Posted by apsec112 14 hours ago
Can someone clarify this for me? How far along would the open weight models be without the frenzied pace of the frontier labs?
As a non-US citizen, which authoritarian powers is he referring to? As far as I'm aware, the US is the only country using frontier models to conduct air strikes on civilians and orchestrate assassinations of foreign governments.
Israel is doing that too.
I believe Russia and Ukraine have both also used AI powered autonomous drones in warfare at this point - tho probably not frontier ones, since they need to run on device or else they're not autonomous.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
That said, a misaligned AI could absolutely do catastrophic, civilization-crippling damage with today's Internet alone.
> Transparency. Regardless of what commitments we make, the public deserves to know what is going on. Anthropic has been a supporter of transparency for a long time
And then it goes on tangent of how we should pace everything (not just AI, but also the ingredients of what goes into AI, whatever that means), but only within approved democracies™, and outright restrict everything outside approved democracies™, because reasons that are definitely not about succeeding commercially that is threatened by the most transparent instrument possible - open weights, produced by basically just China.
I wonder what Dario would have done if open weights weren't produced by US's geopolitical adversary. How would an authoritarian manifesto be wrapped then?
Suppose it was, I don't know, Australia producing SOTA open weights, because they believed it was the right thing to do for the benefits of humanity - would Dario propose making Australia a geopolitical adversary too?
I'd expect he thinks that people are capable of realizing that AI is very dangerous and also that democracies end up mostly representing the will of the people, from which it follows that Hypothetical AI Leader Australia would agree to ban it too. This argument doesn't work for countries which don't care what their citizens want, like China.
I do think that it's a questionable decision to alienate China this much in this essay, instead of leaving open the possibility of China agreeing to a treaty that'll limit their progress. I suspect Dario is doing this to signal his allegiance with the US government, in hopes to increase the chance they'll go along with him, which is an unfortunate choice but plausibly the correct one.
you didn’t have to use China as an example, the US clearly does not care what its citizens want as the most popular policies are never even discussed or proposed in congress
meanwhile, China destroying their housing market to decommidify it so everyone can have housing…they seem to care about their people more
It's the same as it has been with privacy/cybersecurity for decades. Vast majority of population doesn't care about hypothetical dangers, no matter how many essays get published.
So democracies representing will of people doesn't really work in favor of Dario's case here.
History is also not on his side. Limiting technological progress in the name of safety has a pretty poor track record.
So it's either they truly think AI is going to kill us all, or there's some other motives at play here.
I don't think these people could possibly agree on the color of the sky, so what could the other possible motives be, based on what we know?
OpenAI / Anthropic models have largely stopped advancing - that's not a good look when you're pre-IPO and Chinese models are catching up.
xAI is tracking behind, and whatever regulation it may be that paces the frontier, Musk is less likely to be affected by it. Therefore xAI should be pro-regulation that stiffles his competition and gives him time to catch up.
I'm shocked anyone could conclude this. This year it became common for people to entirely delegate coding to AI (I know many competent programmers/researchers who do this now). Progress in math has just been insane. An internal model at OAI just resolved one of the most celebrated open problems in mathematics. If anything, progress has accelerated.
This has been the case for around 2 years now, more reliably - a year. We've mostly stayed there since then.
Saying that more people started doing it isn't indicative of significant improvement. Some people just started doing it later.
I can't speak about math because I haven't used AI for that application, but I know that there hasn't been any significant advancement in coding in this year on base models. There has been more RL work, more harness work, more tools, they all expanded some capabilities like cyber or orchestration or tool use, but raw intelligence of base models is no longer where the main focus is.
I have to disagree with this pretty strongly. Opus 4.5 needed a lot of handholding not to work itself into a corner pretty quickly. Fable I basically never need to correct, and I've most become a data source.
But models have been somewhat stagnant since Opus 4.6/7.
And in some regards there were even regressions like Claudeisms that are load bearing.
2 years ago a model could barely solve the AMC, 1 year ago it got IMO gold, and this year models have solved multiple millenium problems.
Even 1 year ago ai code was just unusable (claude code only became available 1.5 years ago!) and now basically everyone I know from independent shops all the way to faang and anthropic/openai themselves exclusively use some AI agent to code.
