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Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

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Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#151
This is exactly the reason Anthropic's call to slow down A.I. development will fail. Shareholders will be loath to accept that the company loses its lead and a commensurate sharp decline in the company's share price.

Moreover, it could lead China to catch up and eventually proclaim that it has nosed ahead of the U.S. in the field. The U.S. Government won't allow that to happen.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#152

They are talking about slowing down the public facing AI development. Because then nation states can create a capabilities gap between them and the public. Why does nobody seem to be pointing out this obvious explanation? It explains why the “we need to race China” concern suddenly vanished in the discussion. The government can simply gag Sam, Dario, Musk on national security basis, getting them all behind the public…

> The government can simply gag Sam, Dario, Musk on national security basis Genuine question - can they really do this? Obviously if I, a not-even-millionaire, get a national security gag order, I'm going to follow it because I assume they'll bury me under the jail otherwise. But the (b|tr)illionare class? I'd assume they have access to enough legal services to make even the government careful of trampling their firs…

Kind of related: https://www.forbes.com/sites/anishasircar/2026/09/01/federal...

> Federal Judge Rules Pentagon’s AI Blacklist [of Anthropic] Violated The Constitution

I don't see the common citizen having this as an option

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#153

They are talking about slowing down the public facing AI development. Because then nation states can create a capabilities gap between them and the public. Why does nobody seem to be pointing out this obvious explanation? It explains why the “we need to race China” concern suddenly vanished in the discussion. The government can simply gag Sam, Dario, Musk on national security basis, getting them all behind the public…

> The government can simply gag Sam, Dario, Musk on national security basis Genuine question - can they really do this? Obviously if I, a not-even-millionaire, get a national security gag order, I'm going to follow it because I assume they'll bury me under the jail otherwise. But the (b|tr)illionare class? I'd assume they have access to enough legal services to make even the government careful of trampling their firs…

Recall that the legal system is itself provided by "the government". It's a complex system. Whether one part of it is capable of exerting influence over some particular thing comes down to competing interests. For example in the US if the states and the federal legislature are in sufficient agreement about something the constitution ceases to matter - they could literally target a single person with an arbitrary law if they so chose. Our assurance that this won't happen comes down to the fact that getting any of them to agree on anything is an exercise in herding cats.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#154

A lot of people in this comments section seem to be against this, i genuinely don't get it? Why? Do you think the current state of affairs is GOOD? That if we let companies create a mind that is, AS OF TODAY, able to solve problems no human in history has solved, with no regulation, things will end up good for us? We need some sort of regulations, some sort of method to help ensure the thing we are creating ends up g…

Giving the big boys a regulatory moat isnt going to do anything positive for the space.

I don't think giving them free reign is going to do anything positive for it either.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a valid concern, but some of that is outright impossible. Banning chinese models and killing open source training is not happening without massive unified international cooperation, and that sort of level of action would require the international counties decide to allow the US aligned companies to just, win. Which would be pretty against their own interests.

It's not all-or-nothing. Banning Chinese models in the public sector and strong-arming the private sector against using them would already do great damage. Similarly, open-source training could be stymied by any of hardware embargoes, taxation, or regulation of larger players.

Sure, it's possible for regulations to make things worse, i will agree. But without regulations it's pretty clear things are going to end up VERY bad, and the only knob we have to make it not bad is regulations. So it's important we try something, and work towards doing a good kind of regulation, or any one of the bad futures you imagine is pretty likely to come to pass.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is pure fantasy.

Why? There are numerous technologies we have ignored or abandoned for numerous reasons. Many of the benefits of AI is "requires less humans", but in an age where we question what work people could possibly do in the future, human labor isn't that hard to find. If the amish can do what they do for whack religious reasons, people could manage it with ai for cultural and social reasons. And I never saw an amish person s…

But notably the amish don't preclude the rest of us from existing. Some subset of humans could turn their attention away from AI but it would presumably still exist and continue to be developed.

I can't think of any economically beneficial technologies that we've collectively ignored. If you manage to come up with a counterexample then that's an opportunity to make some money for yourself. It's a fundamentally unstable state given our economic system.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#157
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every time the labs try this we see model collapse The latest studies demonstrate model collapse is not a given and synthetic data can be used just fine. The latest models are proof of that, they're all trained on large swathes of synthetic data. It can't be used as the -only- data source of course, but that's not how it is being used. This is an obvious conclusion, too, because there's no difference between synthe…

> The latest studies demonstrate model collapse is not a given Which studies? [edit: I'll assume you mean these two given by @dorolow: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01413 https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.07515 ] > It can't be used as the -only- data source of course, but that's not how it is being used Right, so human data creation would also have to scale up exponentially, and that's not gonna happen. > because there's no di…

> Right, so human data creation would also have to scale up exponentially, and that's not gonna happen.

