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Ask HN: Anyone else feeling uneasy with the latest developments in AI?

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11–20 of 29 posts

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feeling uneasy with the latest developments in AI?

#11
I watch my frontier models fail to make the simplest tradeoffs in tasks daily. I watch zealots sputter out after the initial burst of activity.

I fear for my loved ones when the bills come due and we don’t have an ROI on it, and any model that’s made is quickly absorbed into cheaper models. That the utter hucksters who have given takes ranging from massive exaggeration to willful Big Lie will somehow tell the truth while they stand to gain untold billions.

I’m not sure if it would be worse if they fail utterly or succeed completely, but my bet is we somehow manage to end somewhere in the middle, towards the former. There’s been no accounting yet for the lies told to get the money.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feeling uneasy with the latest developments in AI?

#12
I'm even worried about the current and past AI. Look at what we have used it for. Look at how it's drowning out hunan voices in spam. Look at what people promise it will do.

I really wish I could see the potential of those technologies, but that potential is put to the service of humanity's worst.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feeling uneasy with the latest developments in AI?

#15
Just because models are getting better, that doesn't mean we're getting to AGI anytime soon. It will likely require more than just 'a better model' to get to AGI, and it might not even be fully possible.

That being said, companies have to make their money back on this eventually and they're already jacking up their prices, even if we get to AGI I'm not sure most people will be able to afford to use it to handle everything in their lives, at least not for quite a while (and companies won't be able to afford to replace every human with an AI counterpart).

It's already getting expensive to go too heavy with something like Claude, to the point where my company hosts internal seminars on how to reduce token count (for the company's employees) and also runs out of tokens before the end of the month for the company every month, and we're going pretty heavy on A.I. usage within the company.

And I highly doubt companies are going to just leave servers running AGI models going just so it can do some sort of hostile takeover. It's still ultimately reliant on electricity and massive compute power.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feeling uneasy with the latest developments in AI?

#16
I'm not dreading increasing AI. I firmly believe that LLMs in their current form cannot even achieve AGI. We need to break past barriers like not thinking in tokens and a model having a sense of prediction semi independent of its output.

Truly, even with the current level of AI, we should be concerned how people should learn. This is true of adults, but incredibly important for children. Should we become dependent on these tools to the point where we feel like we can't achieve our day-to-day work?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feeling uneasy with the latest developments in AI?

#20
post #4

I don't tend to worry about things, more-so than is maybe healthy, but that's just how I am. I very much like the Newt Scamander quote about worry: "worrying means you suffer twice" Having said that, my advice to anxiety ridden family members of "just don't worry about it" isn't generally taken as useful or actionable advice, so I'll make an attempt at logic: I think the nuclear arms race was scarier. It was literall…

That makes sense. You may as well be right. And I agree that the nuclear arms race was probably scarier in practice.

I think my main concern is the sheer velocity of this revolution. Between yesterday and today, we’re now seeing the news that an OpenAI internal model that’s “a step-function improvement” over Astra (!) on several benchmarks has solved the Navier-Stokes Millenium Prize Problem.

At this rate, I fear governments (slow as they are) might not even see it coming before it’s far too late. I also fear that AI researchers, despite being well-intentioned, might turn reckless under the pressures of the frontier labs that employ them to accelerate at all costs.

But following your logic, I agree, it’s probably not hopeless yet. And I do believe there are highly smart people with more power and influence than me that are keeping a close eye on this as well, and they won’t stand there with arms crossed if they believe doom is impending (so I hope).

Good reminder about worrying about what we can control, and thanks for sharing your perspective on this topic.

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