles his competition and gives him time to catch up.
by glub - > So it's either they truly think AI is going to kill us all
Yes. Basically everyone here is dismissing this possibility. We shouldn’t.
by rphv - "So it's either they truly think AI is going to kill us all"
Exactly how does a CPU kill 8 odd billion people? Even if they got hold of the weapons to wipe out a few billion, surely the remain billions would just turn off the data centres?
by ta20240528 - Yeah, this 100% looks like an effort to use fear to create a regulatory moat.by jmull
- > So it's either they truly think AI is going to kill us all, or there's some other motives at play here. I don't think these people could possibly agree on the color of the sky,[...]
And yet, they historically did agree on the existence of AI risk, since before OpenAI was even founded.
by stratos123 - > OpenAI / Anthropic models have largely stopped advancing - that's not a good look when you're pre-IPO and Chinese models are catching up.
What is going on in this thread?
Are these even real comments?
While I strongly agree on the need to pace the frontier, I do think there are reasonable arguments that could be made against it.
Non of those are being made here though. It's just speculation that the CEOs of the fastest growing companies in the world are somehow obsessed with regulatory capture to maintain their lead, and have been playing the long game by talking AI risk for 10+ years so that when they become the CEOs of leading AI companies they can push for regulatory capture.
Perhaps they're all just genuinely concerned?
What would regulatory capture even give them? Who are they so worried will compete with them? Google, Mistral? Even if it's Chinese AI labs, it seems odd for anyone in the West to be opposed to any regulation that would slow them.
So assuming they are obsessed with regulatory capture – what's the argument for why they would want it?
by kypro - > OpenAI / Anthropic models have largely stopped advancing - that's not a good look when you're pre-IPO and Chinese models are catching up.
This is obviously untrue… do you use any of them?
by TheSisb2 - > OpenAI / Anthropic models have largely stopped advancing
Have they? That seems like quite a claim given the last 6 months, particularly for cybersecurity.
by IanCal - > OpenAI / Anthropic models have largely stopped advancing
I'm shocked anyone could conclude this. This year it became common for people to entirely delegate coding to AI (I know many competent programmers/researchers who do this now). Progress in math has just been insane. An internal model at OAI just resolved one of the most celebrated open problems in mathematics. If anything, progress has accelerated.
by qnleigh - Hard disagree. Our choices are:
A) Bet our collective good on the national and international cooperation of all companies, nations, and people to come together in order to slow down development of one of the most powerful economic tools (and/or weapons) the world has ever known. Or
B) Assume that all our systems will be targeted by super hackers right now, and take appropriate measures to deal with that reality.
If I have to put my community’s wellbeing on the line behind one of those possibilities, I know which I’ll be betting on.
by thadt - > Assume that all our systems will be targeted by super hackers right now, and take appropriate measures to deal with that reality
Smashing the gas pedal is not "taking appropriate measures". Did you read the article? Needing more time for more secure operations is literally one of the arguments for pacing.
by causal - Of course it is B). If you can use LLMs to find bugs and vulns in software you don't own, you certainly can use them to find bugs in software you _do_ own. They are amazing at that job.
Also, models like GLM 5.3 have zero guardrails in that regard ("find vulns in (...)" prompts just work)
by TuxSH - B) needs more time and A) provides exactly that.by HellDunkel
- These do not seem to be mutually exclusive. Should we not do both?by cardamomo
- > We have sought a middle way: to show that it’s possible to build carefully and succeed commercially, and to make safety something on which AI companies compete. In other words, to create a race to the top
> Transparency. Regardless of what commitments we make, the public deserves to know what is going on. Anthropic has been a supporter of transparency for a long time
And then it goes on tangent of how we should pace everything (not just AI, but also the ingredients of what goes into AI, whatever that means), but only within approved democracies™, and outright restrict everything outside approved democracies™, because reasons that are definitely not about succeeding commercially that is threatened by the most transparent instrument possible - open weights, produced by basically just China.
I wonder what Dario would have done if open weights weren't produced by US's geopolitical adversary. How would an authoritarian manifesto be wrapped then?
Suppose it was, I don't know, Australia producing SOTA open weights, because they believed it was the right thing to do for the benefits of humanity - would Dario propose making Australia a geopolitical adversary too?
by glub - > Suppose it was, I don't know, Australia producing SOTA open weights, because they believed it was the right thing to do for the benefits of humanity - would Dario propose making Australia a geopolitical adversary too?
I'd expect he thinks that people are capable of realizing that AI is very dangerous and also that democracies end up mostly representing the will of the people, from which it follows that Hypothetical AI Leader Australia would agree to ban it too. This argument doesn't work for countries which don't care what their citizens want, like China.
