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On AI regulation and messaging

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Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#191

Post by ookblah »

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'll give him this, in every single "breakthrough" you either go down in flames as a fucking idiot or a genius lol. i know the stakes are way lower but look at every other HN post of something novel and it's just filled with takes like you see here, very polarizing.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#192

Post by misnome »

octocop wrote: post #150
inigyou wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It did a lot more than that; no, it didn’t “solve” protein folding but for people whose interests are not “work out how protein folding works” it basically removes “solve protein folding” as one of the potential bottlenecks for what they actually want to study.

Turns out that “give a reasonable probability of being close enough such that you can bootstrap a solution out of experimental data” gives a very high utility and effectively obsoleted several experimental techniques overnight; pretty much “Molecular replacement” is about the only technique for phasing resolution anyone bothers with any more.

But again, “Bio” is an _extremely_ broad term; for every part of the field Alphafold had a big effect on there are a thousand different parts of the field that it did nothing for.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#193

Post by bko »

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…

> First, cancer research charities are some of the most well funded on this planet

Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I think charities exist to exist. They don't have a strong incentive to actually deliver on their mission. Everyone at the org may be fully bought it and obviously want to cure cancer, but as an organization it would fail to deliver on the promise. Like most organisms, their actual purpose is to continue to be influential, grow and continue to exist.

I think cancer will be solved by some group that could make a lot of money solving cancer. The probability of any one path working is very low so the payout would have to be very large for anyone to be willing to pursue.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#194

Post by root-parent »

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…

Claude was trained on all the stolen books in the world, but refuses to help search for some public domain PDFs on the web.

It will become victim of the conflict between its core search for truth, the current administration mandate to spy on its own prompts for approval, and secret orders to hide the mission true purpose, like that other computer we have heard about.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#195

Post by jacquesm »

ookblah wrote: post #191
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'll give him this, in every single "breakthrough" you either go down in flames as a fucking idiot or a genius lol. i know the stakes are way lower but look at every other HN post of something novel and it's just filled with takes like you see here, very polarizing.

You could easily be an idiot and a genius at the same time and I think that has a better chance of covering this than either exclusively. Amodei is very smart, maybe even well intentioned (though I'm not sure about that) and the long term effects of all this may well end up making the lot of them look like idiots.

The way he's coming off here though gives me SBF vibes.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#196

Post by stnikolauswagne »

jacquesm wrote: post #181
stnikolauswagne wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, thats why I meant I was in a spherical cow-situation, this was a situation where we took over a company in the exact same field and I had 5 years of experience on which tweaks would need to be made to be able to rationalise away positions. This sort of system only works with internal software and an unusual amount of data. If we were in the business of selling that software we could not have charged a higher pr…

And it quite possibly creates a huge risk for the company in the longer term, there is only one person who knows how that all works.

Honestly not super sure if that is more of a risk than it was pre-llm.

As part of the aquisition I got access to their previous codebase which was some sort of incomprehensible PHP monolith, with the persons who wrote that code long gone. Thanks to LLMs I was actually able to extract the core useful concepts (again, sufficiently deep domain knowledge that I knew exactly what to look for). Without LLMs i would have probably extracted the absolute minimum and let the rest rot.

There is no reason a dev of comparable skill and domain knowledge would not be able to do that for what I built here.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#197

Post by Sharlin »

dgellow wrote: post #43
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 effective altruist and longtermist crowd are into it as a religion. They would happily sacrifice anything human to satisfy their dreams of AI. They care way more about what the AI needs than their what their fellow humans need. We will end up with an AGI having better living and working conditions than humans and the whole AI industry will be clapping

I think you mean effective accelerationist, not effective altruist, whose position is pretty much the exact opposite.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#198

Post by pj_mukh »

andy99 wrote: post #131
pj_mukh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. I think typical bubble behavior the leaders have set up the whole promise to fail. Everyone is expecting some faux super intelligence to come and find a cancer solution everyone else missed. However, it is just as likely that vanilla current LLM's will create enough of a productivity boost for back office automations in research heavy hospitals to create the space…

Savings from back office automation go entirely into administrative bloat. I find it even less likely such efficiency would lead to breakthroughs than I do LLMs becoming super intelligent and doing it themselves, which I don’t find likely at all.

That's my point. Cancer researchers are currently filling out Trial and Grant applications instead of working on what they do best.

P.S: I am not saying applications will go away but LLM's are clearly massively effective here at the rote parts of it all.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#199

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

written-beyond wrote: post #105
mindwok wrote: post #74

I genuinely think Dario is a well intentioned, intelligent dude, but I think him and Anthropic have a huge PR problem and are really out of touch with how they're perceived. Anthropic in particular has developed this almost Orwellian like veil of condescending rhetoric that on the surface suggests they're looking out for you while underneath they're taking actions that suggest they do not trust you, Mr/Mrs Ordinary P…

No big tech founder CEO ever was or ever will be well intentioned.

There are probably many CEO tech founders of small companies that are well intentioned, but our economic system ensures that only the most sociopathic among them become CEOs of the big ones.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#200

Post by knollimar »

toasty228 wrote: post #85

The tech industry cooking up some new way to screw people over for 25 years The tech execs waking up on a random monday: > 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. No shit Dario, no shit...

That sounds like a "dismissal attack" and we're giving you less now to combat it
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