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- Hacker News
- Cal Newport is one of the clearest minds on this whole topic. His take on doom-trolling helped me realise that there could be an end to all this nonsense that isn’t the end of us.by dofm
- I mean, the reason that all these stories about AI being an existential threat to humanity are coming out is because they've made $3.1T in debt-fuelled spending commitments and now interest rates are going up. "AI will kill us all if we don't regulate it" is their "get out of debt free" card, so they can have the U.S. government stop the arms race, raise prices on their existing models, and declare force majeure on new DC commitments:
https://emeraldbook.org/news/sep-1426-3/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49830037
It's telling that the only AI-related company that is not sounding the AI safety drumbeat is NVidia, who is the only one that is cash-flow positive because of AI.
by nostrademons - Maybe I'm a bit too skeptical/cynical, but it certainly seems like the frontier labs have fallen into their own (self-created) AI psychosis.
There is no doubt in my mind that LLMs are fantastic machines, but the imminent jump from "AGI" to "ASI" seems premature (not to mention the ever-shifting goal posts of AGI itself).
I'm in the "move as fast as possible" camp and work with LLMs all day, but I still don't believe we're a hop and a skip from ASI.
In fact, I hope I'm wrong. I hope ASI is around the corner.
What scares me though, isn't ASI. It's "AGI" (_dumb AI_) used by humans to make decisions for them, because they trust it knows best.
It's the ceding of intellectual control to high-dimensional magic mirrors, giving up critical thinking because _we_ want to believe _we_ created artificial life.
This is the new Turing test, and too many smart people are failing.
by jumploops - I trust the big AI labs about as far as I can throw them. And yet, that's still quite a bit more than I trust the US Government, especially these days. Frankly nobody in Congress, or in a leadership position in the current administration, is remotely qualified to "investigate the AI labs". About the only possible outcome of this would be a bunch of new, unenforceable, and misguided laws, and Turing Police agency. Hard pass, thanks.by mindcrime
- - ban certain types of hazardous information from being included in the training data (virology, weaponry, cybercrime).
- ban the "personalization" of chatbots (there is no need for them to have a personality, other than to make them addictive).
- ban chatbot therapists / companions.
- ban recursive self-improvement and superintelligence.
by pompom75 - Why aren't they running agents on isolated computers without Internet access? This way, breaking free of containers would not matter.
It is truly a security nightmare that so many people are have given agents root access to their entire computers, in addition to presumably very private personal information.
by psyklic - This is a wrong-headed attempt to regulate AI. The real problems are different.
AI systems, especially multi-agent ones that can do things, are more akin to corporations, than individuals. When you read the logs from the Hugging Face incident, you're seeing something that looks a lot like internal corporate emails. Various units of the organization are arguing over what to do and who does what. They eventually converge and get the job done, breaking the rules at times. This is normal corporate behavior.
When agentic AIs do something outside their own internal world, they do it by engaging in transactions with external systems and people. As yet, few have robots to do their bidding. So, again, this is normal corporate behavior.
A corporation is a goal-seeking system. In theory, if you agree with Milton Friedman, its sole purpose is to maximize shareholder value. Internally, within the company, there are subgoals, which exist to support the top level goal. That, too, is what multi-agent AIs do.
The uncomfortable place this thinking leads is that AI regulation and corporate regulation are very similar. That's not something the political part of the world wants to think about too hard. It would mean putting more constraints on corporate power.
Yet that can't be ignored, because we're likely to see corporations where some parts are AI and some parts are human. That's already been done a few times as a demo, not too successfully. Yet. It's going to hit hard when an AI-run company outperforms a human one.
by Animats - > We must move past vague discussions of “AI” and instead isolate the specific types of systems that are creating problems.
This is absolutely correct and its surprising how rarely you see commenters in the media push to go into the specifics on this. AI is just matrix math and its what you connect that math to that matters, we should talk a little more about what we are willing to connect AI to and little less about how scary or capable the models appear.
by jimmyjazz14