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Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

bbc.com

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Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#31

Post by Imnimo »

My read is not so much "if we say this is dangerously powerful, it will make people want to buy our product", but rather that there is a significant segment of AI researchers for whom x-risk, AI alignment, etc. is a deal-breaker issue. And so the Sam Altmans of the world have to treat these concerns as serious to attract and retain talent. See for example OpenAI's pledge to dedicate 20% of their compute to safety research. I don't get the sense that Sam ever intended to follow through on that, but it was very important to a segment of his employees. And it seems like trying to play both sides of this at least contributed to Ilya's departure.

On the other hand, it seems like Dario is himself a bit more of a true believer.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#32

Post by FiberBundle »

Another potential reason, not mentioned in the article, is that open source models obviously pose the biggest threat in the labs' ability to monetize their tech. Anthropic especially seems to be very anti open-source. If frontier models start to plateau and don't have capabilities that truly differentiate them, nobody will pay what the labs would want to charge. Posing the tech as a danger is a way for them to make the government regulate open source models.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#33

Post by sublinear »

detectivestory wrote: post #4
scratchyone wrote: post #2

Honestly we should have learned this claim from AI companies was purely fear-mongering back when GPT-2 was "too dangerous to release".

That's true but in reality I think people are far more afraid of AI in terms of how it is being used in warfare and policing. Automatic target detection and deployment of drones, or even how it might simply make their role at work redundant etc

These were all already very valid concerns long before this era of "AI" or computational power.

The broader public is just now barely beginning to understand because all they have to do is ask a chatbot. AI does not enable new capabilities, but it does aggregate an idea into a rough sketch and do it quickly on-demand.

None of this really means it will play out that way. The devil is in the details. What it does mean is much more nuanced attention on the politics and money because that's where the power always was.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#34

Post by tangotaylor »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #11

> It's a strange way for any company to talk about its own work. You don't hear McDonald's announcing that it's created a burger so terrifyingly delicious that it would be unethical to grill it for the public. > Here's one theory. But the author never gets back to this! It's the main observation the theory has to account for; why don't we see other companies speak this way, if it's such an effective strategy for defl…

I think they get away with it because it's a dual-use technology. They have this tool that could end the world and people want in on it because they want the power.

The answer to the burger analogy is that it's the wrong analogy. McDonald's is selling you the burger. AI companies are essentially selling you the grill.

The hype works so well because it plays on people's ego and desire for power. They think I have the power to end the world with this technology but I won't because I'm a good person.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#35

Post by boh »

I think the big secret is that AI is just software. In the same way that a financial firm doesn't all of sudden make a bunch of money because Microsoft shipped an update to Excel, AI is inert without intention. If there's any major successes in AI output it's because a person got it to do that. Claude Code is great, but it will also wipe out a database even though it's instructed not to (I can confirm from experience). The idea that there's some secret innovation that will come out any minute doesn't change the fact that it's software that requires human interaction to work.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#36

Post by james2doyle »

Imnimo wrote: post #31

My read is not so much "if we say this is dangerously powerful, it will make people want to buy our product", but rather that there is a significant segment of AI researchers for whom x-risk, AI alignment, etc. is a deal-breaker issue. And so the Sam Altmans of the world have to treat these concerns as serious to attract and retain talent. See for example OpenAI's pledge to dedicate 20% of their compute to safety res…

There have been a number of people leaving them because of that bait and switch it seems. That 20% turned out to be something closer to 2% or even 1%

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#37

Post by chis »

Imnimo wrote: post #31

My read is not so much "if we say this is dangerously powerful, it will make people want to buy our product", but rather that there is a significant segment of AI researchers for whom x-risk, AI alignment, etc. is a deal-breaker issue. And so the Sam Altmans of the world have to treat these concerns as serious to attract and retain talent. See for example OpenAI's pledge to dedicate 20% of their compute to safety res…

Yeah I just don't buy that it would somehow help AI companies for everyone to be existentially afraid of their technology. It seems much more reasonable to think that they really believe the things they're saying, than that it's some kind of 4d chess.

Additionally Dario has just been really accurate with his predictions so far. For instance in early 2025 he predicted that nearly 100% of code would be written with AI in 2026.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#40

Post by b65e8bee43c2ed0 »

tangotaylor wrote: post #18

Finally the media is catching on. Lee Vinsel's criti-hype article nailed this 5 years ago, before we even had the chatbot economy we do now: https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-cr...

the media is not catching on, they've been looping through 'AI is going to kill us all!' when they want to sell fear and 'Look at all the energy and water AI companies are pointlessly wasting!' when they want to sell anger.

the writers and the editors know exactly what they're doing - spreading FUD and creating controversy out of thin air. some of it is done for-profit, some for-agenda, and all of it with malicious intent.

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