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

Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 56 posts

Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers

#31

Post by Slyfox33 »

dpflan wrote: post #21
Slyfox33 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lmao. As if chatbots are going to destroy the world. Give me a break. LLMs, while having some cool uses, are clearly just the next in line of a never ending tech hype scam cycle. Honestly I'm kind of dreading what's coming next because each iteration just gets more insufferable.

It's pretty obvious that LLMs can be used to give instructions to machines, those machines could be hooked up to other sensors, like cameras with facial recognition, and actuators. Now imagine a Boston Dynamics DOG robot with a machine gun that can target specific people. This is already possible. If someone were to manufacture and let loose say 100 or 1000 in public, that seems pretty drastic...or flying drones, etc…

LLMs cannot reason so having them control robots wouldn't work. They are reasonably good at text prediction. That's literally all they do.

Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers

#33

Post by pixl97 »

malfist wrote: post #24
dpflan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technology is indeed powerful; it's pretty obvious you can make military grade or better propaganda pretty easily with this technology and disseminate it more easily. Let's just classify that as "misinformation" generally, which could also be applied to ideas of teenagers making deepfakes of classmates, etc. So misinformation is a big risk, and already affecting society. It is also clearly useful to whomever is c…

What is "military grade propaganda"?

https://www.usmcu.edu/Outreach/Marine-Corps-University-Press...

Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers

#34

Post by baq »

skwirl wrote: post #10

It’s pretty interesting how widely divergent views of the current state and promise this technology is. The dominant view here on HN seems to be that generative models are overhyped toys that burn massive amounts of energy and investment capital with little signs of promise. Meanwhile you have these AI researchers who are warning about “the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extin…

The current systems don’t have the capability to update their knowledge and can’t really perform complex reasoning.

The obvious approach would be to attach a proper memory somewhere between layers and farm out reasoning to a sat solver, also preferably between layers. This sounds very sci-fi but chatting with a computer has been sci-fi 20 months ago and it’s a commodity now.

Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers

#35

Post by pixl97 »

Slyfox33 wrote: post #31
dpflan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty obvious that LLMs can be used to give instructions to machines, those machines could be hooked up to other sensors, like cameras with facial recognition, and actuators. Now imagine a Boston Dynamics DOG robot with a machine gun that can target specific people. This is already possible. If someone were to manufacture and let loose say 100 or 1000 in public, that seems pretty drastic...or flying drones, etc…

LLMs cannot reason so having them control robots wouldn't work. They are reasonably good at text prediction. That's literally all they do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1QZB5baNw

yea, you're way late to the game.

Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers

#37

Post by ein0p »

rshah_45 wrote: post #29
ein0p wrote: post #16

Periodic reminder: at the moment, governments worldwide are literally developing killer robots which can’t disobey their orders. Your fears are comically misplaced.

A heat-seeking missile or nuclear bomb can't disobey orders either. Therefore we should not worry about the dangers of guns or knives.

Heat seeking missile or a nuclear bomb have to be launched by a human today. Not for much longer though.

Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers

#38

Post by dpflan »

malfist wrote: post #24
dpflan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technology is indeed powerful; it's pretty obvious you can make military grade or better propaganda pretty easily with this technology and disseminate it more easily. Let's just classify that as "misinformation" generally, which could also be applied to ideas of teenagers making deepfakes of classmates, etc. So misinformation is a big risk, and already affecting society. It is also clearly useful to whomever is c…

What is "military grade propaganda"?

Propaganda is a crucial part of the military; there are even divisions in modern militaries whose sole job is create propaganda/misinformation. This material is clearly deemed of some quality or grade that would deem it possible effective against a target. Given that it is the job of these departments to influence the information and human psychological "playing fields", then I would give that context a label of "military grade" -- in that it is as powerful as information warfare techniques used by entities whose sole job it is to engage effectively in information warfare.

Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers

#39

Post by ActionHank »

skwirl wrote: post #10

It’s pretty interesting how widely divergent views of the current state and promise this technology is. The dominant view here on HN seems to be that generative models are overhyped toys that burn massive amounts of energy and investment capital with little signs of promise. Meanwhile you have these AI researchers who are warning about “the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extin…

They are saying what will offer the best hype and a good reason to be leaving.

The reality is that they have shown the world some pretty big, powerful offerings they are working on. That value is already priced into their stock.

If they fail to deliver on the hype, which they will, it will tank their value hard. If they meet the hype expectations (no one ever lives up to the hype, ever), there will be no jobs and no employees and no businesses and thus their stock will tank.

I believe that, more realistically the easy, low hanging fruit has already been plucked and they are leaving now before everyone realises the emperor has no clothes on.

Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers

#40

Post by hooverd »

dpflan wrote: post #38
malfist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "military grade propaganda"?

Propaganda is a crucial part of the military; there are even divisions in modern militaries whose sole job is create propaganda/misinformation. This material is clearly deemed of some quality or grade that would deem it possible effective against a target. Given that it is the job of these departments to influence the information and human psychological "playing fields", then I would give that context a label of "mil…

That's funny, I always thought military grade meant overpriced and underbuilt.
Post reply on HN