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On AI regulation and messaging

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Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#141

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

pjc50 wrote: post #113
podgorniy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swap that point about AI with "electricity". Everything runs on electricity it's "a technology that tends to concentrate power" (no pun intended). The electricity providers must be too powerful... But somehow electricity providers aren't that powerful. Unless there is no competition in sight... The point "AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power" is not that correct. They need this statement to…

Swap that to "oil" and everyone goes "well, yes, obviously, oil is so powerful that people start wars over it". Iran has hit the Amazon data center in Bahrain. The Ukranian deep drone bombing campaign has hit refineries, but also Wildberries, the "Russian Amazon" warehouses. The US campaign against Iran now, Iraq and Serbia previously, targeted power infrastructure. It will obviously be a target in the next war, and…

>Every time the US completes an AI data center, someone in the Chinese nuclear command updates their target priority list

You might have stumbled on the way to convince people that more data centers are a good thing

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#142

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

bananaflag wrote: post #108
kilpikaarna wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI bros consistently handwave away any notions of the material world imposing limits, because (spoiler!) it's a religion where you start from the miracle and work backwards. "Oh, we'll just set up fully automated robotic research labs everywhere!" Where will you get the raw materials? Oh we'll mine the asteroids! How will you find the energy to get there? Oh, the AI will invent new physics! (again without needing to…

> AI bros consistently handwave away any notions of the material world imposing limits, because (spoiler!) it's a religion where you start from the miracle and work backwards. How else are you going to work towards a dream? It's how Elon Musk managed to get reusable rockets when everyone said it's unfeasible. Granted, most ideas don't work, this is why you need testing, but I am a bit surprised to see this attitude o…

If they said that their dream is to solve physics, I'd say "that's cool and I can't wait to see how it turns out." LLMs have gotten so good at mathematics, and are so adroit at analyzing vast quantities of data, that they might have a really good shot.

But they said that they want to cure cancer. That's far outside the core competencies of any LLM, and it requires a lot of real-world wetwork with liquids, chemicals, cell line experiments, animal experiments, etc. They can't merely analyze existing data -- they'd need to generate vast amounts of new data, which isn't really the case in physics. And then regulatory approvals and so forth.

"We're working on curing cancer" sounds more like a poor PR attempt than an actual effort, though I'd love to be wrong.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#143

Post by jatins »

stnikolauswagne wrote: post #44
glimshe wrote: post #13

One thing Dario said is important reflecting on (but from another angle): where's the big deliverable from AI? If AI makes us 10x more productive, the 3 years since its popularization were enough for a product that would have taken 30 years to build without AI, for instance. I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity.

Can only speak for my own project, but can give an example: After an aquisition earlier this year I got the task of doing an SAP-Integration for the new company, last time I did this 5 years ago it was a 6 month task, but with the experience and skills ive gained since I estimated it would be a 3 month project (with or without AI, most work is just logistics, AI cant help much there). In those 3 months I was able to…

> Building the software post-launch of the integration would have easily taken 2.5 years at minimum.

What you have said is correct, it lets you build software much faster. The question however is: is that software making money for the company? (Not talking about what you built but in general)

I think, with AI, companies are saying yes to a lot of things they would have said No to ik say 2020. And as a result realizing “just building it” is not the answer.

Previously your GTM team or Product team would say “If we ship some big project X, we unlock $Y in revenue” but now people are realizing that those projections were really more of a hope. So companies are spending so much more tokens and shipping so many more PRs based on hope but a lot of it just doesn’t turn into meaningful revenue, especially not in short term

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#144

Post by xscott »

blitzar wrote: post #133
xscott wrote: post #101

Any argument about regulation in the US which doesn't mention that China and other countries aren't bound by that regulation should be heavily questioned. Exactly who are you stopping from doing what you don't like?!? Law abiding US citizens won't be able to run them, but you didn't solve anything other than making sure US citizens pay Sam or Dario.

Any arguments that US laws or regulations should apply to people in other countries should be heavily questioned.

That's definitely not an argument I was making.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#145

Post by blitzar »

XorNot wrote: post #86
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Curing cancer sounds insane, but it's also a research problem, I just don't buy the AI labs approach to this stuff. Like, unless we can basically simulate the entirety of human biology, I don't really see how LLMs can make progress here. Maths is different as it doesn't require a real-world interface, and programming already (by definition) can be simulated on a computer. Without that, I can't see much (if any) pro…

The real issue is that biology needs actual experiments done in the physical world, which isn't nice and orderly and well behaved and easily loadable onto a 19" rectangular box.

There is a lot of computational chemistry and biology done in the early stages of research - there are now multiple orders of magnitude of computation power available that is doing nothing but feeding forward on billions of random numbers.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#146

Post by eloisant »

traceroute66 wrote: post #136
kilpikaarna wrote: post #32

> I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. [...] > I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is mo…

> The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. This is honestly hilarious. Dario must think people are stupid. First, cancer research charities are some of the most well funded on this planet. They all obtain donations on the basis of "together, we will cure cancer" messaging. They all fund the best science they can. Second, the human body is a complicated thing. You can feed your fancy LLM as many textbooks a…

Besides cancer isn't really "a disease" but rather "a family of diseases" that can vary a lot. Even breast cancer can be one of many different cancers.

It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases"

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#147

Post by fyredge »

mindwok wrote: post #67
kilpikaarna wrote: post #32

> I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. [...] > I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is mo…

I think it's more reasonable than it sounds on the surface. People's jobs, the bubble, etc are societal level problems and well beyond what Anthropic could even hope to influence on their own. Curing cancer sounds insane, but it's also a research problem, not a societal level coordination problem. And one AI has already proved to help with breakthroughs (alphafold). IMO it makes sense for them to shoot for something…

Based on rhetoric from open ai and Anthropic, i don't think this is reasonable. If anything, their miracle of an AI should be able to solve the job market and economic bubbles. Deploy their agents on it, set up automated hedge funds, distribute the profits equitably to everyone on the planet and on and on.

But something tells me either they can't or they won't, so no trust will be built.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#148

Post by smoe »

mindwok wrote: post #67
kilpikaarna wrote: post #32

> I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. [...] > I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is mo…

I think it's more reasonable than it sounds on the surface. People's jobs, the bubble, etc are societal level problems and well beyond what Anthropic could even hope to influence on their own. Curing cancer sounds insane, but it's also a research problem, not a societal level coordination problem. And one AI has already proved to help with breakthroughs (alphafold). IMO it makes sense for them to shoot for something…

I don't think the problem is that people don't believe AI can be beneficial. The problem is the perception that AI will affect people's lives more negatively than positively, while a few get even more obscenely rich and powerful.

If you don't tackle the societal level problems, nobody will care about research breakthroughs.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#150

Post by octocop »

inigyou wrote: post #127
anon-3988 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean they did solve the protein folding problem did they? NOt too far fetch to think it can automate cancer research or problem finding in some way.

The field of AI did very well in protein folding, but it was completely different from LLMs.

AI made a large improvement in accuracy on a specific protein dataset. We still don't know how exactly protein folding works. So no, it's not solved.
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