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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

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt very much that a "find me zero days" prompt worked, because I am not aware of the slightest evidence about this. The Anthropic report that describes the bugs they have found with Mythos in various open-source projects admits that a prompt like "find me zero days" does not work with Mythos. To find bugs, they have run Mythos a large number of times on each file of the scanned project, with different prompts. T…

I don't understand how these arguments are still happening. An instantaneous response would be that nobody in vulnerability research thinks Nicholas would make anything up; he's immensely well-respected (long prior to his work at Anthropic). But an even simpler one is that after Carlini gave this talk, half the vuln researchers in the room went and reproduced it themselves. I've repoduced this. Calif has reproduced i…

These arguments keep happening because models keep surpassing most peoples' expectations, whose default behavior right now is denial of capabilities out of fear.

There has been a large majority on HN who have dismissed AGI and model capabilities at every turn since OpenAI was founded a decade ago. The problem is the universe where models are going to be super powerful is unprecedented, revolutionary, and probably scary, so therefore it is easier to digest it as untrue. "they won't be powerful". "LLM's couldn't have possibly done the vulnerability expose that I could never have." And every time capabilities are leveling up, there is a refusal to accept basic facts on the ground.

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

#192
post #37
post #31

My read is not so much "if we say this is dangerously powerful, it will make people want to buy our product", but rather that there is a significant segment of AI researchers for whom x-risk, AI alignment, etc. is a deal-breaker issue. And so the Sam Altmans of the world have to treat these concerns as serious to attract and retain talent. See for example OpenAI's pledge to dedicate 20% of their compute to safety res…

Yeah I just don't buy that it would somehow help AI companies for everyone to be existentially afraid of their technology. It seems much more reasonable to think that they really believe the things they're saying, than that it's some kind of 4d chess. Additionally Dario has just been really accurate with his predictions so far. For instance in early 2025 he predicted that nearly 100% of code would be written with AI…

> nearly 100% of code would be written with AI in 2026

HN is the only place I have heard it seriously suggested that anything like this is happening or likely to happen. We certainly get a lot of cheerleading here, my guess is that in the trenches the fraction is way lower.

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems much more reasonable to think that they really believe the things they're saying It seems more reasonable to me to think that they know it's bullshit and it's just marketing. Not necessarily marketing to end users as much as investors. It's very hard to take "AGI in 3 years" seriously.

AGI in 3 years is literally not possible as it stands. Our current idea of "AI" as an LLM fundamentally will never be able to reach that goal without some absolutely massive changes

At least Dario Amodei kept the window short. When AGI fails to magically appear in 3 years he will be discredited and we can all agree that he's full of shit and treat everything he says accordingly. This is a huge improvement over the "just 10 years away" prophesying we usually get.

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

#194
post #95
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, these same people will attach openclaw to production systems soon and destroy their own companies.

One does not even need OpenClaw to achieve this outcome: https://x.com/lifeof_jer/status/2048103471019434248

Yeeeehaaaaa, the vibes shall never end!

On a more serious note, they were mostly f*cked by their paas provider imo. Claude will always do dumb shit. Especially if you tell it to not do something... By doing so you generally increase the likelihood of it doing it.

It's even obvious why if you think about it, the pattern of "you had one job, but you failed" or "only this can't happen, it happened!" And all it's other forms is all over literature, online content etc.

But their PaaS provider not scoping permissions properly is the root cause, all things considered. While Claude did cause this issue there, something else would've happened eventually otherwise.

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

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

With the old way of doing things you could spend energy to reduce errors, and balance that against the entropy of you environment/new features/whatever at a rate appropriate for your problem. It's not obvious if that's the case with llm based development. Of course you could 'use llms until things get crazy then stop' but that doesn't seem part of the zeitgeist.

> It's not obvious if that's the case with llm based development. Of course you could 'use llms until things get crazy then stop' but that doesn't seem part of the zeitgeist.

Harnesses are coming online now that are designed to reduce failure rates and improve code quality. Systems that designate sub-agents that handle specific tasks, that put quality gates in place, that enforce code quality checks.

One system I saw (sadly not open source yet) spends ~70% of tokens on review and quality. I'll admit the current business model of Anthropic/OpenAI would be very unfriendly to that way of working. There is going to be some conflict popping up there. Maybe open weight models will save us, maybe not.

If Moore's Law had iterated once or twice more we wouldn't be having this conversation. We'd all be running open weight models on our 64GB+ VRAM video cards at home and most of these discussions would be moot. AI company valuations would be a fraction of what they are.

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

#196
post #194
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One does not even need OpenClaw to achieve this outcome: https://x.com/lifeof_jer/status/2048103471019434248

Yeeeehaaaaa, the vibes shall never end! On a more serious note, they were mostly f*cked by their paas provider imo. Claude will always do dumb shit. Especially if you tell it to not do something... By doing so you generally increase the likelihood of it doing it. It's even obvious why if you think about it, the pattern of "you had one job, but you failed" or "only this can't happen, it happened!" And all it's other f…

I absolutely agree with you.

Also, some folks seem to be forgetting the virtues of boring, time-tested platforms & technologies in their rush to embrace the new & shiny & vibe-***ed. & also forgetting to thoroughly read documentation. It’s not terribly surprising to me that an “AI-first” infrastructure company might make these sorts of questionable design decisions.

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

#197

I’m afraid of AI but not because I think it’s going to become skynet tomorrow, it’s because of all the social ills that are already clearly attached to it. - Spam - Deep Fakes - Porn - Buggy Software - Economic Bubbles - Degradation in people’s abilities and learned dependence on ChatGPT for basic functions. - Job loss through enshittification ala AI interviews and Telemarketers - Climate Change, noise pollution etc.…

This. We don’t need AI searching for critical bugs in the software, enshittified life quality is already enough.

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

#198
They say AI will destroy humanity because they believe it. OpenAI and Anthropic were created by people who believed this. There's nothing nefarious about them saying this.

Why are they still building it? Because each team thinks that THEY are the ones who can prevent it from destroying humanity, but they have to get to AGI first, before the other teams make an AI that does destroy humanity.

But also, if AGI doesn't destroy humanity, it would be the most powerful weapon in the world, and they want to be the ones in control of it. Keeping the focus on Armageddon distracts from the real and severe problems that arise if a single person, or even a small group, controls an AGI.

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

#199
post #198

They say AI will destroy humanity because they believe it. OpenAI and Anthropic were created by people who believed this. There's nothing nefarious about them saying this. Why are they still building it? Because each team thinks that THEY are the ones who can prevent it from destroying humanity, but they have to get to AGI first, before the other teams make an AI that does destroy humanity. But also, if AGI doesn't d…

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

#200
post #35

I think the big secret is that AI is just software. In the same way that a financial firm doesn't all of sudden make a bunch of money because Microsoft shipped an update to Excel, AI is inert without intention. If there's any major successes in AI output it's because a person got it to do that. Claude Code is great, but it will also wipe out a database even though it's instructed not to (I can confirm from experience…

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…

> If I was a Ph.D. student today, I'd probably do a thesis on cheap verifiers for LLM agents. Since LLM agents are not reliable and therefore not very useful without it, that is a trillion dollar problem.

PhD thesis are for (ideally) setting up a new world standard in some research area (at the end, you build your PhD thesis out of the deep emotional shards of this completely destroyed life dream), and not for some personal self-discovery project of which you hope that it will turn you into the popular kid on the block.

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