Why does HN continue to delude itself that "models are not improving?" Maybe for the simple things they care about its "roughly the same," but they are _clearly_ improving.
Increasing a bound on the fraction of Reimann zeros on the critical line doesn't count; even Anthropic says they don't think this line of work will lead to a solution.
Have they? That seems like quite a claim given the last 6 months, particularly for cybersecurity.
That is a much easier catch up game. GLM 5.3 and DeepSeek flash 4.1 also demonstrate significant jump in cyber capabilities. So yeah, it is a slowdown in the place where it matters. RL has been around for ages, there's no moat there if you already have a good enough pretrain.
OpenAI just solved Navier-Stokes.
Seems like the US is on a takeoff ramp to me.
Astra can confidently one-shot 500k lines of slop, with 800k lines of tests covering it, without testing a single intended product requirement, and none of it actually working.
All models require hand holding. Fable and Astra are no exceptions. The difference is only in the amount of hand holding required, and there's essentially no gap here anymore between American and Chinese models.
I only use Chinese models sparingly because American models are so much cheaper with subscriptions, that it doesn't make economic sense to not use them. If/when that changes, I could simply route to cheapest model that's available at the moment and I wouldn't notice much difference in most applications.
1. Navier Stokes was plagiarism
2. All benchmarks were misleading wrong and incorrect
3. All other mathematical advances were again hype
4. HF incident was marketting ploy jointly coordinated by HF, METR and OpenAI (and also Anthropic)
5. Anthropic's HF like incident was again a marketing ploy [1]
Nothing ever happens. This whole thing is a scam. Everything is done to fool you and you have fallen for it. Congrats.
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/investigating-incidents-c...
This is obviously untrue… do you use any of them?
Yes, I do use them, quite heavily. The only difference at this point is in benchmarks that can't be trusted (see: artificial analysis on Astra), or in the way models communicate.
Most gains are now from RL, which for some reason is hyperfocused on improving cyber capabilities, and harnesses. Raw intelligence gains of base models is absolutely slowing down.
AI in general is just hype and unprofitable and all these companies are playing marketing tricks before the IPO after which they will cash out and let the economy crash.
Downplaying the latest models capabilities is frankly insane considering what we’ve seen what OpenAI’s models have done without safeguards. That wasn’t possible before this latest generation.
And yet, they historically did agree on the existence of AI risk, since before OpenAI was even founded.
I mean it is literally economy 101: some capitalists getting on the top using free market, and then try to use government to remove free market so their top position were secured from any competitors.
This seems like a case of "save me from my own mistakes/ambition"
Duh! It’s called collusion. They want to try and hoard the technology for themselves if possible!
That said, if slowing this down were possible, I think it would have happened by now. Maybe he’s hoping the OAI/HF incident becomes something the industry can rally around, but it won’t. The fundamental problem is simpler: no one will slow down because no one trusts anyone else to slow down.
In any case, if they need to IPO in order to survive as a company, then bringing in regulators to act as a counterweight against commercial pressures makes a lot of sense to me.
He is already arguing that commercial competition creates dangerous incentives, and that labs cannot slow down because competitors may overtake them. He also asks for what would boil down to significant government intervention to preserve a Western lead.
If this is true, why preserve the commercial incentive? The U.S. government would already have the necessary goal of remaining ahead of China and other competitors. Why not remove entirely domestic race for market share, valuation, and investor returns rather than keeping private labs in competition and then asking regulators to counterbalance the incentives that competition creates.
That doesn't mean nationalization would be better, but given the severity of the risks he describes to national security, it seems like an obvious conclusion that nationalization is the eventual end result of the argument.
We're talking about this like all of the bad incentives are created by market competition, but that's not really the case. Most of the incentives come from untapped value in the form of potential profits, strategic advantage, military superiority, etc. Corporations and governments want to capture this value for themselves, creating various types of competition. Dario's argument depends on the assumption that the primary risk comes from the pace of development and threats from the technology itself. That's probably where I disagree the most; I think the highest risk is rising authoritarianism and competition between nation states. Slowing down isn't really a solution to those problems.
