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

washingtonpost.com

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

#41

Post by jcims »

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…

Couple of things come to mind. This is a community of people that:

- are 'in the room' when evidence of new capabilities emerge

- are 'in the room' when discussion of new use cases and applications are held

- have an intuition about the raw rate of advancement and how it changes over time

Imagine you're 'in the room' during the Manhattan project when someone says 'hey, there's a nonzero chance that a test will ignite the Earth's atmosphere'. Vanishingly small maybe, but of incalculable impact. These folks may be the sort that say something rather than not.

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

#42

Post by Slyfox33 »

pixl97 wrote: post #35
Slyfox33 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In general you should be very skeptical of these types of videos. Most of them end up being misleadingly edited or almost outright faked. There's 3-4 cuts just in this 2 minute video alone.

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

#43

Post by ein0p »

pixl97 wrote: post #28
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.

No, not misplaced at all, both need monitored and regulated. And large companies like Google and whoever else will gladly sell their model for use in the latest killbot for some of that unlimited military industrial complex money.

Point is, people on this very site are cheering on unmanned plane aerobatics while hyperventilating about linear algebra and associative memory which might at times tell you to eat rocks.

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

#44

Post by dpflan »

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.

You seem stuck on this idea of intelligence, when you don't need "reasoning" to do any of this. You don't even need the LLM. You could just use object recognition and current robotics techniques. The LLM could just be the language interface for giving it instructions of where to patrol, what to observe.

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

#45

Post by kyledrake »

tuatoru wrote: post #25
kyledrake wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per usual, it's somewhere in the middle. I find LLMs to be very useful for coding and solving quick tasks, but I don't think it's going to turn into skynet or make humans worthless. There's a lot of momentum (driven by incentivization) around sensationalizing and storyboarding emerging technology into the "to the moon" and "neo Luddite" camps, and there's far too many people that fall into that uncritically. My guess…

The cynicism (in my case, and probably others') comes from remembering self-driving cars, blockchain, crypto, the millennial internet hype, and previous AI hype. Smartphones have arguably made life worse for many people too, judging by skyrocketing mental illness. Edit: oh, and Uberisation (workforce casualisation), and AirBNB. Enshittification all round. They might be right this time, but the prior has to be this is…

Why does it have to be completely worthless or completely dangerous? Where does this binary thinking come from? In my experience, almost nothing in the world is binary on a spectrum of "good" or "bad".

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

#48

Post by tarunkotia »

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…

This is how I assume one of the ways an expert system would play out:

1. A system which understands not just the language but the meaning behind it and the cultural context around it.

2. Let's assume it's multi-model and have all the senses having the same level of technical maturity.

3. It has read all the text available for all the major sciences and understood the meaning behind it including the possible applications of it.

To that end, having the above conditions satisfied I am assuming there should be major breakthroughs in all sciences. So far what I have seen is that the AI system is able to selectively brute-force it's way in finding a solution. Maybe I am just being impatient.

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

#49

Post by tines »

dgfitz wrote: post #30
rurp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in most cases it's wrong to treat HN opinion as a monolith, including in this case. There certainly are a lot of people here who think that LLMs are overhyped, but there are also many who find the current tools useful and expect them to improve dramatically in the near future. I think most people have a more nuanced view though. There is without a doubt a lot of marketing and hype bullshit around AI right now…

> The thing I'm most confident about is that anyone being overly confident is likely to be wrong. So does this mean you're wrong? This sentence really amused me.

No, his is a second-order statement that applies to first-order statements. It's not intended to apply to second-order statements.

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

#50

Post by rsynnott »

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…

I mean, I would assume that they're not necessarily talking about LLMs.

And the 'oops, we made Roko's Basilisk' risk is not the only risk that people are concerned with, of course. LLMs come with many of their own risks, primarily around misuse (ie using them for anything important.)

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