Live data from Hacker News

We must pace the frontier

darioamodei.com

461–470 of 937 posts

Re: We must pace the frontier

#461

Dario's proposed approach is a classic example of capital attempting to control technological advancement and the means of production. For the first time in human history, any member of the working class can just about afford to have a team of expert scientist/physician/lawyer/engineers working directly for them. Super intelligence (the ability to have many smarter minds than your own reporting to you) has always bee…

Sorry boss but this ain’t it. I don’t think the answer to nuclear proliferation is to let everybody have all the nukes they want. You’re framing this like it’s 1917, or 1945. But it is not - and likely has very little to do with capital at all. Any “revolution” here (assuming there is some truth in the doomerism which I believe there is given the state of AI) will really look more like an extinction or a genocide, re…

Sorry boss we live in a physical world, unplug it. Don’t grant information monopolies.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#462

Dario's proposed approach is a classic example of capital attempting to control technological advancement and the means of production. For the first time in human history, any member of the working class can just about afford to have a team of expert scientist/physician/lawyer/engineers working directly for them. Super intelligence (the ability to have many smarter minds than your own reporting to you) has always bee…

> Super intelligence (the ability to have many smarter minds than your own reporting to you) has always been available to the wealthy and powerful This is not what superintelligence is. Don't be like Meta and redefine existing terms for marketing purposes.

Actually, it has been historically been observed that some institutions, such as large corporations, do resemble super-powered, non-human intelligences of a kind, and that studying our history with them is instructive for our hopes of controlling superintelligent AI (i.e. not good).

Re: We must pace the frontier

#464

Bro, no, you must stop pasting your opinion, because you share it with no one. This control, no control is crazy. Stop doing it..

This comment reads like Dario's a random tech blogger who's personally submitting these to HN

“Dario” is quite literally a random figure that just emerged out of nowhere one day. It’s not like it’s Eric Schmidt’s next company or Tim Ferris came out of the woodwork or even some Jack Dorsey backed underdog nobody’s heard of.

No, he’s more like an avatar with no history placed on the AI stage by the industry itself.

I’d respect a tech blogger’s opinion on the issue more, even if I reference them casually by first name (which you do with “Dario” btw)

Re: We must pace the frontier

#465
post #430

Hard disagree. Our choices are: A) Bet our collective good on the national and international cooperation of all companies, nations, and people to come together in order to slow down development of one of the most powerful economic tools (and/or weapons) the world has ever known. Or B) Assume that all our systems will be targeted by super hackers right now , and take appropriate measures to deal with that reality. If…

These do not seem to be mutually exclusive. Should we not do both?

Do you really think we can really get every country to truly pace the frontier? Pretty sure China won't give a f until they catch up Anthropic and OpenAI. It is an arm race. We had nukes for like 70 years and still haven't figured out how to make every single country follow those nuclear treaties, with an increasingly non-interventionist US I don't think we can get every single country to the table and agree to a pause. Will US accept their frontier being caught up by Chinese Labs? I don't think so.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#466

I like the idea of pacing the frontier, but while we’re talking about restrictions, I like restrictions of another sort more. Namely, restricting the use of AI in corporate environments so that it does not destroy the economy as it advances. The chance of getting broad agreement on “pacing” is fairly low, meaning that all of this likely won’t happen and the race will continue. However, even in the unlikely event that…

I think Dario is writing with much of these things in mind, but using this as a specific framed opportunity to enable a better interim and long-term outcome for this planet with us still on it. When the internal motives for Dario are fully shared on the other side of the hill, I think we will find his writing to be more about influencing and shaping policy to steer the world in the best way possible within his ability, control, and knowledge. It’s a commonly held believe with the effective altruism community, which Anthropic team was formed under, to use the policy levers to positively influence the world. If I read this latest writing from Dario through that lens, there are deeper concerns with the AI tooling that go well beyond what’s noted in this singular post and are likely the motivations for re-attempting a slowdown or pacing. I too generally agree with for many reasons like allowing the young OpenAI engineers to make mistakes like the Hugging Face incident in July and put better processes in place (ie where is your decent multi-level fencing controls and harness best practices when disabling security features and where is your energy/spend limits for achieving the mission objective in scope and not warming the world for no reason!) and more time to engineer and deploy better hardware to not warm the world instead of burning through fossil fuels since now data centers in the US can isolate pollution from the grid to exempt themselves from federal regulation.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Limit what AI corporations can use? Other countries would love that more than anything. Basically a free gift to any competitors or any startup that quietly avoids the rules. Sure - look at what is being done today with H1B visas and tariffs. What is more important to you - having a job and a functioning economy/society, or upholding some "free market" doctrine you've bought into? Just as with H1B visas, you restri…

Jobs are going to evolve because of AI. Some jobs will be automated. New jobs will be created. It's like saying we should have never created car factories and automated much of it because we should think of the horse handlers and maintainers. There will still be a market for "trust". And its customers will never trust the machines. And within that market a lot of new startups will emerge for those who actually get to…

> New jobs will be created.

In the short term yes, but in the long term no.

What makes AI different to previous technological shifts is that it is (or will be) a general purpose technology, equally capable of itself doing the new jobs that it creates (so yeah, they'll be created, but also immediately taken away).

The saving grace is that this won't happen immediately, or as soon as we get something the AI companies slap an "AGI" label on in a couple of years, and it will likely take decades until we have an "artificial human" tech that genuinely could do any job (if we choose to allow that future).

Re: We must pace the frontier

#468
post #227

Can the frontier be paced partly by holding humans responsible for the actions of their software? My impression is that AI hacking is being treated as a special case where the AI itself is imagined to be responsible and the humans who created it, set it up and then ran it are somehow excused. I'm not a lawyer but surely the bad actions of AI are covered by existing law. I suspect that the development of AI would dece…

[deleted]

Re: We must pace the frontier

#469
post #180

One might think they will slow down the development of new models at Anthropic, but Dario does not really mention that in the text. This certainly looks like a way to slow down competitors and regulate foreign and open models. It's always about money

Really? Anthropic has the strongest models and it's in the best position to begin RSI and win the race. A pause would favor competitors.

Companies are already switching to open weight. They want to stop that asap. That only happens if they can get regulation. It's plain as day to see.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You start from incorrect premises by presupposing agreed-upon rules would never work anyway. "Competition" only makes sense within a pre-mediated set of constrains. Rules all competitors agree to. Workable rules are a difficult problem, that doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile to come up with them.

> You start from incorrect premises by presupposing agreed-upon rules would never work anyway. The rules would never work on a global economy. If you think the entire world is going to shake hands and agree not to let their companies use a competitive advantage, that’s not a conversation I’m interested in having. It’s a fantasy. If you think it’s that easy to get all competitors in a global economy to agree to a set…

Your idea about the world being inhabited by mindless seekers of short-sighted "competitive advantages" is the fantasy.

Getting people to agree isn't easy, that doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile. There often even isn't any viable alternative to reaching an agreement in social settings.

When your hyper-competitive mode of thinking leads to undesirable consequences, you have to change your mindset. Reality doesn't conform to wishful thinking.

Post reply on HN