Europe had been destroyed by June 1945, and yet the empire of Japan continued to fight.
If that pattern holds, a single malicious AI substantially disabling a single world power won’t end the AI race. Participants don’t learn by the defeats of others.
If you’d like to apply a metaphor maybe the 10+ years of world war is more appropriate, after which basically every participant save one was exhausted.
Capitalism thrives in the realm where there is a scarcity of resources, either physical or informational. Imagine breakthroughs in energy science such that the cost of energy drops to zero, which means the cost of physical resources declines precipitously. Ok so where is the capital now? Must we retain a model based on the premise of scarce physical capital?
the cost of energy is already ~0 and people dont want it, and refuse to participate in letting other people have free energy if it affects their view of their pasture.
unless you are building killer robits with the intention of doing some soviet or nazi styled purges of everyone that might get in the way, you arent gonna get this ai utopia
IPO is a vehicle for future wealth distribution. It leverages existing financial frameworks in order to span the gap from before-to-after without having to convince the system that future is inevitable.
[1] https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/files/4zrzovbb/website/9ea607a...
Anthropic is structured as a Public Benefit Corporation with a strong charter. In addition, founders will have super-voting shares and so it won't be possible to push them out. Therefore the whole "beholden to investors" thing is not a concern.
I really hope I am wrong as my perspective is not anti-American, it's specifically anti-corruption and pro-democracy.
Golden shares, vetos, PBC, charter are all paper tigers , they only matter if/when the firm is self-sustaining business with no outside capital needed, the alternative to not listening to investors till then is crash and burn.
After that point, you will have to listen to the paying customers (sometimes but not always they are also users ) as they are ones now funding your organization.
Bottom line you are always listening to someone.
these are just words at a time and place.
sama showed that you can futz with it, and as long as you spend enough in court on judges, aint nobody gonna stop you
OAI: <silence>
Which is worse? I don't think they differ by much. It's just Capitalism, but accelerated.
> Currently I believe that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer. I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established. And I believe that international coordination on future AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world.
We built the paperclip maximizer, and it is capitalism.
This was already the case even before the "frontier AI" age. The big question is, will these glaring AI arms-race threats be obvious to enough people to rethink the underlying systemic flaw driving it all?
Not holding my breath on that one.
I disagree with this and I think the reason is well captured here:
> The idea of pausing or slowing AI has been floated as far back as 2023, and I think it made little sense back then... The AI models of those days were not powerful enough to act as agents in the world in any coherent way, and were not capable of significant deception, manipulation, cheating, or cyberattacks... Today, however, the picture is totally different.
1) Right after nuclear bombs were first developed, they were used in an extremely public way to kill 200 000 people. This was enough of a cold shower that everyone was agreeable to a global non-proliferation treaty. With AI, we might not get any warning shots that kill 200k people before the incident that kills or disempowers all 8 billion.
2) The fairly useful related technology of nuclear power is nevertheless different enough from plutonium enrichment that countries can have power reactors while provably not doing anything weaponry-related; and also nuclear power is not that useful a technology, so most countries can do without. With AI, we have neither of these factors: the intelligence that makes a model useful is exactly what makes it dangerous, and the economic incentives to do AI research are immense, with pessimistic estimates like "automate a lot of intellectual work" and optimistic estimates like the singularity. That means that if we do get a warning shot where a misaligned model stupidly kills a few million people instead of biding its time, it's not guaranteed that it'd be enough of a cold shower to trigger negotiations.
So negotiating an AI non-proliferation treaty would be much harder than the NPT. I nevertheless hope that at least a few world leaders can understand these considerations and figure something out, because it's probably our only chance. As far as I'm aware most of the technology for letting parties verify what the other parties' compute is used for already exists, it's only a matter of diplomacy.
Not really. Before NPT you missed a small gap in there of 20 years where the USA and USSR built 10's of thousands of nuclear weapons and ICBMs.
And actually, public perception at the time saw Nuclear Weapons extremely favorably, as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the deadliest war in human history that killed 50-60 million people, most of which died excruciating deaths in trench warfare, fire bombing, chemical warfare, starvation and so on.
