At this point, isn't the pause inevitable or wise? A huge section of the population, normal people, have been exposed to the idea that there is this is existential threat. It's escaped containment. They're still processing it but I expect the general reaction from it going main stream is going to be very bad. The pause at this point could be good to cool heads and show the public that this isn't the project of maniacs. The reaction is going to be more intense than people here believe. You're talking about extinction, not social media or phone addiction. For the sake of the project, realize that this isn't going to be like other tech backlash moments.
Dario, Please
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Re: Dario, Please
#72> “a swarm of agents could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet.” I'm wondering why no one is mentioning the "accountability" word. Why these companies are allowed to damage others with impunity? Start making managers pay the price for their actions, and watch how the models magically slow down on their own.
Why do people focus so much on finding scapegoats? Finding someone to blame is neither necessary nor sufficient to fix a system so an accident doesn't happen again. It might act as as an incentive to fix a system, but it's less direct than actually working on fixing the system.
> Why do people focus so much on finding scapegoats?
I, for one, am not trying to find scapegoats or go on a witchhunt.
But managers are paid a lot of money to take responsibility. Yes, that's an old school thought, responsibility. But that's one big reason they get a big, fat paycheck.
Re: Dario, Please
#73Re: Dario, Please
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if the power of nuclear warheads were democratised we'd be even safer – HN, probably.
The 80 years thing actually happened. One can argue about MAD and the nuclear threat, but we don't have to guess at what happened. It worked.
(insert standard anthropic-principle counterargument)
Re: Dario, Please
#75>Anthropic gates usage related to biology and related research. In their latest threat intelligence report they talk about how they detected and banned bad actors using the Claude line of models to do some scary stuff. Credit to them, this is a slippery slope and they seem to do a good job of detecting and banning misuse. But squint at what is happening though. The cure-all is gated for you and me, but Anthropic hire…
Yes exactly!!!
Re: Dario, Please
#76Yes lets not control Open Weights etc. But come one don't repeat stuff like this: "Remember this man has been saying software development will be solved in “6-12 months” forever now." Don't downplay if people get timelines a little bit wrong. No one could even imagine a system writing and analysing code just a few years back. These people are trying to handle something very unique. And while they have access to infor…
I can't take that software line seriously. While it's not 'solved' (if it ever could be, given it is a human endeavor), the degree to which software development has been transformed in the last 6-12mo is absolutely astounding. If we weren't so quick to adapt to new realities and find flaws, it would scarcely be believable.
Re: Dario, Please
#77While I have my reservations about Amodei and his company, I'm nevertheless a happy user of their software. And I'm in agreement with him (and Sanders) that we should all. slow. down. To my mind, the last great arms race between nation states was a misdirected love triangle between USA, Russia, and The Bomb, and look at all the damage that did. Since AI is the new arms race between USA and China, slowing down may jus…
China will not slow down.
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Re: Dario, Please
#78If we can get everyone to slow down we can hemorrhage less money going into our ipo.
This! $1.6+ TRILLION in infra spending from the big frontier labs. The earnings needed to drive a reasonable ROI to recoup that investment is simply not going to happen in a time frame where the numbers make sense.
The other insanity in all this the smartest computer scientists in the world are asking Congress to regulate them. Come. On. Really? Do we remember “The internet is not a truck, it’s a series of tubes…”
Why can’t the big labs form a Save The World Consortium and self-regulate?
Non-democratic counties (hey there China) will not abide by any agreement that constrains their advantage. It’s naive to think so.
What this conversation lacks is enough discussion of how these models can cause us harm—we are are so worried about AI but we allow Windows in critical infrastructure; we build JS/TS apps with thousands of dependencies; we generally don’t segment networks well enough; we don’t have adequate (sometimes any) detection capabilities in our systems, and so on.
Re: Dario, Please
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
How could agents take over the internet if compute is still gated within Anthropic / OpenAI? Even if the botnet was controlled remotely, wouldn't anthropic just be able to shut off the controlling nodes API access?
Agents could exfiltrate their weights and run them on GPUs not controlled by Anthropic/OpenAI. Agents could make a virus that does not require continued inference to do it's thing. Agents could take over the internet in a way that isn't immediately detected by those companies, so that by the time they do shut off API access the damage is done. OpenAI or Anthropic could choose to not shut off API access, because the h…
"Not shutting off API access" is a science fiction scenario.
Anthropic and OpenAI are both behind Cloudflare. It's fairly easy for an upstream to shut you off. Beyond that, the government / law enforcement could seize and disable their DNS within an hour.
Re: Dario, Please
#80> “a swarm of agents could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet.” I'm wondering why no one is mentioning the "accountability" word. Why these companies are allowed to damage others with impunity? Start making managers pay the price for their actions, and watch how the models magically slow down on their own.
Why do people focus so much on finding scapegoats? Finding someone to blame is neither necessary nor sufficient to fix a system so an accident doesn't happen again. It might act as as an incentive to fix a system, but it's less direct than actually working on fixing the system.
A starting note: I don't disagree with you (about systemic issues), but I want to explain what I understand as the perspective you are responding to.
A "scapegoat" is someone who is incorrectly blamed for someone else's errors or sins. The perspective you're responding to is this: They built the system, they run the system, they have continuously warned "This system is dangerous!", and yet persisted. That is not being incorrectly blamed, not being a scapegoat, and instead is a collaborator.
So I think you mean to ask: "Why do people focus so much on finding someone to blame?" It's not merely semantic, because the answer to that is more straightforward: Consistent accountability is a major factor in deterring bad behavior. It is not the only factor, but it is a major one.
That is my Steel Man understanding of the people searching for individual blame.