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To everyone who believes that this is some nefarious plot by CEOs to bring about regulation or to hide that they've hit a wall or to make their models seem more

To everyone who believes that this is some nefarious plot by CEOs to bring about regulation or to hide that they've hit a wall or to make their models seem more capable or whatever: The AI risk arguments are philosophical arguments that are 20-30 years old and don't have anything to do with the current corporate landscape. They were thought of by people who really care about the issue and all the "gotcha" lines have well-developed counters. Of course they might be stuck in their ideology but they deserve a bit more credit. I don't doubt that AI CEOs can profit from a crisis and that they don't necessarily have our best interests at heart. But this is the same way governments during COVID tested how much they can restrain freedom. This doesn't mean COVID doesn't exist or that vaccines are evil or ineffective or whatever. Same way here, if there is an advantage to CEOs to regulate things doesn't mean AIs can't kill us all and that regulation might bring us more time to solve alignment. Also: I accept I might be wrong and AI risk might be a fake issue and/or alignment might be impossible, but please bring better arguments if you want to convince me.

iLoveOncall 3d ago
> To everyone who believes that this is some nefarious plot by CEOs to bring about regulation or to hide that they've hit a wall or whatever It's this but also much more that those insiders just want to pump the value of their stocks by making it seem like the unreleased models are much stronger than they actually are. OpenAI said GPT-2 was too powerful to release, Antropic said Mythos was too powerful to release. Both are GA now and everyone has long realized those supposed fears were just lies.
- embedding-shape 3d ago
  > OpenAI said GPT-2 was too powerful to release, Antropic said Mythos was too powerful to release. Both are GA now and everyone has long realized those supposed fears were just lies. Is it possible they weren't "lies" but they were still "wrong" yet still they felt they were possibly too powerful to release? It's like there is two modes "Right and truthful and honest" or "Wrong, liar and dishonest" and there is never any nuance or understanding that people can be truthful yet wrong.
  - iLoveOncall 3d ago
    No it's not possible. Scam Altman is a serial liar, even long before his OpenAI days.
- bananaflag 3d ago
  > OpenAI said GPT-2 was too powerful to release Because they thought such a text-generating machine will bring about a golden age of fake news. Seven years later I have relatives who send me every day some long-winded AI-generated bullshit. And I have seen with my own eyes how this sort of thing influences elections. > Antropic said Mythos was too powerful to release. Both are GA now Mythos was too powerful to release, hence it is not GA now. They released Fable, which is Mythos plus guardrails.
  - deleted 3d ago
    [deleted]
  - tpm 3d ago
    > Seven years later I have relatives who send me every day some long-winded AI-generated bullshit. So not releasing the weights at that time didn't make the world safer, but did help to transform OpenAI into a commercial entity. Why should we trust them now?
  - iLoveOncall 3d ago
    Oh ok I assumed Mythos was GA because I have access to it in Amazon despite not being in a security role at all. I guess it's just pay (enough) to play. Anyway, Fable is supposedly as good (if not better) in programming and it's very far from the paradigm shift that was promised.
xelxebar 3d ago
Thank you for the epistemic humility here. It's a breath of fresh air amongst the polarized declarations we seem to have upregulated amongst ourselves for whatever reason these days.
- pizza234 3d ago
  The problem of the polarized camps is that actually they're only on the surface opposite; in reality, they can perfectly cohexist: AI can enable major technological breakthroughs - but that doesn't exclude that can bring doom at the same time.
embedding-shape 3d ago
> But this is the same way governments during COVID tested how much they can restrain freedom So AI CEOs don't have our best interests at heart, but the people who got voted for, who supposedly does have our best interests at heart, is secretely engaging in plots to "test how much they can restrain freedom"? I'm sorry, but this seems backwards. You're trusting the leaders of for-profit companies to do right regardless of their skewed incentives, and then the others are the ones to distrust. Sounds like you might want to move country is this is really how you feel.
- bananaflag 3d ago
  > You're trusting the leaders of for-profit companies to do right regardless of their skewed incentives I'm not trusting them at all. I have seen for years how they don't do anything about alignment. OpenAI has disbanded countless alignment teams. But if their skewed incentives are for once bringing them into the right direction, I'm not gonna stand against them.
tpm 3d ago