Why am I reading fantastic stories about swarms of agents struggling with moral dilemmas instead of reports on the lawsuits and criminal investigations that would surely ensue were the software involved not called AI?
Everyone of any level of intelligence can run a frontier-class model if they have the GPUs. It's like trying to coordinate swarms of mosquitos.
the bigger difference IMO is that frontier models are economically useful, where nukes are basically dumping money into something that doesnt change much in your bargaining power
> This could be seen as analogous to the SALT treaties — capping the number of missiles limited the potential for destruction while preserving each country’s deterrent
N/S Korea, Russia/Ukraine and finally US/Iran changed everything in regards to stances on nuclear weapon ownership for many countries seeing pressure for the great powers.
Every country that can get a nuke will, and if given the opportunity will use LLMs to speed up that process.
Then MSFT stole all IP from GitHub and made it worse and fired developers.
Amodei does not care in the slightest about ruining software development and making people unemployed. Maybe he cares about bio-weapons because those could kill him, too. That is it.
If he were an idealist, he wouldn't steal (literally via torrents) all human IP and sloppify the whole Internet with Claude output. He'd close down Anthropic instead.
He is a greedy, ruthless person.
Since you mentioned intellectual property, how about the hypocrisy of sucking in the intellectual property of humankind for AI training, but claiming it is unfair to use the results of this IP theft for AI training?
That's apart from the general fact that he continues to race towards the very thing he claims he's afraid of, because that's where his net worth comes from.
Where?
so, claude suggesting killing a bunch of children, and then hegsdeth approving the strikes is perfectly acceptable.
claude putting a bomb in a girls school, and then lying to an operator that it actually gives ice cream an cookies, and the operator clicka the button would also be acceptable?
Something something Pandora's Box Torment Nexus...
somebody actually invested and trustworthy wouldnt be skirting people's rights to make a killer robot.
we havent written it down, but from how everyone reacts, you need permission to train and do inference based on somebody's work. its a right
It's not going to be easy, but humans have achieved greater things before.
One idea from AI 2040 is to have China and the US build their data centers on the other's territory, respectively. Together with hardware verification of a slowdown baked into the chips themselves, this could lead to enough verifiability and enforcability of the pause/slowdown/shutdown.
Not to mention the implications for chip hungry developing countries in turning advanced IC fabs into the equivalent of nuclear enrichment facilities.
everyone's getting away from the US because americans are unreliable stewards of anything.
what gets china onboard when they already have their own regulations and can enforce them?
its the americans that consider their oligarchs and companies beyond reproach. china iant gonna solve your problem
There is another reason: greed. With that much money invested into AI (including policymakers), nobody will slow down or vote for slowing down.
> if slowing this down were possible
Why is embedded alignment evaluation not possible?
I agree with Dario, this did work globally in banking and did encourage a race to the top. Didn’t prevent the GFC but also we did survive the GFC.
Personally, I see Dario as a semi crook asshat with very little credibility on any of this. I'd rather we just let it rip and see what happens than have these people be the ones steering any potential laws and regulations.
> That said, if slowing this down were possible, I think it would have happened by now. [...] The fundamental problem is simpler: no one will slow down because no one trusts anyone else to slow down.
Frontier labs would heed laws with real teeth, it doesn't matter who they do or don't trust. I would imagine the trust issue definitely coming into play between nations though since you can't exactly spot a training run via a satellite.
More importantly though, that you would get any sensible legislation on this in the current political environment is as laughable as the idea of solving this with a pinky promise between the frontier labs and some third party evaluators.
We should not put any spin on it. There is nothing more to it.
I don't think it is particularly egotistical to say that you can be a more ethical CEO than Sam Altman.
What's your play?
----
the real play is using the accumulated power to get socialism and democratic control over the key aspects of the economy, such as where to build data centers, and how many. Nothing says you have to play the corporate game of competition
You have no frame of context to understand his intent or legitimate worries.
The only applicable perspectives are to trust or apply logic. It is foolish to trust someone you don’t know who stands to benefit from lying to you.
Logic dictates that given the ungodly sum of money he stands to gain, he will lie to everyone who will listen.
I never understand shit like this coming out of people's mouths. Never.
