Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dario and Anthropic's strategy has been to exaggerate the harmful capabilities of LLMs and systems driven by LLMs, positioning Anthropic themselves as the "safest" option. Take from this what you will. As an ordinary human with no investment in the game, I would not expect LLMs to magically work around the well-known physical phenomena that make submarines hard to track. I think there could be some ability to augment…
Theres a lot of astroturfing on here too. The reality is, LLMs to date have not significantly impacted the economy nor been the driver of extensive job destruction. They dont want to believe that and they dont want you to believe it either. So theyll keep saying "its coming, its coming" under the guise of fear mongering.
The Adolescence of Technology
121–130 of 159 posts
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people broadly feel like all of this is happening inevitably or being done by others. The alignment people struggle to get their version of AI to market first - the techies worry about being left behind. No one ends up being in a position to steer things or have any influence over the future in the race to keep up. So what can you and I do? I know in my gut that imagining an ideal outcome won't change what ac…
In the large, ideas can have a massive influence on what happens. This inevitability that you're expressing is itself one of those ideas. Shifts of dominant ideas can only come about through discussions. And sure, individuals can't control what happens. That's unrealistic in a world of billions. But each of us is invariably putting a little but of pressure in some direction. Ironically, you are doing that with your c…
How will this pressure add up and bubble to the sociopaths which we collectively allow to control most of the world's resources? It would need for all these billions to collectively understand the problem and align towards a common goal. I don't think this was a design feature, but globalising the economy created hard dependencies and the internet global village created a common mind share. It's now harder than ever to effect a revolution because it needs to happen everywhere at the same time with billions of people.
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#123> Having described what I am worried about, let’s move on to who. I am worried about entities who have the most access to AI, who are starting from a position of the most political power, or who have an existing history of repression. In order of severity, I am worried about:
For how much this essay is being celebrated on Twitter, it's astounding how explicitly this section (The odious apparatus) decries China yet glosses over the US
> A coalition of the US and its democratic allies, if it achieved predominance in powerful AI, would be in a position to not only defend itself against autocracies, but contain them and limit their AI totalitarian abuses.
Sure, how about a thought on repressing its own populace with AI? I know the very next paragraph tries to cover this, but it all feels stuck in 2016 political discourse ignorant of the stench of rot and absence of integrity in American politics. This is especially ironic considering he calls this out as a risk later on: "if there is such a huge concentration of wealth that a small group of people effectively controls government policy with their influence, and ordinary citizens have no influence because they lack economic leverage"
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The proactive thoughts in the Player Piano section are quite refreshing though. Hopefully other frontier companies follow suit
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#124Too many people dismissed Kurzweil as a crank. He was mostly and sort of correct, but couldn't possibly anticipate the scale, scope, (or hype), or timeline that is still unfolding.
Furthermore, people involved in tech often reflexively dismissed this nearing iteration/revolution because their lifestyles, finances, and identities often revolved around a form of employment that would gradually and eventually be replaced (on a long enough time horizon) with significant automation, leaving far fewer involved with it. And also shrinking/disappearing incomes of millions of people who had previously attained a middle- or middle-upper-income lifestyle that would be captured by billionaires. AI is the computer equivalent of the cotton gin or cigarette rolling machine.
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dario and Anthropic's strategy has been to exaggerate the harmful capabilities of LLMs and systems driven by LLMs, positioning Anthropic themselves as the "safest" option. Take from this what you will. As an ordinary human with no investment in the game, I would not expect LLMs to magically work around the well-known physical phenomena that make submarines hard to track. I think there could be some ability to augment…
> Dario and Anthropic's strategy has been to exaggerate the harmful capabilities of LLMs and systems driven by LLMs, positioning Anthropic themselves as the "safest" option. Take from this what you will. Yeah, I've been feeling that as well. It's not a bad strategy at all, makes sense, good for business. But on the nuclear issue, it's not a good sign that he's explicitly saying that this AGI future is a threat to nuc…
> But on the nuclear issue, it's not a good sign that he's explicitly saying that this AGI future is a threat to nuclear deterrence and the triad. Like, where do you go up from there? That's the highest level of alarm that any government can have. This isn't a boy crying wolf, it's the loudest klaxon you can possibly make.
