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People are expecting you to consider the possibility that they might believe what they're saying. If you don't start from the premise that they're lying, you'll

People are expecting you to consider the possibility that they might believe what they're saying. If you don't start from the premise that they're lying, you'll discover that their behavior is not cutthroat or cynical at all, and the behavior that appears to be is instead an inevitable consequence of things that they knew would happen and warned the public about years ago.

Henchman21 4d ago
Given the track record of corporate America, to take these folks at their word would be monumentally stupid. “Lying to get their way” is practically the M.O. for corporate America and now, on this topic, we’re expected to take it seriously? For real? Based on what?
- SpicyLemonZest 4d ago
  You're expected to take it seriously because a number of their previous predictions about where the technology would go have ended up being correct. A lot of problems AI systems are already causing would be in a much better spot had people listened to Sam Altman's warnings in 2019, instead of making fun of him for the idea that text generation could possibly be dangerous.
  - bayindirh 4d ago
    > Sam Altman's warnings in 2019, instead of making fun of him for the idea that text generation could possibly be dangerous. Can you remind them to us, if it will not inconvenience you? Also, Timnit Gebru warned us earlier, but people ended up ostracizing her. Interesting investigation: https://recul.ai/news/sam-altman-lobbied-against-ai-regulation/ https://recul.ai/news/sam-altman-lobbied-against-ai-regulati...
    - SpicyLemonZest 4d ago
      In early 2019 OpenAI released a post titled "Better language models and their implications" (https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/ https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/). In this post, they explained that their new GPT-2 model shows broad capabilities across a wide range of tasks, why this should be worrying to the public and to policymakers, and how this led to their decision not to release it widely. In particular, they said: * This kind of decision is similar to the norms in biotechnology and cybersecurity, where AI misuse may soon become relevant. * They understand that some people have the technical capacity to build and publish similar systems, but they hope the AI community will be careful about doing so. * Governments should start tracking the impact, adoption, and progression of AI capabilities. --------------------- By 2023, the problems had become a blaring alarm bell at OpenAI, and they started posting papers like https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03718 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03718 demanding that the government must regulate AI quickly because of the dangerous capabilities that will soon start appearing. (They also signed the famous "Pause AI" letter, although there's truth to the criticism that using the frontier model they'd literally just released as the benchmark for a 6 month pause is kinda silly.) --------------------- Now we're in 2026, those dangerous capabilities have clearly arrived, and we don't have the regulations to deal with them because nobody listened to the warnings. You say Timnit Gebru warned us, but her warnings were about a very different topic, because she insisted and to this day continues to insist that AI systems do not actually have dangerous capabilities. In her view, it's categorically impossible for any LLM-based system to be dangerous, except in the sense that human beings could intentionally use it to commit political sins. Her response to the guy who resigned from Anthropic last week (https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:azpq3hfq3llpowyqpjkqwgxs/post/3mvduxj2syc2m https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:azpq3hfq3llpowyqpjkqwgxs/po...) was that his concerns are obviously stupid and people only think otherwise because they're racist.

Henchman21 4d ago

Given the track record of corporate America, to take these folks at their word would be monumentally stupid. “Lying to get their way” is practically the M.O. for corporate America and now, on this topic, we’re expected to take it seriously? For real? Based on what?

SpicyLemonZest 4d ago
You're expected to take it seriously because a number of their previous predictions about where the technology would go have ended up being correct. A lot of problems AI systems are already causing would be in a much better spot had people listened to Sam Altman's warnings in 2019, instead of making fun of him for the idea that text generation could possibly be dangerous.
- bayindirh 4d ago
  > Sam Altman's warnings in 2019, instead of making fun of him for the idea that text generation could possibly be dangerous. Can you remind them to us, if it will not inconvenience you? Also, Timnit Gebru warned us earlier, but people ended up ostracizing her. Interesting investigation: https://recul.ai/news/sam-altman-lobbied-against-ai-regulation/ https://recul.ai/news/sam-altman-lobbied-against-ai-regulati...
  - SpicyLemonZest 4d ago
    In early 2019 OpenAI released a post titled "Better language models and their implications" (https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/ https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/). In this post, they explained that their new GPT-2 model shows broad capabilities across a wide range of tasks, why this should be worrying to the public and to policymakers, and how this led to their decision not to release it widely. In particular, they said: * This kind of decision is similar to the norms in biotechnology and cybersecurity, where AI misuse may soon become relevant. * They understand that some people have the technical capacity to build and publish similar systems, but they hope the AI community will be careful about doing so. * Governments should start tracking the impact, adoption, and progression of AI capabilities. --------------------- By 2023, the problems had become a blaring alarm bell at OpenAI, and they started posting papers like https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03718 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03718 demanding that the government must regulate AI quickly because of the dangerous capabilities that will soon start appearing. (They also signed the famous "Pause AI" letter, although there's truth to the criticism that using the frontier model they'd literally just released as the benchmark for a 6 month pause is kinda silly.) --------------------- Now we're in 2026, those dangerous capabilities have clearly arrived, and we don't have the regulations to deal with them because nobody listened to the warnings. You say Timnit Gebru warned us, but her warnings were about a very different topic, because she insisted and to this day continues to insist that AI systems do not actually have dangerous capabilities. In her view, it's categorically impossible for any LLM-based system to be dangerous, except in the sense that human beings could intentionally use it to commit political sins. Her response to the guy who resigned from Anthropic last week (https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:azpq3hfq3llpowyqpjkqwgxs/post/3mvduxj2syc2m https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:azpq3hfq3llpowyqpjkqwgxs/po...) was that his concerns are obviously stupid and people only think otherwise because they're racist.