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We must pace the frontier

darioamodei.com

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Re: We must pace the frontier

#781

Post by pvab3 »

nedruod wrote: post #561
RGS1811 wrote: post #521

I don’t understand all the comments assuming that RSI is the real threat here. Dario is admitting that they failed to solve alignment. Without alignment, further improvements in capability turn LLMs into wanton felony generators. This call to pace the frontier is dressed up as altruism but it’s an admission that they cannot produce a marketable product better than what they have. Pacing the frontier means the US labs…

You assume alignment and marketable are the same. That's not true. You would willingly work with an unaligned model. At best, you might say you wouldn't if you knew, but (a) you might not know, (b) you wouldn't be representative of all users. You never got to use OAI IM1, but Sol was quite willing too and Claude wasn't perfect either. Hundreds of millions used those, so seems they were marketable. The "big" threat is…

I think it's useful to separate the motives of Anthropic and Dario. I believe that Dario is capable, deep down, of expressing mild concern about the future of things were bad enough. Getting the entire organization to comply out of goodwill is a much much less likely scenario

Re: We must pace the frontier

#782

Post by FusionX »

RGS1811 wrote: post #521

I don’t understand all the comments assuming that RSI is the real threat here. Dario is admitting that they failed to solve alignment. Without alignment, further improvements in capability turn LLMs into wanton felony generators. This call to pace the frontier is dressed up as altruism but it’s an admission that they cannot produce a marketable product better than what they have. Pacing the frontier means the US labs…

We're already seeing anti-AI sentiments, but the movement is still fringe with a vocal minority. However, that'll change soon without alignment. Without self-intervention, there will invariably be future incidents that can cause major economic impact, leaked private data, loss of life (directly/indirectly) etc. Once that happens, their social capital is wiped. It'll be an avalanche of lawsuits and overzealous regulations. Most importantly, the anti-AI sentiment will become universal, rather than a minority-held opinion.

What they're proposing now, is voluntarily staggering the pace of development.

IMO, we don't need to trust Dario or his bedfellows, to do this out of their goodness of their heart. Even assuming (for good reasons) that they are selfish and care only about short-term profits for their investors, this is still purely a business decision. The exponential pace of AI and its impacts ARE short-term. And so, the negative consequences that they might face is also short-term.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#783

Post by Insanity »

To his credit, this reads like human slop instead of AI slop. It's still slop though. People shouldn't take this guy (or Altman) seriously, they need to hype their products to stay afloat and for some reason get a kick out of the 'extinction threat'.

They're still 5 years away from solving cancer (just like they were 5 years away from doing so in 2023). They'll still be 5 years away from solving cancer in 2031.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#784

Post by uncomputation »

Chance-Device wrote: post #306

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 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.

Careful, you’re making too much sense. The big model providers would much rather the ball be in their court. “Deceleration” meaning Anthropic and OpenAI offer less capabilities for more money in service of “protecting humanity from extinction” rather than penny pinching. A lot of “AI research” coming out of these “labs” (increasingly enterprise) seems to be more driven by a cost benefit analysis from suits rather than genuine contributions to the field. I think the last true innovation was the idea of using doom and ending the human race as a marketing gimmick, which strangely seems to have worked in setting the narrative and captivating the sci-fi imaginations of journalists and techies alike.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#785

Post by adsharma »

RGS1811 wrote: post #521

I don’t understand all the comments assuming that RSI is the real threat here. Dario is admitting that they failed to solve alignment. Without alignment, further improvements in capability turn LLMs into wanton felony generators. This call to pace the frontier is dressed up as altruism but it’s an admission that they cannot produce a marketable product better than what they have. Pacing the frontier means the US labs…

The real threat is that we uncritically adopt language such as alignment.

Implicit in this is the idea that AI is a inscrutable matrix and going to remain that way and we'll need expert interpreters to make sense of it.

