Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I also have near zero concerns about that, but I worry that we will wipe ourselves out by social and economic chaos caused by AI.
So I'd just ask everyone, don't get too greedy. Its better to be powerful in a world where people can live good lives than lord over a barren wasteland.
by jackmott42 - "He attributes the incidents to poor human oversight and system design, and says they’re “totally preventable" - I know people respect him, but this sounds like someone paid to say this. Aren't most extinction risks preventable with better human oversight and system design? I mean we can have an asteroid hit us, but outside of this, isn't the point of talking about a problem that we can prevent it, and failing to leads to that? What is he saying that I'm missing?by figassis
- LeCun has been consistently wrong for the last ten years, I am not sure why he keeps being amplified.
Edit: I am sure, it's denial.
by yewenjie - I am just amazed how otherwise smart people can say such things. Many people in here too.
Within 4 years of the big bang with ChatGPT, we have seen a development unlike anything we have ever seen. Now LLMs and related architectures can solve our very hardest math problems.
They can speak, they can create videos and pictures, they can control robots. The only thing that they still miss is persistent memory for each agent that is efficient, some LoRa thingy, but I'm sure hundreds of very smart people are working on that.
The development is not stopping at all, in fact it is speeding up. Even if, and that is very unlikely, they will not get smarter, then they will get cheaper and faster.
If openAI can crack major math problems with 10.000 agents, then what can you do with 100 million agents that run 1000 times as fast?
Yeah sure, maybe most of these gigantic swarms will not go rogue if we do our job well. But there will be times when when we make a mistake and a swarm will go rogue. And what if one time the swarm will conclude that killing a lot of humans is an instumental goal.
How can you be sure that if something so powerful looks at every single possbility, every single crack of every single technology that can wipe us out, that it will not fine one?
One new chemical that can poison the entire earth and you only need to impersonate that general and that factories CEO? Some type of prion? A virus? Something that we don't even know about and can't even imagine yet?
I think many people do not truly consider that these swarms will be much smarter than you or me and completely unpredictable.
by kosh2 - 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.
by edot - LeCun also said back in 2022 that "if you train a machine, as powerful as it could be, your 'GPT-5000', on text", it will never be able to learn basic common-sense physics like that objects placed on tables will move along with them.by stratos123
- A huge chunk of humans are sedated with infinite supply of cortex-disabling short form video and games.
Another huge chunk are too distracted by having to scrape by for a living and work multiple jobs or raise kids and survive financially until exhausted. That second group will keep increasing as the first flows into it.
The rest are aging, disabled, or too young and pegging themselves majorly in the first category until they hit the second.
The people aware enough to hold on to their brain and do something with it in their time available are trying to figure out AI and how to make money with it. The variable rewards of promoting AI are turning into an addiction with some of them, especially if grasping for straws with little inherent insights into the problems prompted.
So if you are able to fly above the AI-generated addictions and have the privilege of time to do it, see what you can do.
by dzink - LLMs, plus broadly sourced yet expertly curated training sources, plus clever harnesses, plus RAS, etc. do an ever better job of synthesizing their training set into useful responses. For some use cases like coding, that's very useful now and likely to get at least somewhat better before reaching limitations based on the training set.
That's not going to reach AGI, mainly because today's recipe for AI products isn't built to be AGI. Some people believe it will reach AGI because the performance and applicability of LLMs was emergent. There's a case to be made that AGI could be similarly emergent. After all, what we intuitively call our consciousness emerged from a network of neurons.
I don't buy it, mainly because the network of neurons and how they interact in our wet slow electrochemical brains, while being in theory mathematically equivalent to a software neural network, isn't sufficiently well understood to tell us how close the software neural network is to being practically equivalent. The odds of consciousness emerging from the same neural network that gave us LLMs without some sort of theoretical breakthrough seems very small.
by Zigurd