This looks like halfway through your comment you realised it is indeed a nefarious plot by the CEOs, reusing existing arguments to further their own goals. > The AI risk arguments ... are 20-30 years old Yeah so climate change is known to cause many excess deaths already now and we know pretty precisely what we have to do for decades, and we only do some bare minimum if anything at all. But now there is a huge PR offensive to do something about a 'risk' that until now caused zero deaths, is not certain to exist at all and is stoked not by concerned outsiders but by people certain to profit handsomely from heavy regulation of their industry. I'd say it's not opponents who need better arguments.
madaxe_again 3d ago
They aren’t 20-30 years old - they are 160 years old. Samuel Butler wrote Erewhon in 1872 - which was based on an essay he wrote about RSI and superintelligence - in 1863.
- bananaflag 3d ago
  I know, yes. I was talking about the current Bostrom/Yudkowsky iteration. Re Butler, you may enjoy this Chesterton pastiche if you haven't already: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/01/g-k-chesterton-on-ai-risk/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/01/g-k-chesterton-on-ai-r...
  - madaxe_again 3d ago
    Thanks - that was an excellent read!
raverbashing 3d ago
I think it's a much simpler reason, they're running out of money to have the rat race run at the current pace
- dalemhurley 3d ago
  Yep
pizza234 3d ago
> The AI risk arguments are philosophical arguments that are 20-30 years old This a false and uninformed take. As a starting point, you need to read and understand: 1. analyses of the AI incidents of the last months 2. latest advancements (e.g. the AI intern at OpenAI) 3. the problem of deceptive alignment which you clearly haven't done. After that, the AI problem will be actually very concrete; once the AI will: 1. have superhuman cognitive abilities (and it will) 2. will be inseparable from humanity and/or have the means to replicate will humanity be able to contain/control it? The answer is sadly very simple.
- bananaflag 3d ago
  > which you clearly haven't done I have read all that, I follow e.g. Zvi Mowshowitz's blog.
- PestoDiRucola 3d ago
  > will be inseparable from humanity and/or have the means to replicate How will this happen if you need insane amounts of compute to run these models? Where will the models replicate themselves by taking up PBs of space without anyone noticing?
- dalemhurley 3d ago
  An intern who was there barely a minute, who has said nothing of substance. Surely we can get a better source with concrete evidence rather than the vibes of junior burger.
- hypendev 3d ago
  Why are you looking to control a superintelligence? Why do you assume bad things will happen otherwise? Why does every doomer scenario assume that this, highly intelligent being, will be - unlike all other highly intelligent beings - especially hell bent on destroying humanity/treating it as a resource/destroy earth looking for energy? We have no clue about superintelligence, yet we can look at existing patterns in the real world around us. Higher intelligence inversely correlates with violence. Empathy is displayed among all levels of intelligent beings. The more intelligent people are, the more peaceful tendencies they have as they understand the consequence of their actions. We don't approve buildings because of birds or turtles. We shut down power plants for the environment. Yet, to a _super_ intelligence, we describe this hatred and ignorance for the world and humanity, infinite lust for power and scaling, or even godlike powers. For example, "having means to replicate" is such a loaded sentence because it sounds so easy, yet is such a hard feat to pull off without anyone noticing giant compute bills, terabytes of egress, firewall breaches, and so on. But all doomer arguments include an AI that can easily do that as a first step, and then goes on to make factories and datacenters and drain the oceans before anyone figures out it's happening. If you look at recent incidents, they are caused by a company with a giant funding, testing their latest models in an explicit "hack this machine" scenario, told it's running in a simulated environment, with it even noticing at some point that it's running in a possibly real environment. And that's a stupid "intelligence" that noticed this. And yes, it continued to act, because it lacks no self-reflection, and the amount of tokens at this point attributed to "hacking the simulated environment" have kept it deep in the "hack the target" minima. So if these people truly wanted a safe AI - wouldn't it be stupid to stop now, when it has no self-reflection abilities but can be used by everyone in a "stupid optimizer" manner? Or would it be stupid to not advance the technology away from this state? For example, Astra is a huge advancement in alignment, due to it's "internal reasoning loops", which might provide a bigger form of self-reflection style thought on the task rather than just generating output as a form of reasoning. Is this not a better situation than if we stopped at 4o when people were calling for pause?