We need to insist on building tech that's explainable by design.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#786

Post by yoyoyoyop »

FusionX wrote: post #782
RGS1811 wrote: post #521

I don’t understand all the comments assuming that RSI is the real threat here. Dario is admitting that they failed to solve alignment. Without alignment, further improvements in capability turn LLMs into wanton felony generators. This call to pace the frontier is dressed up as altruism but it’s an admission that they cannot produce a marketable product better than what they have. Pacing the frontier means the US labs…

We're already seeing anti-AI sentiments, but the movement is still fringe with a vocal minority. However, that'll change soon without alignment. Without self-intervention, there will invariably be future incidents that can cause major economic impact, leaked private data, loss of life (directly/indirectly) etc. Once that happens, their social capital is wiped. It'll be an avalanche of lawsuits and overzealous regulat…

I don’t think the anti-AI sentiment is as fringe as you think. At least not outside the tech world it isn’t..

Re: We must pace the frontier

#787

Post by ElProlactin »

deepwoods wrote: post #741
barrrrald wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have many issues with Anthropic, but I will say that their actions are fully consistent with a group of people who earnestly believe that AI is extremely dangerous In fact, I would say that the Occam’s razor explanation is not that they are seeking regulatory capture, but that they earnestly believe in the x-risk, and that they are the most thoughtful and capable people to address it You may disagree, you may think…

I agree with this take. Regardless of whether you think they're right, most everyone at Anthropic is acting in good faith. If this is an intentional media campaign it is a remarkably sloppy one. It has been effective because if you tell people they're going to die, they tend to pay attention - think of the grip the 2011 Harold Camping rapture prediction had on our collective psyche, or the 2012 apocalypse. But the me…

> Regardless of whether you think they're right, most everyone at Anthropic is acting in good faith.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Dario Amodei is a 40-something dude who is obviously very, very intelligent. But intelligence is not wisdom and his "essay" here can easily be read as someone who opened a can of worms and doesn't know (or can't accept) that he won't be able to put the worms back in. But he's going to try because he believes he owes it to humanity to try.

It's hubris in its most basic form, even if the guy who has it looks nice and wears shawl-collar sweaters.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#788

Post by kristofferR »

MisterTea wrote: post #713
Amekedl wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed; and it really is not that deep. Realistically; anyone paying for llm access (anthropic, openai, gemini), is getting their access, and a service provided billed by tokens, subscription, whatever. All the efficiency gains, which publications like deepseek v4.1 flash seriously frontload like it is their most important topic to have accomplished improvements on without diminishing performance too much - now this…

I feel like all the closed model providers are milking it as they likely know open models on local hardware will one day eat their lunch. We all know it's not a matter of if but when. The company goes bankrupt, the hardware and property sold off, banks holding the bag.

Cloud models will always have massive benefits of scale.

Caching is the simplest one to understand, cloud providers often reach a 90% cache hit rate, so hosting the same request locally on the exact same model on the same hardware is often way less efficient than on the cloud where a group of users generates a healthy cache.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#789

Post by chillfox »

hgoel wrote: post #554
RGS1811 wrote: post #521

I don’t understand all the comments assuming that RSI is the real threat here. Dario is admitting that they failed to solve alignment. Without alignment, further improvements in capability turn LLMs into wanton felony generators. This call to pace the frontier is dressed up as altruism but it’s an admission that they cannot produce a marketable product better than what they have. Pacing the frontier means the US labs…

Why are we accepting the framing that the LLMs are felony generators, when the only incidences of LLM generated felonies involved misconfigured sandboxes and reckless waste of resources? The companies doing these things without following common sense security measures are the felony generators.

Because those are not the only examples.

There’s the case of the agent that hacked a gym when asked to book a class. That was just a normal user asking an agent to do a normal thing.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#790

Post by seizethecheese »

glub wrote: post #302

Dario, Sam, and Elon are all on the same page on this. So it's either they truly think AI is going to kill us all, or there's some other motives at play here. I don't think these people could possibly agree on the color of the sky, so what could the other possible motives be, based on what we know? OpenAI / Anthropic models have largely stopped advancing - that's not a good look when you're pre-IPO and Chinese models…

Which is it? Would the regulations slow down competitors or let them catch up, or are you contending it would let American competitors catch up but Chinese ones not?
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