I do think that it's a questionable decision to alienate China this much in this essay, instead of leaving open the possibility of China agreeing to a treaty that'll limit their progress. I suspect Dario is doing this to signal his allegiance with the US government, in hopes to increase the chance they'll go along with him, which is an unfortunate choice but plausibly the correct one.
by stratos123 - I also like the idea of pacing the frontier and slowing down development so we all have a chance to stop and catch our breath. However, I don't think regulating AI is the way to do it. I would tackle the problem by constraining the resources used to run AI models; the "simplest" way to do that is increasing the costs of running a data center. The two easiest places to raise data center costs are electricity and water tariffs.
I think those two tariffs are the best place to raise costs because they can be increased incrementally, state by state or country by country. The main problem with the regulatory approach is that it's a "big bang" post-board approach. Nothing happens until the regulation is defined and deployed, and corporations are experts at delaying implementation.
Yes, increasing tariffs means touching many individual regulatory domains at the state and municipal levels, but like deploying solar energy or wind power, you can do it incrementally.
by rickydroll - This makes no sense. The hardware is only going to get cheaper. In a decade, everybody could be running an ASI on their phones.
What we need to do is to make unaligned AIs illegal and monitor for them, like we do with nuclear weapons. And make aligned AI strong enough to counter it, for deterrence and defense.
by esafak - I think taxes like these actually worsen the incentive structure. If it’s effectively more expensive to do training and inference, labs will be incentivized even more to improve efficiency. Opaque recurrence seems like a great way to improve efficiency, and it comes at the cost of safetyby jfreds
- Yes, water not used for human consumption should be more expensive (we should stop subsidies for that). Of course it won’t affect datacenters because they don’t use that much water, but well at least get rid of the most inefficient agricultural practices.by azan_
- > Not building the technology deprives humanity of benefits or simply places AI in the hands of authoritarian powers
Can someone clarify this for me? How far along would the open weight models be without the frenzied pace of the frontier labs?
As a non-US citizen, which authoritarian powers is he referring to? As far as I'm aware, the US is the only country using frontier models to conduct air strikes on civilians and orchestrate assassinations of foreign governments.
by zinodaur - Yeah the Chinese fear-mongering falls a bit flat when coming from a point of maintaining US supremacyby j_maffe
- > As a non-US citizen, which authoritarian powers is he referring to? As far as I'm aware, the US is the only country using frontier models to conduct air strikes on civilians and orchestrate assassinations of foreign governments.
Israel is doing that too.
I believe Russia and Ukraine have both also used AI powered autonomous drones in warfare at this point - tho probably not frontier ones, since they need to run on device or else they're not autonomous.
by kennywinker - Anthropic is about to go public, but they figured they can't keep making improvement at the same pace they used to. If the frontier is paced, they can continue hyping their unreleased capabilities that coincidentally cannot be released due to things outside their control. Which buy them more time to try to improve the models.
- This is just completely false lol. They most certainly can make better models - why cant people here just read this for face value? I think anthropic is legitimately concerned about the safety implications of stronger models. Race dynamics necessitate that they make better and better models, which they clearly think is bad.
They have an internal model which could solve a millenium problem end to end with no intervention, whereas current available models can't. They can clearly make better models. Not everything these guys say is some 500iq game theory optimal 4D chess PR or subterfuge strategy.
by boshalfoshal - Distillation is a great thing for consumers. It improves competition and reduces the massive moats that OpenAI and Anthropic have in compute that would otherwise lead them to be duopolists. It’s also only fair that AIs trained on humanity’s wealth of knowledge for Pennie’s allow competition to train on humanity’s wealth of knowledge at market cost.by iloveoof
- He did actually specify that diffusion should be limited for authoritarian countries, which I appreciated. If his focus is really safety, distillation in countries that are bound by safety regulation should be fineby pastel8739
- Yeah, we should give a limited copyright waiver for pre training, given that the model is released as open weight and allow labs to compete with RL on that basis.
- Distillation is only a great thing for consumers as long as you ignore all AI risks, which are what this post is about. If you don't, you have to weight greater access to better open-source models against greater exposure to risks caused by these models existing. Everything hinges on how major you think the risks will be.by stratos123
- I don't see how the dual goals of "we have to make an agreement with China for mutual slowdown" but also "we have to ensure we will always stay ahead of China" would work.
I imagine the first thing the chinese government would demand in negotiations about such an agreement would be a lifting of the chip and distillation ban.
> Some may believe these measures make it more difficult to cooperate with China, but I believe the opposite is true: these measures increase the leverage held by democracies and make an agreement more likely in the future.
Everyone can believe what they like, but it seems to me the "leverage" in that case would exactly be the ability to lift those measures - you can't have both, use them as leverage and keep them active at the same time.
by xg15