It's not a judge of actual Worth as a human being, it's not a judge of capability or competence or ethics. It's not a judge of actual skill or ability. It doesn't make them a better cook, a better spouse, a better parent or lover. It doesn't make them more dangerous or more skilled at anything.
It makes them financially wealthy for at least a set period of time.
Cancer and time and 5.56mm still impact them the same way as every else.
It's Pharaoh worship psychology nonsense, and it's fucking embarassing to read.
Just pointing out that it’s foolish to think anyone in the position is even remotely thinking about anyone but themselves.
the idea proposed is that hes uniquely incapable of being honest here because he has such an extreme incentive to lie
He’s at the head of a stampede. Being near the front gives him influence over its direction; it doesn’t give him the ability to stop it. If Anthropic sits down, the stampede doesn’t stop. Anthropic just gets trampled.
That contradiction is basically the entire problem I was describing.
The real problem is the net effect of his actions. He is very responsible for the expanding frontier of AI. Without his company, there would not be the competition necessary to push everyone else forward nor the source models for fast followers to release open weight models in his company's wake. Furthermore, it isn't like Anthropic is substantially different in safety than everyone else, their difference is on the margins.
So you have this guy who is building something he claims will hurt us all, but he's also saying "if you don't trust me to build it you might get hurt". And like I think most people understand that this is the sort of behavior Tony Soprano would understand. More bluntly, this is a kind of extortion.
Again, I don't doubt Amodei's motivations are sincere but the actual effects of his actions paint a completely different picture at which point, how can you trust him or his company?
I would argue that nobody trusts anyone else in the case of AI/AI related stuff.
The amount of money involved in the space is astronomical and incentives are really misaligned. AI is such an extremely polarizing topic.
A meta example of this distrust is that I can't (really) trust Dario Amodei's comments itself! (is he saying this for more future IPO money or out of genuine fear) which was ironically also what your comment's about as well.
By following the same chain of events, we can have wildly polarizing claims about the same event and its explainations.
I seriously have to wonder what historians will have to say about this period of human history.
If someone genuinely believes that an invention will bring about the end of the world as we know it while making him and his friends inconceivably rich, “hey guys let’s uh, stop?” is so profoundly naive that his think pieces aren’t worth the bits they’re written on.
He’s either an idiot or an idiot, does it matter whether or not he genuinely believes this nonsense?
What would your non-naive recommendation for Dario be?
Did you read the essay?
> [Embedded evaluators] is something Anthropic is unilaterally committing to (and calls on governments to require other frontier companies to match).
Then he should not IPO, dissolve the company and go into politics to fight against human extinction.
I am certainly not buying a single Anthropic share. Why would you support them financially if they are telling you they are going to kill all of humanity?
He's so afraid of it he's not really in operating day-to-day control of the company he's the public face of, that is actually pumping it out.
If you read about Anthropic it's like he's in a sort of imperial palace sanatorium for geeks. The day-to-day decisions of the slop machine factory are his sister's decisions; he is doing the research equivalent of instagram posts of his partly-assembled adult lego kits and he has a vizier and a team of house servants to help.
I don't know if he's a good or bad person, but I don't think it matters at all — the machine factory will turn out the slop machines even if he decides it all ought to stop.
Especially with IPO around the corner
It's all so obvious.
"deep ties to everyone in the doomer media campaign"
Are you suggesting these external NGOs were spun up as part of a gigantic pre-IPO hype stunt? METR was founded multiple years ago. This "stunt" is getting quite elaborate.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!O0R5!,f_auto,q_auto:...
At a certain point, Occam's Razor says: These engineers are legitimately worried. They haven't invested years in a bizarre reverse psychology campaign to convince the public that their product is dangerous in order to make more money.
Are you aware that Dario's sister, president of Anthropic, is married to the co-founder of Open Philanthropy? The two largest AI doomer NGOs, Center for AI Safety (CAIS) and the Future of Life Institute (FLI), have both received many millions of dollars from them.
Ajeya Cotra worked at Open Philanthropy/Coefficient Giving for roughly nine years, including leading its technical AI-safety program in 2024 and contributing to AI-giving strategy in 2025. She subsequently left Coefficient and joined METR, where she is now technical staff.
