Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 230 posts

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

#211

Post by suttontom »

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…

Wtf? A sub-agent is a tool you give an agent and say "If you need to analyze logs delegate to the logs_viewer agent" so that the context window doesn't fill up with hundreds of thousands of tokens unnecessarily. In what universe do you live in where that mechanism somehow means you need fewer humans?

Do you think this means "Build a car" can be accomplished just because an LLM can send a prompt to another LLM who reports back a response?

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

#212

Post by metalliqaz »

mghackerlady wrote: post #181
lbrito wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>deregulation Peter Thiel literally gave a lecture on the Antichrist* saying basically that regulation is satanic https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/world/europe/peter-thiel-... * He's the best person in the world for this lecture - the only one that can claim first-person knowledge on the subject!

he's a nutjob, I don't know why anyone would listen to what he has to say outside of fear

money talks

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

#213

Post by Jtarii »

timacles wrote: post #109
Jtarii wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, humans also routinely accidentely delete production databases. I think at this point arguing that LLMs are just clueless automatons that have no idea what they are doing is a losing battle.

They’re not clueless they just don’t have a memory and they don’t have judgement. They create the illusion of being able to make decisions but they are always just following a simple template.They do not consider nuance, they cannot judge between two difficult options in a real sense. Which is why they can delete prod databases and why they cannot do expert level work

>they cannot do expert level work

Well this is just factually incorrect considering they are currently on par with grad students in some areas of mathematics.

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

#214

Post by throwaway27448 »

xdavidliu wrote: post #145
throwaway27448 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would a verifier even look like without having all of the same problems that the chatbot itself does? Are humans themselves not the cheap verifiers?

humans are probably the least cheap thing you can have in this context

Yea, but they'll do the job. What else plausibly could? ...an LLM? Then you're back at unreliable computation.

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

#215

Post by elondaits »

afh1 wrote: post #39

They want regulation for others but not them. Otherwise there might be competition.

I think they want regulation for them as well, because they have the money to comply… but regulation eliminates the threat of open source models, foreign models, and small independent companies.

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

#217

Post by GuB-42 »

For me, there are two reasons:

One is simple marketing. "We have a product that gives you superpowers, but we have to be careful, imagine if everyone had superpowers, it would be chaos". Most people reaction would be "I don't care about the others, give me these superpowers". An then, when you finally have it, you realize it is just not that super, but the next one will be, or so they say.

The other is that established players want to build a moat. If by scare tactics, they can convince regulators to not give newcomers the same freedom they had when they started up, good for them. Bonus points if they are the ones who make the rules. They are they experts, we should follow them, right?

And yes, it is touched on in the article, it is a way to hide smaller but real problems behind bigger but hypothetical problems. When we see Skynet, we don't see the copyright problems, slop and unreliability. While they talk about the vulnerabilities the new LLM find, they don't talk about the ones it introduces in your vibe-coded app.

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

#218

Post by DANmode »

habinero wrote: post #190
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand where you're coming from. I can imagine myself reacting similarly if HP announced that they've invented a printer so powerful that it can print documents you don't have access to. But I don't know how to engage with this response, other than to say that Anthropic's story is plausible to me and everyone I know in either AI or security.

I work in security, and I think it's marketing BS meant to drive FOMO until proven otherwise. You cannot take any claims from these people seriously, they lie constantly.

> I work in security

Doing what? School admins work in security.

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

#219

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #183
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would be surprised if there were any top company where it's below 75% I would be surprised if there were any top company where it's above 5%. The slop Claude generates isn't going anywhere near production without being edited by hand.

Perhaps it depends on what you mean by "edited by hand"? It's definitely still common for human beings to review generated code and tell Claude "no you need to do it this way". But most developers at Google, Meta, etc. no longer open up an IDE and type in code themselves.

I don't give a bleep what the bleeps at Google and Meta are doing. (Judging by the quality of ""software"" they put out - probably nothing all day.)

In reality it's extremely rare that AI generated code isn't combed through line-by-line and refactored.

(For real software, that is, not VC scams like OpenClaw or litellm or whatever.)

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

#220

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

DennisP wrote: post #208
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They're selling FOMO to investors.

"Last chance to jump on the AI train, invest into your future robot overlord or be turned into biodiesel for datacenters in the future."

Post reply on HN