It doesn't need to. We're not even close to exhausting the useful synthetic data within the human data we have, let alone all of the new data that is being created.

> I mean, that's obviously false, otherwise model collapse wouldn't exist. The difference is statistical, but it's there.

It's not. It's just bytes of information. A machine and a human can write the same bytes (and often do). Like I already said, model collapse happens when you are overfitting on data without useful, fresh training signals. That's the key difference between the data. The data itself isn't in some way "special", some unique configuration of bytes that imbues special powers, it's that the useful information in it has already been exhausted by the model. You can get the same phenomena by having a poor distribution of human training samples as well. I think you're confusing LLM generated data with synthetic data. Synthetic data doesn't need to be created by an LLM, although an LLM can assist in the creation.

Wiki:

> In early model collapse, the model begins losing information about the tails of the distribution – mostly affecting minority data. Later work highlighted that early model collapse is hard to notice, since overall performance may appear to improve, while the model loses performance on minority data.[11] In late model collapse, the model loses a significant proportion of its performance, confusing concepts and losing most of its variance.[10][12][13]

As models retrain on outputs sampled disproportionately from the higher-probability center of the distribution, rare words and uncommon syntactic constructions are among the first features to disappear.[25] Statistical analysis of recursive next-token prediction training has shown that, when language models are trained recursively on synthetic data, the learned conditional distributions concentrate probability mass on a small subset of highly predictable continuations (a phenomenon characterized as "total collapse")

> That's pretty clearly a hype article

It was just the first article I saw on a quick google search, there are thousands of these stories. It's easy to dismiss anything that doesn't align with your worldview as hype, but you're the one lacking evidence now.

> I'm asking for empirical measurements of timelines, not hypotheticals.

Go and find it then? You haven't bothered looking.

> Lol that excuse is getting really old

You're doing the same thing people have been doing for years, comparing this very second in time and failing to extrapolate. HackerNews was full of developers who said that AI would never be useful for programming, it can't do x, y, z. Now these same people don't write code by hand anymore and haven't looked at their codebases in months.

You had people in mathematics saying the same thing, now you have Terrence Tao posting articles about how AI is stealing their job.

You had artists, designers and photographers saying the same thing, now they can't tell the difference between something human created or AI created.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#158
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK understood. But you understand this makes them sound like the type of person who doesn't believe any of the "worldly concerns" are worth addressing because "the end is near" right?

There's no logical error here if the end is actually near. So it all hinges on an empirical disagreement you have with them. There's nothing particularly unserious about that.

“It all hinges on [an entirely presupposed conclusion that we can’t prove is any more likely than the opposite]” is about as unserious as it gets lol

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#159
post #17

I have to wonder if some us are just much more inured to salespeople and thus also to "AI Safety" propaganda. I've yet to have a logical discussion with anyone who thinks the "AI Safety" people should be in charge and I think they just truly don't that what most them actually want is to be the one holding the keys to power.

I am an AI Safety Person and I want the government to nationalize or have a significant stake in the frontier labs and to have democratic control of the development of the technology. The AI Safety movement is not a monolith. I do not think Eliezer Yudkowsky nor his acolytes should hold the reins, but a lot of folks sure like to create a strawman that anyone who wants to regulate OpenAI is somehow an EA/MIRI weirdo

>but a lot of folks sure like to create a strawman that anyone who wants to regulate OpenAI is somehow an EA/MIRI weirdo

Anytime I see a random person on X who makes these kind of safety alarmism posts >90% of the time can be directly tied back to EA / LessWrong / related offshoots. You can not deny the amount of people, employees of Antrhopic / OpenAI, CEO and employees of various AI companies, etc are related to these groups.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm asking is, why should we expect that to effectively further the end goal? You're simply asserting that it will ultimately do so. Given the efficiency gains we've seen it seems to me that the situation has shifted from being analogous to producing nuclear weapons to producing something much closer to small arms.

To further the metaphor, didn't the ban on nuclear weapons research work? We don't have pocket nukes, and there's very little risk of random countries acquiring their own due to the amount of work involved. To be concrete to AI: if we stop work on the frontier, the best we can do is make the current frontier easier to get to and more accessible. And while current frontier is strong, it's not world-changing so. The on…

> We don't have pocket nukes,

What do you call the Davy Crockett warheads like the W54 ? The 0.3 kiloton low yield B61-12 ? The Chagai-I boosted fission warheads demonstrated by Pakistan in 1998 ?

> and there's very little risk of random countries acquiring their own due to the amount of work involved.

And yet North Korea, Isreal and Pakistan got there ... and India speed ran five tests in 1998 that caught the US completely by surprise.

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