I'm sorry, but the ostrichmaxxing and conspiracy-thinking in hn threads about AI extinction risk is at worrying level right now.
The denial and whataboutism is constant, no matter what kind of evidence comes out!
I resigned from Anthropic today
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Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#402There's a scene in the movie "War of the Worlds" by Spielberg where the protagonist's son walks into a war zone because he is entranced by the battle ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7rfWPbEufo ). He is obliterated (along with the rest of the US forces) shortly after. I've always been struck by that scene, because in a lot of ways, if we really are headed towards a superintelligence, I at least want to be there and…
You can't address the key problems without understanding of the esoteric side details to be fair. You are studying what is basically the worlds most complicated and undocumented computer.
Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#403“ No other human activity poses this level of danger.” I really, really disagree with that statement. I don’t think ai models come close to nuclear weapons or to run-of-the-mill, everyday carbon emissions in terms of danger to humanity. What’s the most dangerous thing that’s happened with an LLM so far? (This question is serious - maybe I don’t know the right examples.) Example 1: I’m aware of a small number of peopl…
The problem is not the technology, the problem is the ideologues (Anthropic) who are steering the ship and the lack of decentralization and distribution of power. Your average Anthropic ideologue - including and most especially the main man himself - would love nothing more than to eradicate 9/10ths of the planet's population, pump the survivors full of memory wiping drugs, bury the existence of AI deep underground a…
What evidence do you have for any of this?
Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
> inherent non-determinism in current AI architectures There's nothing inherent about non-determinism in transformer architectures. All of it is removable.
I see. Can you say more about this? What’s the trade-off of removing it?
You get a probability curve for the next token prediction. You can just pick the highest probability. That said the non-determinism serves a real purpose- it allows different outputs and paths to be explored. So that's kind of the tradeoff.
Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#405I'm pretty baffled by the degree of skepticism expressed here in response to some of Jacob's claims. After the events of the summer it feels like it takes a lack of imagination to not see a few plausible routes to disaster. It may be reasonable to believe these outcomes are not very likely or that we can stop before going too far (I tend to disagree). But I can't imagine doubting that the capabilities will soon be th…
The HN crowd has a notable anti-AI bias - so it doesn’t surprise me
Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#406I'm pretty baffled by the degree of skepticism expressed here in response to some of Jacob's claims. After the events of the summer it feels like it takes a lack of imagination to not see a few plausible routes to disaster. It may be reasonable to believe these outcomes are not very likely or that we can stop before going too far (I tend to disagree). But I can't imagine doubting that the capabilities will soon be th…
> I'm pretty baffled by the degree of skepticism expressed here in response to some of Jacob's claims.
What should we do? Freak out? Maybe this sentiment would be taken more seriously if there was a real call to action included. Shall we protest? Vote in a specific way? Call representatives? If your solution is that we should just be scared, then of course there’d be not much value in what you bring to the table.
Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#407Isn’t the real risk that as AI get’s smarter and given more autonomy, it will start to decide on humans instead of with us? And that it will align us instead of the other way around. That this automatically leads to extinction and apocalypse I don’t understand.
Do you align ants in your backyard, or do you simply demolish their home and build your shed?
Are humans trained on the collective ant internet?
Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#408“ No other human activity poses this level of danger.” I really, really disagree with that statement. I don’t think ai models come close to nuclear weapons or to run-of-the-mill, everyday carbon emissions in terms of danger to humanity. What’s the most dangerous thing that’s happened with an LLM so far? (This question is serious - maybe I don’t know the right examples.) Example 1: I’m aware of a small number of peopl…
You’ve identified that the risks of nuclear weapons are theoretical. ie in theory we could blow up the world even though we haven’t yet done so.
Well the worries about AI are equivalent in that those risks are discussed now because discussing them after they’ve happened is clearly too late.
That’s the thing about risk. There’s no point discussing it after it’s happened and any discussions beforehand can easily be hand waved away as “it’s just a small group of unrelated individuals” or “it’s unlikely to happen to me”.
So yeah, your points are true. But they’re also moot.
Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm order to guess the next token in a love poem, they must understand love. In order to predict the next token in a chess game between grand master, they must master chess. In order to predict the next token in a computer program, they need to be able to program anything. They gain all these abilities in their training. That's what training does. Despite no one programmed them to master chess, or hack into anything.
This is so wildly incorrect I don't even know where to start. For one, they were absolutely programmed to play chess if they can play chess. That is the only way they can play chess. For another, they cannot understand literally anything, much less love. Trying to actually educate you would be an exercise in futility, enjoy your willful ignorance, I hear it's bliss. But for anyone reading this, this is absolutely, un…
This is so wildly incorrect I don't even know where to start.
For one, as you said yourself, they were just programmed to compute the probability of the next token. They were not programmed to play chess, chess games just happened to be in the training data.
For another, there is no formal definition of "understand", and it is therefore impossible to tell whether or not they "understand". (But my claim was that one need to understand something to write poem about it. And the LLM can write poem about it)
Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#410How do you think he feels knowing the basilisk will eat him first /s