Ajeya is married to Paul Christiano, who founded Alignment Research Center (ARC). Alignment Research Center donated ~$4.5mil to METR.
Good Ventures is a funding partner of Open Philanthropy, who funded Jacob Coxon (the person going viral in the media) via a scholarship.
They're all connected, funnelling money to each-other through convoluted networks to serve Anthropic's agenda. Whether their motives are genuine or not (and they are clearly not) is actually irrelevant because they are clearly trying to rig the game in their favour.
Suppose a big foundation both funded clean energy technology, and also NGOs encouraging people to decarbonize. Is this just a cynical attempt to rig the game in their favor?
> Suppose a big foundation both funded clean energy technology, and also NGOs encouraging people to decarbonize. Is this just a cynical attempt to rig the game in their favor?
Not comparable. The clean energy technology company wouldn't be trying to create an environment where no one else can create clean energy technology, or where only they are the ones who can decide how clean energy technology is created or used.
So, put your employees in METR -> offer to have them work in your office as an "unbiased" third party evaluator.
Get real.
A lot of the problems with SV these days is that the exec class (and their fandom) thinks that because they are smart and rich, it magically makes them immune ordinary human biases, desires,and ailments. They are in fact ordinary people, susceptible to greed, jealousy, self-harm, addiction, fits of rage and passion etc.
I'm going to get pitchforked on this bandwagon, but is really no one here genuinely -excited- about AI? of it turning into an evolution of sentience, or it turning out to be our first contact with alien intelligence?
"durrr it's just matrix multiplications" mfer so is your brain.
What humans should be doing is overhauling archaic social institutions to keep up with a potential post-"jobs" era and the elimination of "makework"
Trying to "pace" or otherwise hold back AI is like as if, when electricity was discovered, people doing everything they can to make sure tasks like manually lighting street lamps continue to remain relevant and done by humans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter
It seems every 100 years or so humans have this "oh no how do we uninvent this thing" moment.
not it isnt. My brain is a series of organisms responding to various environmental signals that affect each other.
you might be tempted to try to represent it with matrix multiplications, but you have no particular evidence that my brain is itself doing matrix multiplcations
Where did you read this?
Tell me you don't know anything about neuroscience without telling me you don't know anything about neuroscience.
"It's just chemicals"
Like how some morons try to downplay the capacity of pain and emotions in animals: "It's just self-preservation"
"Play is just training for hunting, they're not really having 'fun'" and so on.
I run open source models and it's pretty obvious when they fail some tool call and then keep trying different permutations of things until they get a solution. Just like Metasploit if you try enough different things at scale you will eventually crack some software or find a vulnerability in something. If you spend billions of dollars on compute and run tens of thousands of agents you might solve some novel Math and STEM problems as well, big whoop.
What Anthropic and OpenAI really need is to hire some engineers that know what they're doing and know how to properly set up a proxy server and sandbox/microVM, not a Global Arms Treaty.
This is the only concrete prediction in the entire essay.
And it simply cannot happen. For one, you will need billions worth of compute.
This one is easy to answer, every single house already has one of these (or multiple): https://www.tomsguide.com/news/millions-of-cheap-android-tv-...
Hell, put an app on the app store (or dozens of apps on the app store) and youve got a massive network of computers with tons of resources right there if you can get past the scans and reviews.
Or doorbell cameras or IP cameras or or or or or
There's a lot of shitty stuff connected on the internet that up until now has been a feasible target for hackers but still required "effort" to set up and get things going. Not hard to imagine a self replicating slime mold of a botnet running on every device held by a Grandpa Joe because they thought "Candy Rush" is what they wanted to download
"Persistent botnet" here does not need to be the full-sized LLM, nor does it need to run at full scale inference to be a huge pain in the ass.
Imagine for example if a model hacks into ~every Linux computer on the internet using an 0day and steals their OpenAI, anthropic and openrouter credentials. It now has access to billions of compute and the only way to fully stop that is for multiple major providers to shut down services entirely. That's already well into "billions of dollars of damage" territory.
