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Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

bbc.com

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

#201

Post by dataviz1000 »

com2kid wrote: post #187
danaris wrote: post #164

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. This is a disingenuous comparison. First of all, what you're talking about is nondeterminism at the hardware level, subverting the software, which is, on an ideal/theoretical computer, fully deterministic (except in ways that we specifically tell it not to be, through the use of PRNGs or r…

> First of all, what you're talking about is nondeterminism at the hardware level, subverting the software, which is, on an ideal/theoretical computer, fully deterministic (except in ways that we specifically tell it not to be, through the use of PRNGs or real entropy sources). Malloc and free were never deterministic outside of the simplest systems. The second we accepted OS preemption we gave up deterministic perfo…

The single best example is for this discussion is Superscalar out-of-order execution which can't be used in aerospace, medical devices, and industrial control systems, or you need to guarantee that code finishes within a certain time, because technically it isn't deterministic.

Neither is stochastic gradient descent which is the cause of the LLM problem. Nor is UDP, the network protocol that powers video calls, live streaming, and online gaming.

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

#202

Post by sublinear »

detectivestory wrote: post #46
sublinear wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These were all already very valid concerns long before this era of "AI" or computational power. The broader public is just now barely beginning to understand because all they have to do is ask a chatbot. AI does not enable new capabilities, but it does aggregate an idea into a rough sketch and do it quickly on-demand. None of this really means it will play out that way. The devil is in the details. What it does mean…

AI does enable new capabilities when it comes to constant mass surveillance, and automated weaponry.

No it doesn't. We already have all of that right now and have had it for decades.

The big investment into Project Stargate is all about managing risk. The government contractor and security clearance situation is out of control. As well, every human mistake is costly and time consuming to address. If you instead blame it on AI, you can skip the court proceedings and postmortems.

The other part of this is likely an attempt to surface information with summaries and shorten the chain of command. This is just a power grab and a dangerous dismissal of necessary implementation detail. It's a tantrum being thrown by ignorant people at the top being displaced. We live in an ever-complicated world that demands more experienced leadership than we have available. AI is their hail mary pass.

LLMs are being abused as a political battering ram. They are not the technological breakthrough advertised. The AI label is borderline absurd. AGI even moreso. NLP is an accessibility tool at best.

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

#203

Post by dataviz1000 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #200
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…

> 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 p…

That is like telling students to never do a PhD thesis on superscalar out-of-order execution, stochastic gradient descent, or UDP. I'm framing it as an analogous problem. What is missing is a cheap verification process.

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

#204

Post by sublinear »

chasd00 wrote: post #22
detectivestory wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true but in reality I think people are far more afraid of AI in terms of how it is being used in warfare and policing. Automatic target detection and deployment of drones, or even how it might simply make their role at work redundant etc

AI has been used in defense for a while now, a modern tomahawk cruise missile and its associated targeting systems is a good example. I think most people fear AI taking their job and only source of income.

Linear regression?

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

#205

Post by aleph_minus_one »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #203
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

That is like telling students to never do a PhD thesis on superscalar out-of-order execution, stochastic gradient descent, or UDP. I'm framing it as an analogous problem. What is missing is a cheap verification process.

> That is like telling students to never do a PhD thesis on superscalar out-of-order execution, stochastic gradient descent, or UDP.

No decent PhD advisor would let their PhD student base their PhD thesis on such well-known concepts: a doctoral study programme is a journey into something never-seen-before (with a very high likelihood of faling and shattering your life). Anything else is failure.

(Obvious exception: either he or the PhD student can convince the other one that there could be something really, really deep in, say, "superscalar out-of-order execution", "stochastic gradient descent" or UDP be found that generations of researchers overlooked, and which once discovered might necessitate rewriting all the standard textbooks about this topic).

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

#206

Post by pacomerh »

twobitshifter wrote: post #102

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.…

Yeah, this is definitely not sustainable. We're all getting tired of the content quality going downhill. If it's gonna to be like this for a while, I guess new social networks will have to emerge and moderate more? maybe, especially since the government definitely isn't interested in moderating anything. They just want to win races.

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

#207

Post by [deleted] »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #205
dataviz1000 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is like telling students to never do a PhD thesis on superscalar out-of-order execution, stochastic gradient descent, or UDP. I'm framing it as an analogous problem. What is missing is a cheap verification process.

> That is like telling students to never do a PhD thesis on superscalar out-of-order execution, stochastic gradient descent, or UDP. No decent PhD advisor would let their PhD student base their PhD thesis on such well-known concepts: a doctoral study programme is a journey into something never-seen-before (with a very high likelihood of faling and shattering your life). Anything else is failure. (Obvious exception: e…

[deleted]

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

#208

Post by DennisP »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #172
DennisP wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not saying today's AI has that kind of power, and they're not saying future superintelligent AI will give you that power. They're saying it will take all power from you, and possibly end you. If this is some kind of twisted marketing, it's unprecedented in history. Oil companies don't brag about climate change. Tobacco companies don't talk about giving people cancer. If AI companies wanted to talk about how p…

> If this is some kind of twisted marketing, it's unprecedented in history. They're marketing AI to investors, not to end-user plebs. This is a pump-and-dump scheme.

Exxon has never bragged to investors that they'd burn so much oil, civilization would collapse from climate change. They've always talked about how great fossil fuels are for the economy and our living standards. It makes no sense to sell apocalypse to investors either.

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

#209

Post by devilsdata »

pacomerh wrote: post #206
twobitshifter wrote: post #102

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.…

Yeah, this is definitely not sustainable. We're all getting tired of the content quality going downhill. If it's gonna to be like this for a while, I guess new social networks will have to emerge and moderate more? maybe, especially since the government definitely isn't interested in moderating anything. They just want to win races.

How do you ever have a social media network that is immune to this from now? You could with the best intentions start a non-profit, defederated, open-source, grass roots social network. It would go great, until the moment it hits critical mass and becomes prey for people who are willing to piss in the pond to make money.

There's no way to defend against it. You can just copy and paste text from an LLM into the reply box.

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

#210

Post by scratchyone »

mofeien wrote: post #74
scratchyone wrote: post #2

Honestly we should have learned this claim from AI companies was purely fear-mongering back when GPT-2 was "too dangerous to release".

Given that his reason for saying GPT-2 was too dangerous to release was that the world needed more time to prepare for the effects of this technology, and given that the following models were basically scaled-up versions of it and killed social media, news reporting and other kinds of communication, I'd say he was right about the dangers of it.

funny how he didn't care about ethics the moment it was more profitable to release it than to talk about dangers.
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