Not surprised, seems these labs start calling for regulation once they are losing or have competition. OpenAI started calling it for it once Anthropic got better, Anthropic started calling for it once the Chinese models got good, Google is now calling it for it because they are falling far behind.
Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
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Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fundamental issue is that if we really get something like this, scarcity will still exist. There will still be scarce things people want. But the motivating justificatory structure for any inequality in allocation will have completely evaporated.
Am I crazy or does this just real like secular eschatology? What evidence do you have of any of this?
There is no real evidence that we'll reach AGI any time soon. It relies on AI continuing to scale, and we have no proof that will continue to be possible.
There is an alternative interpretation, which is that Demis looked at the US government's ham-fisted handling of Fable, and deciding that setting up a body to act as a buffer between the Trump admin and the AI companies would be a good thing.
Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
#53Not exactly a "plan" - he's just saying we should have a standards body that assesses models for safety. At this point I'd say the societal risk of AI isn't models gone wild, or used by the bad guys. Regulation will take care of itself, and it seems the AI companies will not only welcome it, but lobby for it to shift responsibility to the government. The real risk of AI is societal disruption due to job displacement,…
Also a mechanism to pull up the ladder behind themselves.
Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what sorts of new economic models will be needed to help everyone thrive in a post-scarcity world What sort of new economic models did we come up with to help everyone thrive in a post-X world? Like, food production is really a solved technical problem. We can feed anyone on the planet if we wanted to. Another example: we could put everyone who's homeless into some sort of a house. Have we done that yet?
Food production is indeed a solved problem in most countries (we are almost post-scarcity when it comes to food), which is why obesity is a much bigger issue than hunger today. Hunger is present pretty much only in conflict zones. I fully expect such issues in conflict zones, even in AI post-scarcity world. Housing is definitely not post-scarcity today, building a house is still very expensive, not to mention the lim…
> which is why obesity is a much bigger issue than hunger today
Obesity is much more related to the type of food than the quantity.
Many developing countries have obesity issues due to scarcity of fresh and healthy food.
In some places coca cola is cheaper and / or more available than drinking water.
Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
#55How will this be enforced, at least with financial markets money is discrete, can largely be counted. This seems like a slippery slope to full blown surveillance of the internet and in general computing. If AGI is truly imminent and will collectively effect all of us why not apply democracy to it, and vote for new AI models?
Agreed. There needs to be full transparency on the capabilities of the models. Being given access is one thing, but you can't have labs building powerful models that could be manipulating the entire planet without the public knowing. The public needs to have a good pulse on what the leading models are capable of so that we can remain in touch with reality.
Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the STEM side, yes no doubt he is a lot smarter than me. But as per the documentary of his life, he is wholly focused on AGI and will remain unfulfilled if he, or indeed anyone else, doesn't achieve it within his lifetime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinking_Game
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Hassabis is a genuine prodigy and genius by any measure you would care to pick. Unlike a handful of others supposed tech leaders I can think of.
Just how smart? "A few short years" sounds like someone smart enough to know how to make a safe prediction.
Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
#57Not exactly a "plan" - he's just saying we should have a standards body that assesses models for safety. At this point I'd say the societal risk of AI isn't models gone wild, or used by the bad guys. Regulation will take care of itself, and it seems the AI companies will not only welcome it, but lobby for it to shift responsibility to the government. The real risk of AI is societal disruption due to job displacement,…
The risk of AI right now is centralization of power, and it's exactly what they're fighting for. Job displacement ties into that as well.
Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
#58The premise is "Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away". If this is true, establishing an institution to ensure things like "publishing model cards with technical details, maintaining strong internal cybersecurity, vetting key personnel, and providing sufficient resourcing for safety and security research" is…
My great annoyance with all this blather about UBI and post-scarcity and new economic models is that it relies on taxing and redistributing the ~infinite profits of the largest tech companies on earth.
What in the history of our world gives anyone faith that those companies are going to start paying taxes instead of using "AGI" to engineer increasingly complex methods to avoid them so that their equity owners can pocket the profits?
https://itep.org/trump-meta-tesla-alphabet-amazon-obbba-taxe... - "The annual financial reports recently released by Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla disclose that these corporations collectively reported $315 billion in U.S. profits for 2025, and collectively paid just 4.9 percent of that amount in federal corporate income taxes—with Tesla paying exactly zero"
Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
#59If we get to AGI, the first step governments will take is ensure only a few countries are allowed to have it. Just like Nuclear.
Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Hassabis is a genuine prodigy and genius by any measure you would care to pick. Unlike a handful of others supposed tech leaders I can think of. Just how smart? "A few short years" sounds like someone smart enough to know how to make a safe prediction.
More so, as he put the word probably in too.
>"...probably only a few short years away."