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Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

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Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#351

Post by mr_toad »

andyhedges wrote: post #315
phendrenad2 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prediction: Much like Y2K people will think we were all incredibly backwards and uneducated because we thought a bunch of potato computers were going to break the world.

With Y2K we fixed the issue, if a bunch of work hadn't had gone into that then there would have been wide scale impact. Critical systems were fixed hence no disaster, it wasn't people fussing about nothing.

We also spent a lot of money fixing non-critical systems that would have had next to zero impact if they’d failed. A middle manager not getting their sales report on time is not critical.

But at least with Y2K some effort was made in identifying actual problems. We didn’t just stop using computers because we were too scared of them. This latest round of AI panic is horribly vague and the problems are very poorly articulated.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#352

Post by iamnothere »

ben_w wrote: post #221
rogerrogerr wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government can simply gag Sam, Dario, Musk on national security basis Genuine question - can they really do this? Obviously if I, a not-even-millionaire, get a national security gag order, I'm going to follow it because I assume they'll bury me under the jail otherwise. But the (b|tr)illionare class? I'd assume they have access to enough legal services to make even the government careful of trampling their firs…

> But the (b|tr)illionare class? I'd assume they have access to enough legal services to make even the government careful of trampling their first amendment rights. Is the national security gag order process so strong that the government doesn't have to worry about motivated, well-resourced actors buying really good lawyers and blowing up their favorite tool? Hard to hire a lawyer after being struck with a missile as…

In the US, this would likely lead to the immediate launch of a new Business Plot, if the government weren’t already captured by those same interests. (Which also explains why your hypothetical won’t happen.)

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#353

Post by mr_toad »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #115

I don't understand where everyone insists on hallucinating this idea from, that frontier AI labs want everyone else but not themselves to slow down. They've never said that, they've never said anything like that, not once has anyone pointed me to a quote that could be even plausibly interpreted that way.

> They've never said that

You know that humans can lie, right?

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#354

Post by epolanski »

user43928 wrote: post #250
nullbio wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 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…

Open-weight models are not one month behind. In fact they still have not caught up with February's Mythos, indicating they are more than half a year behind.

1. Mythos wasn't released in February. Let's stick to only public-facing models.

2. For public-facing models, the differences are really minor with some occasional model (like Fable or Astra) showing some better performance in specific benchmarks for the span of some weeks or few months before open ones catch it.

3. Being bleeding edge is overblown anyway in the real world, besides the occasional "very latest fresh model did this task which previous one couldn't", and the number of those tasks is increasingly small and far from mundane corporate needs.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#355

Post by iamnothere »

metalcrow wrote: post #155
Paracompact wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not all-or-nothing. Banning Chinese models in the public sector and strong-arming the private sector against using them would already do great damage. Similarly, open-source training could be stymied by any of hardware embargoes, taxation, or regulation of larger players.

Sure, it's possible for regulations to make things worse, i will agree. But without regulations it's pretty clear things are going to end up VERY bad, and the only knob we have to make it not bad is regulations. So it's important we try something, and work towards doing a good kind of regulation, or any one of the bad futures you imagine is pretty likely to come to pass.

It’s quite possible for imperfect regulations to make a problem worse. See, for instance, sanctions intended to weaken China that ended up creating powerful Chinese competitors and reducing Western influence in their internal markets, bringing them closer to technological autonomy.

The sibling comment offers some good regulations that may actually reduce harms, but the kind of regulations offered there are not the ones that the “safety” people want, because they hurt profits.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#356

Post by aroman »

Oarch wrote: post #339
olalonde wrote: post #181

Prediction: in a few years, we will laugh at this hysteria and call it a moral panic.

GPT-2 was called "too dangerous to release".

And again the boy will cry out “the wolf is here!” But this time the wolf really will be here, and no one will believe him.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#357

Post by iamnothere »

metalcrow wrote: post #173
fc417fc802 wrote: post #162

Earlier 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. In contrast, rewind to the early 1800s and there is zero hope of a ban on the R&D of small arms being effective in the long run. The only thing it might maybe ensure is that no legitimate actors that fall under your jurisdiction are involv…

> 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.…

Nukes don’t get “worse” because of physics, not because of laws. You can’t make a pocket Tsar Bomba even if there were no rules against proliferation.

Dial-a-yield nukes already provide a range of yields from tiny to massive, and this provides all the operational flexibility that is needed considering that nobody’s willing to actually launch them in anger. (And this reluctance again isn’t about laws, it’s about the military realities of what would happen across the world in the aftermath of even a single tactical detonation.)

Anti-proliferation agreements and laws only slow “rogue” states from rising to nuclear capability. The immense cost, complexity, technical difficulty, and danger already provide a sufficient cost to deter civilian development.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#358

Post by swat535 »

gpt5 wrote: post #171
ElProlactin wrote: post #161

Earlier 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.

The "sandal-wearing islamists." as you refer them to here, invented Algebra and the postal relay system.

The best part of your comment is that US couldn't even defeat the Houthis, who literally wear sandals in the desert.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#359

Post by aroman »

tabs_or_spaces wrote: post #310

This is about consolidation of power. Open weight models are catching up to the frontier. It also seems like frontier models reached some limit, whether this is capex related, business model related or something else. Nobody knows but it's happening to all frontier labs it seems. It's been fear mongered many times that ai will kill us all. But this time, a person with around 2-3 months of tenure at anthropic managed…

> It also seems like frontier models reached some limit, whether this is capex related, business model related or something else. Nobody knows but it's happening to all frontier labs it seems.

What’s your evidence of this? On the contrary, the large closed frontier models capability has advanced dramatically over the past 6 months… even the past 3 months…

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