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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

#201

Post by ben_w »

Retric wrote: post #180
fc417fc802 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unstab…

Supersonic passenger aircraft were operated profitably and no longer exist. There’s levels of R&D required for many technologies where the question goes beyond could this be profitable to what are the risk vs reward that this specific project will succeed.

> Supersonic passenger aircraft were operated profitably

Were they? IIRC joint project by British and French national airlines, they expected to sell loads, hardly anyone wanted to buy the planes, the two airlines kept them flying out of government embarassment.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#203

Post by ben_w »

bedstefar wrote: post #175
lacy_tinpot wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just stop AI without also stopping progress in computer hardware. You have to do both. The real implication of what they're saying extends beyond just AI. You have to stop the entire compute stack in order to prevent or slow down AI progress.

And even if we did manage to limit/cull hardware development, what would keep people from continuing to find ever more efficient models runnable on contemporary hardware?

Unclear how much more efficient they can be.

Bleeding edge models are putting the desk-job competencies of multiple professional fields into something with as many parameters as a single large rodent has synapses.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#204

Post by Turn_Trout »

nullbio wrote: post #69
AaronAPU wrote: post #27

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…

* Frontier models need infinite high quality private IP to keep them fed. Forcing an IP theft funnel ensures big lab survival and model intelligence growth. * Open-weight models are 1month behind frontier models. Cheaper, faster, private (no IP theft), steerable (you can security harden your own software without safeguard triggers). No sane business would keep using these API services if they didn't have to. The labs…

Dario's post [1] commits to direct evaluators that can, among other abilities, expose secret RSI. He wants that made law.

Do you have a source on METR employees retaining massive equity stakes?

[1] https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#205

Post by ben_w »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #167
amazingman wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is pure fantasy.

Watch, very soon this is going to politically divide. They’re sowing the seeds right now with “antiai” campaigns. The right will for a change be for it but will be able to be talked into regulation because you know “small government” and all only when convenient. The left will bitch and moan about fairness and copyright and automation and UBI, they’ll be the doomers and worldwar chicken littles. The Uniparty will be…

The world isn't the American political nonsense.

> What will be funny to me is that normal tech people outside the frontier model companies are about to find themselves without a home on this topic.

Already happened, just from agentic coding.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#206

Post by teekert »

Buttons840 wrote: post #104
AaronAPU wrote: post #27

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…

All the worst outcomes involve taking this technology away from the public.

So you’re saying the people should be aligned with the government?

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#207

Post by Turn_Trout »

ajross wrote: post #75
AaronAPU wrote: post #27

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…

I remain amazed that the idea of the USA being a coherent, unified rational actor one can describe as a "Nation State" has survived the current administration. To be less glib: Yes, there are still smart people in there making insightful and intelligent and probably even authoritarian suggestions. It all gets unwound the second you try to explain it to POTUS and he regurgitates a simulacrum to the next journalist he…

I'm one of the whistleblowers (from GDM [1]). I gave up over a million dollars (compared to quietly switching labs and continuing to work at one) to speak frankly about these issues. I hold no equity and tried to zero out my position before ever joining GDM.[2]

It's wild to me that people think such whistleblowers are fronts for labs to take over or pump valuations. We are trying to call out how these labs will, by uninterrupted AI-race default, concentrate enormous power over the rest of humanity.

[1] https://turntrout.com/why-i-left-google-deepmind

[2] https://turntrout.com/deepmind-equity-discussion

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#208

Post by octoberfranklin »

lukan wrote: post #34
ranger_danger wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I figured they're just admitting AI models have plateaued and are coming up with some fake story about self restraint so they don't lose VC money

Not sure about the level of irony here, but I keep hearing models have plateaued since a while now, but I keep being impressed with the latest model performance.

People are definitely finding new things to use the models for, and orchestrating increasingly large swarms of agents in useful ways -- every single day, especially the last few months.

But the basic single-NN frontier capability has been pretty stationary since Opus 4.8. Kimi K3 is almost as good as that with open weights, which has the frontier labs terrified.

The only big thing on the horizon is if we can get diffusion models working reliably; that would be a big step forward. Inception's Mercury is AFAICT the leader here. It's stupifyingly fast but has obedience/hallucination problems that the autoregressives solved ~2 years ago. So it's not ready yet but improving.

Also, FFS why is Grok the only model that knows how to do parallel tool calls? Such a useful ability and nobody else trains it in. Or if they do it just doesn't work.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#210

Post by metalcrow »

evdubs wrote: post #186
metalcrow wrote: post #92

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…

> Do you think the current state of affairs is GOOD? Chinese labs releasing open weights models is good. All of these independent harnesses and model router services are good. The pricing of memory and accelerators sucks at the moment but hopefully we will see cool local inference computing if memory and accelerator prices normalize. OpenAI scooping the Navier Stokes problem from researchers already using OpenAI is b…

We only know about the stuff in https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-septemb... because it's not open source. I assure you the open source and Chinese models are being used in this same way.
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