In your opinion, do you buy into the panic about AI eliminating humanity or potentially disrupting and taking down the internet? Is this a marketing ploy?
Give me your best thoughts on this most recent call for AI slowdown.
I don't consider this a "yes/no" question. It seems quite clear to me that the idea of "AI doom" is neither certain (100% probable) nor impossible (0% probable). The question is where on the continuum is the truth. And I don't know. And I'm pretty sure nobody else does either.
That said, there are plausible scenarios where AI can cause great harm, even if it doesn't extend to "eliminating all humanity". So I don't reject calls for putting more emphasis on AI safety and alignment out of hand. On the other hand, I don't support the idea of implementing a new "Turing Registry"[1] like government agency. I also don't think most of the various proposals out there for regulating AI are enforceable in the slightest.
So where does that leave me? Uncertain. I wish I could take a more concrete stance, but from my perspective, the data needed to do that just isn't there.
No. Frontier AI companies need the government to shield them from becoming commodity. That's why they're begging for regulation.
On the other side, the current administration also has powerful backers whose businesses are complemented by AI and would benefit from it becoming a commodity. Think about who Vance is speaking on behalf of.
So the AI companies need to use fear to drive public demand for their regulation efforts. IMO there's little to no honest discourse and a lot of attempts to manipulate public opinion for objectives that we have little stake in. I personally don't trust any of the involved parties to make decisions for the public good.
If you haven't looked at the stuff that has come out in the past couple of months (like the Huggingface hack and the Navier-Stokes solution) and/or you're dismissing it as marketing, you're grossly misunderstanding the current state of what's possible, what the potential of the frontier models deployed at scale is. Personally I'm finding it fascinating to follow, and I'm much more excited about the upsides than thinking about the risks but the risks are very real.
If you look around I don't think we're at the point where even if AI go rogue it could just disrupt us for a while. No real major concern to humanity but yeah I guess having rules and regulations would be plus point. So for now there shouldn't be anything to panic about.
Agree. Ais gone rogue now could be bad, but not humanity-ending bad. Just a hiccup. Of course if it somehow ends with human deaths then even if one human dies because of a rogue AI, that's a failure. But I can't imagine rogue AIs with enough real world power to harm humans in some way. What I do believe however is that humans will find a way to do harm with AI without AI going rogue, as with any other thing humanity comes close to. So the scenario is somehow similar to the nuclear bomb in the 40s, I don't fear our AIs going rogue and killing everyone, I fear a bad guy behind a very smart AI with very bad intentions.
If they were the moral people they say they are, and believed what they say about it killing humanity they would stop unilaterally. These are the “rationalists” but they act like the fundamentalist church I grew up in. Every fact serves the same conclusion.
From my perspective it looks like working to deep in AI makes you crazy. No other way to explain all the weird bullshit these billionaires throw around.
That said, there are plausible scenarios where AI can cause great harm, even if it doesn't extend to "eliminating all humanity". So I don't reject calls for putting more emphasis on AI safety and alignment out of hand. On the other hand, I don't support the idea of implementing a new "Turing Registry"[1] like government agency. I also don't think most of the various proposals out there for regulating AI are enforceable in the slightest.
So where does that leave me? Uncertain. I wish I could take a more concrete stance, but from my perspective, the data needed to do that just isn't there.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer
On the other side, the current administration also has powerful backers whose businesses are complemented by AI and would benefit from it becoming a commodity. Think about who Vance is speaking on behalf of.
So the AI companies need to use fear to drive public demand for their regulation efforts. IMO there's little to no honest discourse and a lot of attempts to manipulate public opinion for objectives that we have little stake in. I personally don't trust any of the involved parties to make decisions for the public good.
If you haven't looked at the stuff that has come out in the past couple of months (like the Huggingface hack and the Navier-Stokes solution) and/or you're dismissing it as marketing, you're grossly misunderstanding the current state of what's possible, what the potential of the frontier models deployed at scale is. Personally I'm finding it fascinating to follow, and I'm much more excited about the upsides than thinking about the risks but the risks are very real.
I think that the genAI companies themselves present a greater danger to us (arguably not an existential danger, though) than genAI itself.
If they were the moral people they say they are, and believed what they say about it killing humanity they would stop unilaterally. These are the “rationalists” but they act like the fundamentalist church I grew up in. Every fact serves the same conclusion.
Sure AI sucks, but not to that degree (yet)