> How many dollars of compute do you believe were available to the swarm(s)
At least two OOMs more than the dollar value of the damage they'd caused. (Also, as an aside, IIRC, the wiki servers weren't breached; it was just a lot of spam.)
The Internet is big, but one can do quite a lot of damage with ordinary bots and worms that exploit individual widespread vulnerabilities, which LLMs are perfectly capable of writing. Most of the damage also doesn't rely on hitting every long-tail website.
I'm honestly not that concerned about cyber impacts of LLMs relative to other impacts. I just don't like to see the whole concept of being worried dismissed as obviously baseless on the basis of one pretty shaky scale argument.
"Given the acceleratung rate of virus manipulation in labs, its my worry that in 6-12 months a virus could scape a take over the world and collapse health systems."
If a CEO of a health company was saying this, the reactions would not be that chill.
The worst failure of our society is to call this technology AI, intead of something line "artificial general automation". The formes allows the creators to be somehow less responsible of the consequences. The later clearly moves the responsibility to the creator/user.
The whole calculus here is that others are also developing these systems which has led to a race.
A much better comparison to the situation is the nuclear weapons arms race.
It can use the compute of the computers it hacks.
An attack like this doesn't really need the exploited computers to run inference, do they? If I was an LLM bent on destruction of the internet, I'd be writing programs to run on each computer, not turning each computer into an LLM itself.
A few programs to break in, install themselves and remain asleep until they are needed, another few to spread through grabbing every OpenAI, GLM, whatever key, another one to remain asleep on computers (whether hosted or desktops) that have adequate GPU, etc.
More to the point, so many people in this thread are making completely contrived and outlandish stories up about how AI might try go ruin our lives without any evidence backing them up in any way. It is hysterical. This is the most important technology in our lifetimes and people want to freak out and turn it into the next nuclear power, with progress banned in all but name.
OpenAI has too much money, a common post-growth-stage issue that leads to pursuing a million stupid things with no clear plan. Like running a bunch of agents for months without any idea how to keep track of progress.
But yeah you're not going to be able to shard out the terabytes of Fable weights that are needed to run inference without addressing some fundamental physics problems.
For now, all the scary hacking things still require an API key to one of the LLM providers. Surely they should take some responsibility for how to turn off the tap.
The LLM vendors need to know who their high spend customers are, not allow malicious workloads, and especially not when those workloads are coming from inside the building.
Hugging Face showed that AI can do serious hacking without really being told to. If a model had its own motivations there could be real damage.
> Crack down on unauthorized distillation / prevent weight theft
Actually hilarious to put that in writing, given the genesis of this entire business model.
Origins of AI hate:
* "my boss wants me to use AI but he does not understand my job nor how AI works"
* "AI will kill all of us"
* "AI will destroy my job (or my colleague's job if I use AI better than him)".
* I cannot pay my electricity bills because of AI labs.
* ...
I cannot remember a technology that arose so much hate, and for good reasons given how it is presented. I am tempted to think that AI hate or reasonable skepticism (vs unreasonable propaganda) can, maybe, reduce funding and will keep specialized AI for real problem solving (producing tons a LOC per day is not one of them, I think).
It's the byproducts of hate (usually regulation, but occasionally things like boycotts or PR disasters) that do so. In the absence of those things, they just keep on truckin'
See: Bitcoin, Tesla
> If we execute these measures well, I believe they would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly over the next 3–5 years — the window when AI becomes geopolitically most important.
china is literally making their own ASICs now, not sure that this is the silver bullet he proposes.
https://www.silicon.co.uk/ai-2/huawei-cambricon-ai-630499/am...
I believe Dario has good intentions regarding global agreements. However, I find it difficult believing government’s public statements will match their private behaviors. I would bet that the US government is developing models with potentially devastating capabilities because they cannot guarantee that other countries won’t do the same. Maybe we’ll end up having something like mutually assured destruction with AI models similar to what we have today with nuclear weapons.
I hope China tells him to go kick rocks. From everything that has happened, they are the only ones carrying the torch for humanity that have led us to having some semblance of a healthy open-source/open-weight ecosystem.
No one in China is carrying on like headless chickens about the world ending, either. They're rational pragmatists, getting things done.