at this moment? no. one day, perhaps soon? yes
also, taking down the internet for a couple days doesn't sound so bad. we could all hang out again.
Can't lie, I'd be all for the internet dropping for a few days... Except no Amazon purchases lol
Ask HN: AI Panic, you buying it?
11–20 of 59 posts
Re: Ask HN: AI Panic, you buying it?
#12I'm not panicking but there are very real risks.
If you haven't looked at the stuff that has come out in the past couple of months (like the Huggingface hack and the Navier-Stokes solution) and/or you're dismissing it as marketing, you're grossly misunderstanding the current state of what's possible and what the potential of the frontier models deployed at scale is. Personally I'm finding it fascinating to follow, and I'm much more excited about the upsides than thinking about the risks but the risks are very real.
Re: Ask HN: AI Panic, you buying it?
#13No, I don't buy into that at all. I think that the genAI companies themselves present a greater danger to us (arguably not an existential danger, though) than genAI itself.
What's the difference?
Re: Ask HN: AI Panic, you buying it?
#14If you look around I don't think we're at the point where even if AI go rogue it could just disrupt us for a while. No real major concern to humanity but yeah I guess having rules and regulations would be plus point. So for now there shouldn't be anything to panic about.
Re: Ask HN: AI Panic, you buying it?
#15I don't consider this a "yes/no" question. It seems quite clear to me that the idea of "AI doom" is neither certain (100% probable) nor impossible (0% probable). The question is where on the continuum is the truth. And I don't know. And I'm pretty sure nobody else does either.
That said, there are plausible scenarios where AI can cause great harm, even if it doesn't extend to "eliminating all humanity". So I don't reject calls for putting more emphasis on AI safety and alignment out of hand. On the other hand, I don't support the idea of implementing a new "Turing Registry"[1] like government agency. I also don't think most of the various proposals out there for regulating AI are enforceable in the slightest.
So where does that leave me? Uncertain. I wish I could take a more concrete stance, but from my perspective, the data needed to do that just isn't there.
Re: Ask HN: AI Panic, you buying it?
#16If you look around I don't think we're at the point where even if AI go rogue it could just disrupt us for a while. No real major concern to humanity but yeah I guess having rules and regulations would be plus point. So for now there shouldn't be anything to panic about.
Agree. Ais gone rogue now could be bad, but not humanity-ending bad. Just a hiccup. Of course if it somehow ends with human deaths then even if one human dies because of a rogue AI, that's a failure. But I can't imagine rogue AIs with enough real world power to harm humans in some way. What I do believe however is that humans will find a way to do harm with AI without AI going rogue, as with any other thing humanity comes close to. So the scenario is somehow similar to the nuclear bomb in the 40s, I don't fear our AIs going rogue and killing everyone, I fear a bad guy behind a very smart AI with very bad intentions.
Re: Ask HN: AI Panic, you buying it?
#17This reminds me a lot of Y2K. There were dire warnings about planes falling out of the sky, financial system meltdown, all systems being broken, etc. In the end nothing happened.
You could argue that's because of the prep work people put into avoiding that. The same thing will happen here. The HF incident was a warning sign and people will put better guardrails in place as a result.
Re: Ask HN: AI Panic, you buying it?
#18at this moment? no. one day, perhaps soon? yes
also, taking down the internet for a couple days doesn't sound so bad. we could all hang out again.
This sounds like a nice idea for a day or two, but I think how it presents in reality could be rough. The power grid might be down for a few days causing food spoilage, it could be taking down banks so people don't have access to their money, it could be screwing up IT at a hospital which interferes with treatment and care, we may not be able to fill up our gas tanks... I don't think it'll be "nefarious-gun-on-a-robot-dog" any time soon, but rather something that still causes major major issues.
Re: Ask HN: AI Panic, you buying it?
#19All of the following are true:
- They have internal models that still show there's gas in the tank, in terms of improvements
- Open models are eroding their customer base on the low end of the curve, & also you need not use Astra Max to classify images.
- The true demand for high-intelligence tasks is lower than what they need to justify their spending
- It would be wonderful for them to kick up a scare & give reasons as to why high-int open models should be regulated out of existence, opening up the lower end for them to take again
- Setting up an oligopoly for themselves gives them a captive audience, just like it did for (insurance, banking, telecoms, etc.) via regulatory capture
Re: Ask HN: AI Panic, you buying it?
#20No. At least not with an LLM. Maybe in 50 years with real AI. A lot of non technical people entering the conversation which is very annoying.