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Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

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Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#151

Post by [deleted] »

ctoth wrote: post #98
simonw wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think subagents are representative of anything particularly interesting on the "agents can run themselves" front. They're tool calls. Claude Code provides a tool that lets the model say effectively: run_in_subagent("Figure out where JWTs are created and report back") The current frontier models are all capable of "prompting themselves" in this way, but it's really just a parlor trick to help avoid burning mor…

The mechanism being simple is the interesting part. If one large complex goal can be split into subgoals and the subgoals completed without you, then you need a lot fewer humans to do a lot more work. The OP says AI requires human interaction to work. This simply isn't true. You know yourself that as agents get more reliable you can delegate more to them, including having them launch more subagents, thereby getting m…

[deleted]

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#152

Post by mistrial9 »

drBonkers wrote: post #97
dataviz1000 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM models are a distribution. Unlike a python script or turning machine, a LLM model is capable of generating any series of tokens. Developers need stop reasoning about LLM agents as deterministic and to start to think about agents in terms of Monte Carlo and Las Vegas algorithms. It isn't enough to have an agents, it also requires a cheap verifier. If I was a Ph.D. student today, I'd probably do a thesis on cheap v…

Do you have any readings you recommend to start thinking in terms of non-deterministic algorithms and cheap verifiers?

filters

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#153

Post by dinfinity »

staminade wrote: post #87

AI company leaders didn't invent this concern about the potential dangers of AI, either as a cause of economic disruption, or as a potential extinction risk. Superintelligence was published in 2014, and even then it wasn't a new topic. Technologists, philosophers and science fiction authors have been discussing and speculating about AI risk for decades. Also, the idea that AI leadership seized on and amplified these…

Another important angle is that the ire of the public falls specifically on people. Google is stepping on the gas just as hard as the other AI companies, but they don't have an uncharismatic CEO drawing in tons of hatred and scrutiny.

We live in an age where influential companies with notable figureheads are seen as evil incarnate and influential companies without notable figureheads as, well, you know, the same old same old greedy companies. It just so happens that the most influential AI companies have notable figureheads, so almost everybody fucking hates them and thinks they're up to no good (whatever they do). Truth is that for most of those companies, taking away the influence of their hated CEO and doing away with their ramblings will change absolutely nothing about how that company operates.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#154

Post by [deleted] »

com2kid wrote: post #142
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you told a programmer 30 years ago that someday we'd switch from a deterministic to nondeterministic paradigm for programming computers, they'd ask if we'd put lead back in the drinking water.

It has always been non-deterministic but we relied on low level engineers who knew the dark magicks to keep the horrors at bay. Bit flips in memory are super common. Even CPUs sometimes output the wrong answer for calculations because of random chance. Network errors are common, at scale you'll see data corruption across a LAN often enough that you'll quickly implement application level retries because somehow the ne…

[deleted]

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#156

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

autoexec wrote: post #122
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #11

> It's a strange way for any company to talk about its own work. You don't hear McDonald's announcing that it's created a burger so terrifyingly delicious that it would be unethical to grill it for the public. > Here's one theory. But the author never gets back to this! It's the main observation the theory has to account for; why don't we see other companies speak this way, if it's such an effective strategy for defl…

> why don't we see other companies speak this way They do. Every company who promised us that their shitty cell phone app or website was going to change the world and revolutionize and disrupt industry/society was guilty of the same thing. They just usually focused their ridiculous levels of hype on the positives. The goal was the same. "Our technology is going to change the world so investors had better give us cash…

There's no past tense "saw", self-driving cars are still a thing! Waymo announced that they're expanding to Portland yesterday (https://waymo.com/blog/shorts/waymo-in-portland/), and the announcement does not include anything but sunshine and roses. Even within the AI space, I really don't see anyone other than frontier AI labs talking about their product this way.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#158

Post by skybrian »

It’s an extraordinary situation and I’m wondering what sort of analogies make sense.

If there were tobacco companies warning everyone who would listen in the 1950’s that cigarettes cause cancer, it would be, like, points for honesty, but why don’t you stop selling them then?

The difference being that there are a lot of good uses for AI chat and it doesn’t directly harm most people.

It seems like the customers who would misuse AI are getting left out of the discussion? It’s as if arms dealers were being solely blamed for war, or if arms dealers were expected to stop wars.

The difference being that a single, general purpose product that can do such a wide variety of things isn’t really comparable to making weapons that are only good for one thing.

Maybe it’s as if car manufacturers in the early 20th century were predicting highways, traffic, and pollution.

Or imagine if early dot-com companies were predicting the various dangers of social networks?

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#159

Post by netcan »

I remember thinking Altman seemed to be over-reacting and fanning the flames about "Ai bias" circa gpt3.

There was a when little panic about the fear of bigoted computers at that point.

But... it got a lot of earned advertising and they also sort of did a "pre-burn." They saturating the space with "bigoted Ai concern" for a while, and now I don't ever see it come up.

There's a "get ahead of the inevitable" thing going on. Also, obviously, prospectus hype.

Besides all that, these are geeks and they're excited. This is what an excited geek looks like.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#160

Post by Lalabadie »

jrflowers wrote: post #116
codingdave wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and it has been said since day one of LLMs that all we need to do is keep things that way - no action without human intervention. Just like it was said that you should never grant AI direct access to change your production systems. But the stories of people who have done exactly that and had their systems damaged and deleted show that people aren't trying to even keep such basic safety nets in place. AI is getti…

If you had made a tool that gave gpt-3 the ability to run arbitrary commands on your production systems you could have seen things go badly.

Good news! Today's SOTA models can also make things go badly.
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