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- Hacker News
- I feel exactly the same way about the kind of LLM-based AI we have today.
But the AI x-risk argument is about what happens when we have "real" AI that can actually think like humans but a million times faster.
There are no real experts on this and yet it does seem worth worrying about in advance.
by jacobgold - Is fool's expertise the same as epistemic trespassing? I didn't quite get that.by chanux
- > https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...
it seems like people aren't even reading this RAND paper, just blindly appealing to it. it basically concludes that a fuck ton of damage can be done, but its unlikely every human will die as a result.
- there is truly no domain a software engineer won't underestimate
- > the ballyhooed OpenAI escape depended on a pedestrian failure of containment
I... I can't believe people still think this way. A whole class of security measures are no longer useful and this guy thinks it is "pedestrian".
This kind of isolation - artifactory having access to only a specific IPs - is what is used in most places, including my university and at my own job.
LLMs basically rendered this kind of isolation almost useless by bringing in the ability to chain together never before found vulnerabilities to escape the containment. This was not possible before.
How is this pedestrian??! The author might say "oh well they should have airgapped actually" in a smug way. But you can only know this retrospectively. Even then, isn't it noteworthy and a meaningfully different class of cyber attack?
by simianwords - https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...
I skimmed the RAND paper too and didn't come away from this feeling good at all.
There's a middle-ground for AI doomage which doesn't involve killing every last human on earth. As AI rapidly becomes more capable it displaces jobs faster than people can be retrained.
I fear a global economic depression, wider wealth inequality than ever before, a loss of benefits due to much lower tax revenues and greater imbalance of power, dismal job prospects returning to non-automated labor--the list goes on really.
And to connect this to the article: the experts who claimed that AI capability would slow down because of some "scaling laws" or whatever--they've been wrong. If anything, the progress is faster than most of us imagined and is only accelerating.
ChatGPT came out 4 years ago. Look at what's possible today. Now imagine 4 years from today.
by alecst - As long as AI does not have legs to chase me and hands to choke me out, any sort of AI doom is just a litmus test for hype merchants. All of the recent "false flags" with OpenAI and Anthropic "hacking" things without doing any meaningful harm is just another set of things pointing towards it. LLM's are a great tool, but as long as it is .gguf somewhere on a drive that can be rm'd, unless they just connect the nukes to claude with --dangerously-skip-permissions, is just a meme.by proxysna
- > we can fairly say that Hinton was wrong because his prediction did not reflect what a radiologist actually does: had Hinton bothered to ask the question, he would have learned that practitioners do much more than interpret diagnostic images.
This has been the crux, for me, of arguments I have had with non-technical people about why, as a software engineer, I am intensely relaxed about AI "taking human jobs". Recently Ford quietly started re-recruiting engineers after they discovered the hard way that their engineers had been doing more than they thought they had, and I sent articles about it to friends I had previously been discussing the matter with. It is still mind-blowing to me that a business historically famous for automating manual labour can have made this mistake, i.e. of literally not knowing what their staff actually do.
Humans aren't machines, who would have guessed? But, perhaps more importantly, machines aren't humans, and the adherence of a lot of domain experts (that should know better) to fairy tale fantasies about the tech they are literally building genuinely makes me wonder if the whole field has just gotten dumber in the 21st century.
by alex-moon