Technically it’s just lip service and nothing of the sort is ever going to happen any time soon, but it’s still nice to see people speaking up
The snake doesn’t have any more of its own tail to eat, and the AI guys know it. There are no new innovations visible on the horizon. The tech has plateaued hard, is still largely useless compared to the amount of resources going in, and it will never ever generate a profit.
The BS concern-trolling “pause” was the simplest way to “flood the zone” and create a smoke screen. By kicking the can of inevitable consequences down the road, they’ve bought a little bit more time for these greedy little ghouls to stuff their golden parachutes.
To salt the wounds of anyone remotely paying attention, they get to fashion themselves as our smart, responsible, benevolent saviours. Which, if you can see what’s going on, it’s infuriating, because you definitely sound crazy trying to describe it to “normies”.
Speaking of, most people know nothing at all about how the tech even works and thinks it’s alive or magic or some shit - these types are enamoured by the romanticization of clankers as somehow particularly dangerous and mysterious, forbidden tools.
The “less wrong” darlings - a bunch of pseudointellectual Silicon Valley techbro groupies and worse - just got a fresh batch of fodder for the exact kind of smug useless faffy discourse they love jerking each other off with in their fetid little echo chambers. They have a big megaphone for some stupid reason, so they also end up being fluffers for the first group at the same time.
Business executives everywhere cream themselves yet again, because they’re simple, evil creatures who love getting rimjobs and handies from clankers all day and also can’t resist the idea of not having to deal with or perceive the working class.
And the media get to fill the airwaves with repackaged flavors of all the previous bullshit for the next few weeks to months!
All the while, a handful of toxic companies keep passing the same $100b check around while pretending it’s in all of their bank accounts.
This fraud is now a significant portion of the US economy. It’s going to be a hell of a show when the wheels finally come off.
every capitalist builds a product that is capable of ending humanity at a large / long enough scale. this kind of “ai is gonna end is” rhetoric is just marketing.
I mean the second one only works if you’re talking about climate change, which I’m for, but also we need to tall about corporate pollution as a whole.
Otherwise, AI systems are about as dangerous as what you give them permissions to.
Gotta ask how well maintained where the IT systems of the smaller organizations that where recently targets by “unaligned” corporate systems…
It wouldn’t shock me if an environment haphazardly thrown together by some vc skids who don’t care how anything is configured so long as it “just werkz” got pwned by an LLM.
The only other issue is hooking em up to weapon systems, however you could argue that’s just as stupid and dangerous as letting a predefined algorithm make the same decisions.
On one hand it’s nice to have anti AI company sentiment.
On the other hand, the “technology could destroy us all” narrative is exactly what these companies want. It makes them seem like they’re the keepers of powerful genies in a bottle. Instead they’re crappy word salad peddlers that are struggling to get results strong enough to displace humans in white collar jobs and need FUD to keep the hype train going.
It’d be better if politicians asked “why are we making so many concessions to these worthless companies “ and “why aren’t we prosecuting when their agents ‘go rogue’ and commit crimes”
Pretty easy to post when you’re not building war chests for reelection.
They always get so vocal and come up with creative solutions after they no longer have the power to accomplish any of it.
Isn’t it odd how it always works that way?
Every single one of these executives are so infatuated with their own product that they truly believe they are the fathers of skynet, instead of just being the fundraising team behind a janky Chinese Room powered by a shitty version of Google translate.
I personally think the claims that AI is so powerful that it’s akin to cracking open the lid of Pandora’s box is just a cheap marketing ploy. Its something a fraudulent martial arts instructor from the 80s would try to sell. “Why can’t I show you my skills? Well they’re just too powerful, no human being could possibly survive a simple demonstration. It’s simply too dangerous.”
In reality they’ve over invested in a product that has no reasonable way to make a return. They’re running short on their funding runway and are trying desperately to extend the time before the market realizes that the most valuable aspect of the field is that most people are ignorant on the topic enough to validate dumping more cash into an over speculated IP.
What about the pedophiles and rapists running the government?
Can you imagine if one day Google was researching SME nuclear reactors, and started using ad revenue to also build a nuclear weapon? Just like, on the side. And sold access to it.
And then two well-funded startups for SMEs also built their own nukes on the side?
Then Facebook built its own nuke, too?
And they were always in the news saying “y’all, these nukes keep us safe and are a natural byproduct of refining nuclear material for reactors. But holy shit, we also might start an accidental nuclear war. Crazy, huh?”
And the government was just like, “yoooo, save some nuke for me, bro!”
Just Luigi them all
I’d personally put them into a Saw trap, where they either can just give up on AI to the point all their data must be wiped, or they can do various “challenges” to save trillions of humans in the future.
Hello Mr. Altman, let’s play a game! You’re building an artificial general intelligence due to effective alturism reasons, don’t you? You think great sacrifices must be done today, to save trillions of potential humans in the future.
The room is slowly getting filled with water. Both your legs and one of your arms is chained to a machine. There’s a button on the machine, that you can press to release the chains, but it will also shut down and erase all LLM developments. Alternatively there’s a saw and some cable ties in your arms reach, so you can do some sacrifice yourself too to save trillions of potential humans in the future. You also can choose to just drown in the water, however doing so won’t guarantee that I or anyone else will let the AI development continue on its current terms.
we can do two things at once
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pass laws preventing companies from making LLMs that do things that LLMs categorically cannot do, but that LLM companies claim LLMs can do for marketing reasons
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arrest CEOs who break that law (which will be difficult)
we do not need to, for example, consider any present or future societal impacts of AI (on the environment, on the labor market, on deskilling, on disinformation…) besides it one day getting Too Smart™ and deciding to kill us all
The problem is that there is no “we” here. There is us, the people, and them, the legislators.
At the federal level, I’d be surprised if there were ANY federal legislator that isn’t invested in GenAI in a significant way and using their classified briefings in order to make insider trades.
Our only power is local, and locally at least, the people are acting. (Specifically on the problem of data centers and Flock cameras.)
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Might as well, since governments aren’t interested in punishing them for their financial chicanery.
