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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

#51

Post by stale2002 »

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…

Unfortunately, we are at the point where people's identities are wrapped up in this.

I would love it if people were having well reasoned discussions of the risk of AI, that are grounded in actual evidence of what capabilities AI has today, and how they might incrementally change in the future to cause more or less damage.

But unfortunately whenever I try to discuss grounded risks, I get responses that reference the anthropogenic principle or other similar unfalsifiable claims. The arguments amount to "Well, of course I can't show you evidence of how AI is going to end the world! If I could, then the world would already be over!".

Which is an awfully convenient excuse for why your arguments are a special case that don't have to proved with evidence, like any other claim. Its perfect for a side that knows that it doesn't have any!

I can be convinced out of my position, with evidence. But I have no idea what proof I could possibly show the other side to do the same for them.

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

#52

Post by skwirl »

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…

“Millennial internet hype” was absolutely warranted, though. The utility of the Internet has exceeded the expectations almost everyone had for it in the 90s. It’s one of the big things people pushing blockchain hype always cited for their faith in the technology.

You will have a high batting average if you are dismissive of everything that gains momentum. But when you are wrong you end up being extremely wrong.

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

#53

Post by pixl97 »

Slyfox33 wrote: post #42
pixl97 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When assessing if the company is worth investing in, assume it's faked.

When assessing threat models, assume it's real.

The particular problem that we have is too many robot companies are putting out videos of robots doing things they have not been able to do in the past. Moreso, even yourself, you can feed data into multimodal models and get instructions to perform real world actions.

All that said, with your post history I'll have to assume you assume everything is fake and I'd more luck explaining it to an LLM.

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

#54

Post by pixl97 »

ein0p wrote: post #43
pixl97 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't realize we all represent the exact same things. It's like that sometimes when you forget you're part of the hivemind.

Myself, I see a mix of people, some disagreeing with the MIC and others gung ho for the MIC.

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

#56

Post by adrians1 »

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…

AI researchers are just as prone as everyone else to be self-delusional.
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