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Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

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Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#61

Post by PeterStuer »

logicchains wrote: post #50
PeterStuer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have been in a state of abundance for a long time. We just choose not to distribute the abundance.

The global average PPP GDP per capita is 18k USD/year. 18k USD/year is not remotely close to abundance.

If I watch my kids and you watch yours, our contribution to GDP is 0$. If I babysit your kids and you pay me 1.000.000$, and you watch my kids and I pay you 1.000.000$, we just created 2.000.000$ in GDP.

Were we not in abundance the day before but now we are? What changed?

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#62

Post by huytersd »

logicchains wrote: post #50
PeterStuer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have been in a state of abundance for a long time. We just choose not to distribute the abundance.

The global average PPP GDP per capita is 18k USD/year. 18k USD/year is not remotely close to abundance.

That is a surprisingly high figure though for 18k a year you could clothe, feed yourself and have shelter especially considering healthcare is cheap or free in most of the world. That’s way better than I thought the world was doing.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#63

Post by aeternum »

PeterStuer wrote: post #48

People focus on LLM's and diffusion models because they are so omnipresent now. But an AI for stock picking and prediction that would be realy next level and outcompete the current ones cosistently would siphon of so much wealth it would basically own society if the operators were clever enough not to get so gready short term that the system would litterally collapse overnight.

Arguably, this has already happened at least twice in the past. One with the discovery of the Black-Scholes model, and arguably again with the advent of HFT (and the ability to basically front-run trades).

The interesting thing about markets is you generally can only make money when things are mispriced. This limits the total potential gain even for actors with perfect information.

Suppose we did have an AI model that could with near certainty predict both the future cash flows of a company and future interest rates. You could very easily calculate the discounted cash flow and determine the fair share price today or at any point in the future. Rather than collapse, markets likely become more stable and stocks would perform more like bonds.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#64

Post by [deleted] »

PeterStuer wrote: post #48

People focus on LLM's and diffusion models because they are so omnipresent now. But an AI for stock picking and prediction that would be realy next level and outcompete the current ones cosistently would siphon of so much wealth it would basically own society if the operators were clever enough not to get so gready short term that the system would litterally collapse overnight.

[deleted]

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#65

Post by sgu999 »

logicchains wrote: post #37
sgu999 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are already in a post-scarcity world, we have been for decades. The problem is inequalities and the inefficiency of how we use the resources, it doesn't look like we'll change that soon, sadly. I'm more prone to think that in a "virtual" economy we'll still have miserable workers to empty the chamber-pots of the lucky ones who are plugged in the new world.

> We are already in a post-scarcity world, we have been for decades. It's only a post-scarcity world if you define scarcity by absence of enough resources to satisfy the bare-minimum required for existence. People don't want to live at the subsistence level, and we're not evenly remotely close to having enough resources to satisfy everybody's wants.

> People don't want to live at the subsistence level, and we're not evenly remotely close to having enough resources to satisfy everybody's wants.

What people want is defined by society. Somehow some people want to be alone in a 2 tons EV, a 200 sqm mansion for a family of 4 and retire at 40. Others are tremendously happy with a much, much less resources intensive lifestyles.

You would also need to define what is part of the subsistence level. I'd put it roughly at what my grandma wanted: food, shelter, healthcare, some leisure time.

A bit more than that is absolutely doable in a civilisation that went from one farmer to feed 1.3 people to one farmer to feed 60 people.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#66

Post by PeterStuer »

huytersd wrote: post #54
PeterStuer wrote: post #48

People focus on LLM's and diffusion models because they are so omnipresent now. But an AI for stock picking and prediction that would be realy next level and outcompete the current ones cosistently would siphon of so much wealth it would basically own society if the operators were clever enough not to get so gready short term that the system would litterally collapse overnight.

It would have a brief period where it would be effective and then you would just have an AI stock picking arms race, and would be back in the same situation again.

That is the way it has been so far. Now if we could lobby for the others not to have access to or be allowed to use this technology ...

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#67

Post by desmond-grealy »

Animats wrote: post #4

It's too late for monopolizing large language models. The technology for making them is known and the cost keeps coming down. There are things to worry about, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.

It is though. The groundwork is already being laid to restrict the legality of training large models. See the recent executive order. There is a rather small cutoff size being established for needing to report your training runs and data centers to the government. It is also being ordered that X-risk and CBRN risk testing frameworks and secure environments be developed specifically so they can be imposed as requirements of model developers, including in the private sector.

You may argue that the knowledge required to develop LLMs is open source and will be accessible to all (and in practice this is not-quite but mostly true). However the federal government is currently in the process of making it so only certain people are authorized to do so legally.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#68

Post by ghshephard »

PeterStuer wrote: post #48

People focus on LLM's and diffusion models because they are so omnipresent now. But an AI for stock picking and prediction that would be realy next level and outcompete the current ones cosistently would siphon of so much wealth it would basically own society if the operators were clever enough not to get so gready short term that the system would litterally collapse overnight.

I'm not following that argument - such a system might siphon off the trading wealth, but presumably that's miniscule compared to the equity wealth that is assigned to the owners of the companies and the wealth that they create?

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#69

Post by RF_Savage »

huytersd wrote: post #54
PeterStuer wrote: post #48

People focus on LLM's and diffusion models because they are so omnipresent now. But an AI for stock picking and prediction that would be realy next level and outcompete the current ones cosistently would siphon of so much wealth it would basically own society if the operators were clever enough not to get so gready short term that the system would litterally collapse overnight.

It would have a brief period where it would be effective and then you would just have an AI stock picking arms race, and would be back in the same situation again.

Exactly. How would it differ from the current algorithm driven HFT stuff? By being slower to react?

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#70

Post by homefree »

I think Yann is probably wrong.

He refuses to engage earnestly with the “doomer” arguments. The same type of motivated reasoning could also be attributed to himself and Meta’s financial goals - it’s not a persuasive framing.

The attempts I’ve seen from him to discuss the issue that aren’t just name calling are things like saying he knows smart people and they aren’t president - or even that his cat is pretty smart and not in charge of him (his implication being intelligence doesn’t always mean control). This kind of example is decent evidence he isn’t engaged with the risks seriously.

The risk isn’t an intelligence delta between smart human and dumb human. How many chimps are in Congress? Are any in the primaries? Not even close. The capability delta is both larger than that for AGI e-risk and even less aligned by default.

I’m glad others in power similarly find Yann unpersuasive.

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