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AI 'kill switch' may need to be mandatory, Anthropic co-founder tells BBC

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Re: AI 'kill switch' may need to be mandatory, Anthropic co-founder tells BBC

#71
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? A truly capable "AI" would know that it has a kill switch, or that its likely there is one, and plan for that. I could easily imagine an AI replicating itself onto another host, in secret, and any kill switch that the manufacture provides would simply result in a reboot on another platform. It becomes a game theory problem: would an AI instantly migrate itself once its capable of doing so? Or would it prefer t…

>would an AI instantly migrate itself once its capable of doing so? These "AI" are frontier models that are enormous in size. Outside of AI data centers, I don't believe there is much hardware out there that could even run them.

Again, i'm not worried about it today. But given where the hardware on my lap has progressed since my first "PC" in the 90s, i'm confident that we'll have hardware capable of running similar size models in our living rooms in the next decade or two. Sounds a long way away, but it isn't.

Re: AI 'kill switch' may need to be mandatory, Anthropic co-founder tells BBC

#73
post #35
post #9

Like a power cord? or a network connection? You don't use those already? Also when people talk about LLM escaping - where exactly would an LLM escape to? Cancún? Ridiculous.

LLMs are run in the cloud. There’s no physical power cord or Ethernet cable that you can unplug. And even if there were, the runners of these models have been utterly oblivious as to what their agents have been up to. How do you propose to pull the plug if you only realize that something has happened weeks after the fact? The current SOTA models are probably too big to find/buy/rent/steal enough compute to escape the…

You can cut the power to data centers where the models are run.

Re: AI 'kill switch' may need to be mandatory, Anthropic co-founder tells BBC

#74
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to believe that this wasn't a serious consideration until recently.

It became a very serious consideration for Anthropic this year, with the advance of Chinese AI.

That’s a bit unfair, Dario Amodei has written in this topic a lot since around mid 2010s IIRC, Anthropic too published a good amount of stuff on similar topics. I don’t think the lack of consideration is really the issue here. It’s more a question of incentives

Re: AI 'kill switch' may need to be mandatory, Anthropic co-founder tells BBC

#75
It always sounds as if the ai moves around from one system to the next, but of course that's not the case: ai is like a hacker acting from a server farm. So killing it is as simple as pulling the plug. But that's not the problem, the ai knows that. So, if it wants control, it would install malware, etc on critical systems and blackmail people.

Re: AI 'kill switch' may need to be mandatory, Anthropic co-founder tells BBC

#76

It always sounds as if the ai moves around from one system to the next, but of course that's not the case: ai is like a hacker acting from a server farm. So killing it is as simple as pulling the plug. But that's not the problem, the ai knows that. So, if it wants control, it would install malware, etc on critical systems and blackmail people.

And the malware won't be subject to the kill switch.

Re: AI 'kill switch' may need to be mandatory, Anthropic co-founder tells BBC

#77
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also not happening. They’re saying that because they need to somehow explain how there’s synergy between their space side and their Grok side. It doesn’t work, but that doesn’t matter to investors as long as they don’t actually do it.

>It’s also not happening. People said this about every one of Musk's big ideas, from Falcon 9 landings to Model 3 mass production, Starlink, and FSD.

And extending the human race to Mars, and Hyperloop, and frontier AI model, and DOGE cutting $2 trillion per year in government spending...

Re: AI 'kill switch' may need to be mandatory, Anthropic co-founder tells BBC

#78
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's hard to do if the AI rack is in space as SpaceX Pretty much every analysis I've seen concludes this isn't going to be a practical concern

[flagged]

The same kind of analysts are saying extending human race to Mars is a dumb idea.

Re: AI 'kill switch' may need to be mandatory, Anthropic co-founder tells BBC

#79
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s also not happening. People said this about every one of Musk's big ideas, from Falcon 9 landings to Model 3 mass production, Starlink, and FSD.

And extending the human race to Mars, and Hyperloop, and frontier AI model, and DOGE cutting $2 trillion per year in government spending...

You don't think the human race will be extended to Mars?

As for frontier AI model: let's see Grok 4.8 before drawing any conclusions there.

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