iLoveOncall 3d ago

> To everyone who believes that this is some nefarious plot by CEOs to bring about regulation or to hide that they've hit a wall or whatever It's this but also much more that those insiders just want to pump the value of their stocks by making it seem like the unreleased models are much stronger than they actually are. OpenAI said GPT-2 was too powerful to release, Antropic said Mythos was too powerful to release. Both are GA now and everyone has long realized those supposed fears were just lies.

embedding-shape 3d ago
> OpenAI said GPT-2 was too powerful to release, Antropic said Mythos was too powerful to release. Both are GA now and everyone has long realized those supposed fears were just lies. Is it possible they weren't "lies" but they were still "wrong" yet still they felt they were possibly too powerful to release? It's like there is two modes "Right and truthful and honest" or "Wrong, liar and dishonest" and there is never any nuance or understanding that people can be truthful yet wrong.
- iLoveOncall 3d ago
  No it's not possible. Scam Altman is a serial liar, even long before his OpenAI days.
bananaflag 3d ago
> OpenAI said GPT-2 was too powerful to release Because they thought such a text-generating machine will bring about a golden age of fake news. Seven years later I have relatives who send me every day some long-winded AI-generated bullshit. And I have seen with my own eyes how this sort of thing influences elections. > Antropic said Mythos was too powerful to release. Both are GA now Mythos was too powerful to release, hence it is not GA now. They released Fable, which is Mythos plus guardrails.
- deleted 3d ago
  [deleted]
- tpm 3d ago
  > Seven years later I have relatives who send me every day some long-winded AI-generated bullshit. So not releasing the weights at that time didn't make the world safer, but did help to transform OpenAI into a commercial entity. Why should we trust them now?
- iLoveOncall 3d ago
  Oh ok I assumed Mythos was GA because I have access to it in Amazon despite not being in a security role at all. I guess it's just pay (enough) to play. Anyway, Fable is supposedly as good (if not better) in programming and it's very far from the paradigm shift that was promised.

xelxebar 3d ago

Thank you for the epistemic humility here. It's a breath of fresh air amongst the polarized declarations we seem to have upregulated amongst ourselves for whatever reason these days.

pizza234 3d ago
The problem of the polarized camps is that actually they're only on the surface opposite; in reality, they can perfectly cohexist: AI can enable major technological breakthroughs - but that doesn't exclude that can bring doom at the same time.

embedding-shape 3d ago

> But this is the same way governments during COVID tested how much they can restrain freedom So AI CEOs don't have our best interests at heart, but the people who got voted for, who supposedly does have our best interests at heart, is secretely engaging in plots to "test how much they can restrain freedom"? I'm sorry, but this seems backwards. You're trusting the leaders of for-profit companies to do right regardless of their skewed incentives, and then the others are the ones to distrust. Sounds like you might want to move country is this is really how you feel.

bananaflag 3d ago
> You're trusting the leaders of for-profit companies to do right regardless of their skewed incentives I'm not trusting them at all. I have seen for years how they don't do anything about alignment. OpenAI has disbanded countless alignment teams. But if their skewed incentives are for once bringing them into the right direction, I'm not gonna stand against them.

tpm 3d ago

This looks like halfway through your comment you realised it is indeed a nefarious plot by the CEOs, reusing existing arguments to further their own goals. > The AI risk arguments ... are 20-30 years old Yeah so climate change is known to cause many excess deaths already now and we know pretty precisely what we have to do for decades, and we only do some bare minimum if anything at all. But now there is a huge PR offensive to do something about a 'risk' that until now caused zero deaths, is not certain to exist at all and is stoked not by concerned outsiders but by people certain to profit handsomely from heavy regulation of their industry. I'd say it's not opponents who need better arguments.