This is not new. Anthropic has raised these concerns in their system cards for previous versions of Opus/Sonnet. Maybe in slightly more dryer terms, and buried in a 100+ page PDF, but they have raised the risk of either
a) a small group of bad actors w/ access to frontier models, technical know-how (both 'llm/ai how to bypass restrictions' and making and sourcing weapons) to turn that into dirty bombs / small nuclear devices and where to deploy them. b) the bigger, more scifi threat, of a fleet of agents going rogue, maybe on orders of a nation state, to do the same
I think option a is much more frightening and likely. option b makes for better scifi thrillers, and still could happen in 5-30ish(??) years.
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At this point it seems pretty clear that LLMs are having a major impact on how software is built, but for almost every other industry the practical effects are mostly incremental. Even just a year ago, most people thought the practical effects in software engineering were incremental too. It took another generation of models and tooling to get to the point where it could start having a large impact. What makes you…
> most people thought the practical effects in software engineering were incremental too Hum... Are you saying it's having clear positive (never mind "transformative") impact somewhere? Can you point any place we can see observable clear positive impact?
I know many companies that have replaced Customer Support agents with LLM-based agents. Replacing support with AI isn't new, but what is new is that the LLM-based ones have higher CSAT (customer satisfaction) rates than the humans they are now replacing (ie, it's not just cost anymore... It's cost and quality).
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#127> but the truth is that behind the volatility and public speculation, there has been a smooth, unyielding increase in AI’s cognitive capabilities. > We are now at the point where AI models are … good enough at coding that some of the strongest engineers I’ve ever met are now handing over almost all their coding to AI. Really? All I’ve seen on HN the past few days are how slop prevails. When I lean into agentic flows…
The disconnect is weird isn't it? The latest coding models can churn out a lot of mediocre code that more or less works if the task is sufficiently well specified, but it's not particularly good code, they have no real taste, no instinct for elegance or simplification, weak high level design. It's useful, but not anywhere near superhuman. It's also my impression that improvements in raw intelligence, far from increasing exponentially, are plateauing. The advances that people are excited about come from agentic patterns and tool use, but it's not much higher levels of intelligence, just slightly better intelligence run in a loop with feedback. Again that's useful but it's nowhere in the realms of "greater than Nobel winning across all domains".
Outside of coding, the top models still fall flat on their face when faced with relatively simple knowledge work. I got completely bogus info on a fairly simple tax question just a few days ago for example, and anyone using AI regularly with any discernment runs into simple failures like this all the time. It's still useful but the idea that we're on some trajectory to exceeding top human performance across all domains seems completely unrealistic when I look at my experience of how things have actually been progressing.
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#128My recent hunch is a lot of the hyperbole in AI inherits from crypto. There’s more utility here, but the grandiosity is still absurd. These guys win biggest if we all believe their narrative.
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> most people thought the practical effects in software engineering were incremental too Hum... Are you saying it's having clear positive (never mind "transformative") impact somewhere? Can you point any place we can see observable clear positive impact?
I know many companies that have replaced Customer Support agents with LLM-based agents. Replacing support with AI isn't new, but what is new is that the LLM-based ones have higher CSAT (customer satisfaction) rates than the humans they are now replacing (ie, it's not just cost anymore... It's cost and quality).
Well I as a Customer who had to deal with AI bots as Customer Service have significantly lower Customer Satisfaction. Because I don't wanna deal with some clanker. Who doesn't realy understand what I am talking about.
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#130One of my formative impressions of AI came from the depiction of the Colligatarch from Alan Dean Foster's The I Inside. The AI in the book is almost feels like it is the main message masquerading as a subplot. Asimov knew the risks, and I had assumed until fairly recently that the lessons and explorations that he had imparted into the Robot books had provided a level of cultural knowledge of what we were about to fac…
Where we want to end up? Normies are still talking about the upcoming AI bubble pop in terms of tech basically reverting to 2022. It's wishful thinking all the way down.