Prediction: in a few years, we will laugh at this hysteria and call it a moral panic.
"Moral panic" were the exact thoughts that came to my mind when I read this yesterday: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/11/mps-urge-...
Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
211–220 of 237 posts
Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
The models have not plateaued, and they are not even mildly close to any sort of ceiling. Right now the barrier is data and compute. Quality data can be created synthetically at an exponential rate as models improve. Humans are actively feeding them with private IP. Compute advancements will begin to skyrocket as we unlock photonic computing and materials science advancements and scale up chip fabs. This is also comp…
> Quality data can be created synthetically at an exponential rate as models improve No it can't? Every time the labs try this we see model collapse, e.g. shoving goblins into every conversation. And I have seen zero evidence that AI is accelerating materials science in any meaningful way, let alone photonic computing.
Goblins?
Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
No idea what you are missing and yes, Opus is quite solid, but Fable is clearly way better for me. I just did a direct comparison, big change in a quite complex codebase. Same prompt for Opus, same for Fable. Fable clearly won and delivered very good results, while Opus delivered mediocre, so I did not let it finish. I expected both to fail and was prepared to do lots of manual steering, but not necessary with Fable…
"Opus delivered mediocre, so I did not let it finish" Mediocre means average / middle of the pack. It sounds like its doing exactly what you would expect nothing more. Why would you stop it? Why would you need exceptional?
> mediocre - of moderate or low quality, value, ability, or performance
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mediocre
Clearly they were using the word to mean low quality. Why would you ask this odd question?
Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The U.S. Government won't allow that to happen. Like the US government wouldn't allow Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz? Or a bunch of sandal-wearing Islamists to take control over the Red Sea coastline? The US government is not omnipotent. To the contrary, it's increasingly impotent. China has somewhere around 200x more shipbuilding capacity than the US today. It has more shipbuilding capacity in one shipyard tha…
You are right, US can do nothing on AI. After all, it doesn't have the shipbuilding capacity or even beat sandal-wearing islamists.
Shipbuilding is but one proxy for China’s dominance in industrialization. A more relevant one for AI is: China has built more energy capacity in the last 4 years than the USA has built in the last 150. AI is increasingly limited by power. For this and other reasons, IMO the US will inevitably be surpassed on AI.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-28/china-s-f...
Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not in the way you seem to be thinking, no. Nuclear weapons can be banned because they are prohibitively expensive to research and build. You can't reliably hide a nuclear program. Isn't that true of AI as well? Data centers are very big and very expensive. > Bit of a tangent but we do, actually Sure but not like the movies, these don't destroy cities. But the metaphor isn't accurate anyway: nukes don't get worse.…
You don't need a datacenter to train a 30B model. Further, the rapid trend of increasing efficiency and decreasing model size for a given level of capabilities means that what is possible to do without a datacenter will continue to increase. Presumably performance on the level of the current frontier of AI would be achieved in short order and the ceiling would only continue to advance from there. Ergo I expect such a…
> Presumably performance on the level of the current frontier of AI would be achieved in short order and the ceiling would only continue to advance from there
That's an enormous presumption! You're saying that even in the theoretical case that frontier research is halted but efficiency isn't, we could do better then the frontier and reach world-changing AI in 30b parameters at home-scale labs?! If that's true then we can just give up now: the world as you know it is going to end in around a decade and billions are going to die, there's nothing we can do. But I don't think that's true. Advancing the frontier seems to take a massive amount of compute, data, and parameters: miniaturization only happens afterwards.
If you're right then I concede. It doesn't matter what we do, regulations or not. But if I'm right then regulation can do something and in theory help bring a better future.
Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
#216They are talking about slowing down the public facing AI development. Because then nation states can create a capabilities gap between them and the public. Why does nobody seem to be pointing out this obvious explanation? It explains why the “we need to race China” concern suddenly vanished in the discussion. The government can simply gag Sam, Dario, Musk on national security basis, getting them all behind the public…
* Frontier models need infinite high quality private IP to keep them fed. Forcing an IP theft funnel ensures big lab survival and model intelligence growth. * Open-weight models are 1month behind frontier models. Cheaper, faster, private (no IP theft), steerable (you can security harden your own software without safeguard triggers). No sane business would keep using these API services if they didn't have to. The labs…
I know people at METR and Anthropic.
When they tell you they're worried the tech they're working on may kill everyone despite their best efforts, perhaps believe them.
Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
#217Prediction: in a few years, we will laugh at this hysteria and call it a moral panic.
You can already look back at similar concerns for early GPT
Given what's happened since then with propaganda and wide spread scams, I think the original concerns about that have proven quite accurate
Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being sarcastic isn't going to solve the problem but you're obviously free to believe that the US is still in a position to call all the shots when it's evident to the rest of the world this isn't the case.
I’m just repeating your words back to you so hopefully you realize how ridiculous it sounds. Also - I think you totally missed the point of the grandparent poster, which is that US will not let US companies slow down.
The only thing ridiculous here is thinking that the US government is in control to the level you think it is.
Spending $500+ billion/year (and close to a trillion now) on defense for decades and in ~6 months it has depleted stocks of critical weapons trying unsuccessfully to defeat a third-rate military power of a country that has been under sanctions for almost 50 years. And it can't even replenish them without Chinese raw materials and components.
Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
North Korea got it with help from China, Israel got it with help from France. They didn't do it on their own.
And Pakistan with help from the Saudi's, and the US with help from an Australian and the Brits and Canadians Do you have a point here?
The point is the risk is in counties being gifted or assisted in making it, not them building it on their own.
Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is pure fantasy.
Why? There are numerous technologies we have ignored or abandoned for numerous reasons. Many of the benefits of AI is "requires less humans", but in an age where we question what work people could possibly do in the future, human labor isn't that hard to find. If the amish can do what they do for whack religious reasons, people could manage it with ai for cultural and social reasons. And I never saw an amish person s…
Because "we" embodies a hugely diverse set of beings with different wants, needs, goals, and priorities. Not to mention different morality and ethics.
So sure, let's say you get 95% of the world to not use or work on LLMs. 5% is still enough to build something that brings forth the End Times.
That's the old checklist trope of "Your idea won't work because: [x] it requires that everyone in the world agrees to do something, all at the same time."
As the GP said: pure fantasy.