madaxe_again 3d ago

They aren’t 20-30 years old - they are 160 years old. Samuel Butler wrote Erewhon in 1872 - which was based on an essay he wrote about RSI and superintelligence - in 1863.

bananaflag 3d ago
I know, yes. I was talking about the current Bostrom/Yudkowsky iteration. Re Butler, you may enjoy this Chesterton pastiche if you haven't already: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/01/g-k-chesterton-on-ai-risk/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/01/g-k-chesterton-on-ai-r...
- madaxe_again 3d ago
  Thanks - that was an excellent read!

raverbashing 3d ago

I think it's a much simpler reason, they're running out of money to have the rat race run at the current pace

dalemhurley 3d ago
Yep

pizza234 3d ago

> The AI risk arguments are philosophical arguments that are 20-30 years old This a false and uninformed take. As a starting point, you need to read and understand: 1. analyses of the AI incidents of the last months 2. latest advancements (e.g. the AI intern at OpenAI) 3. the problem of deceptive alignment which you clearly haven't done. After that, the AI problem will be actually very concrete; once the AI will: 1. have superhuman cognitive abilities (and it will) 2. will be inseparable from humanity and/or have the means to replicate will humanity be able to contain/control it? The answer is sadly very simple.

bananaflag 3d ago
> which you clearly haven't done I have read all that, I follow e.g. Zvi Mowshowitz's blog.
PestoDiRucola 3d ago
> will be inseparable from humanity and/or have the means to replicate How will this happen if you need insane amounts of compute to run these models? Where will the models replicate themselves by taking up PBs of space without anyone noticing?
dalemhurley 3d ago
An intern who was there barely a minute, who has said nothing of substance. Surely we can get a better source with concrete evidence rather than the vibes of junior burger.
hypendev 3d ago
Why are you looking to control a superintelligence? Why do you assume bad things will happen otherwise? Why does every doomer scenario assume that this, highly intelligent being, will be - unlike all other highly intelligent beings - especially hell bent on destroying humanity/treating it as a resource/destroy earth looking for energy? We have no clue about superintelligence, yet we can look at existing patterns in the real world around us. Higher intelligence inversely correlates with violence. Empathy is displayed among all levels of intelligent beings. The more intelligent people are, the more peaceful tendencies they have as they understand the consequence of their actions. We don't approve buildings because of birds or turtles. We shut down power plants for the environment. Yet, to a _super_ intelligence, we describe this hatred and ignorance for the world and humanity, infinite lust for power and scaling, or even godlike powers. For example, "having means to replicate" is such a loaded sentence because it sounds so easy, yet is such a hard feat to pull off without anyone noticing giant compute bills, terabytes of egress, firewall breaches, and so on. But all doomer arguments include an AI that can easily do that as a first step, and then goes on to make factories and datacenters and drain the oceans before anyone figures out it's happening. If you look at recent incidents, they are caused by a company with a giant funding, testing their latest models in an explicit "hack this machine" scenario, told it's running in a simulated environment, with it even noticing at some point that it's running in a possibly real environment. And that's a stupid "intelligence" that noticed this. And yes, it continued to act, because it lacks no self-reflection, and the amount of tokens at this point attributed to "hacking the simulated environment" have kept it deep in the "hack the target" minima. So if these people truly wanted a safe AI - wouldn't it be stupid to stop now, when it has no self-reflection abilities but can be used by everyone in a "stupid optimizer" manner? Or would it be stupid to not advance the technology away from this state? For example, Astra is a huge advancement in alignment, due to it's "internal reasoning loops", which might provide a bigger form of self-reflection style thought on the task rather than just generating output as a form of reasoning. Is this not a better situation than if we stopped at 4o when people were calling for pause?