Posted by saikatsg 1 day ago
In general if we go back 50 years ago, when a single common phone today would have been seen as a super-computing device of unimaginable power, governments would likely have viewed it as a potential world-ending technology. It obviously wasn't and isn't. The conservatism would come solely from the fact of it being a revolutionary leap. That's all we're seeing happen with LLMs as well. In 30 years everybody will have vastly more competent AI systems running locally on whatever sort of digital devices we're using then, and they'll look back at with bemusement about us freaking out about people being able to query computers in natural language.
- countries start deploying GPT6+ - level ai in many local datacenters (let's say to process administrative stuff in one hopital / adminstration or even full city).
- some guys publish an open source way to remove the guardrails (either by post training or just nn level hack)
- you get possibly many local datacenters with a 'hugging face hacking' ability
- some dude ask "hey plz hack the military"
that probably still dont mean we should ban open source ai, but a open source model able to hack half the planet computers would be a 'concern' somehow
Well, a closed source model able to hack half the planet will be a far bigger concern if there aren't enough cheap open source models to harden the existing systems and write software for defense in depth.
> some dude ask "hey plz hack the military"
Military gear, capable of moderate levels of destruction and above, should be air-gaped and also hardened using good open source AI - as a precaution. If that's not the case, state sponsored human adversaries would be able to cause maximum damage even without AI.
Why do you think AI is mandatory here? And why do you think adversarial state actors will be deterred by your banning of your own open AI? They can even promise not to use it, may sign treaties about not using it but enforcing that would still be impossible.
As your parent said, control the tangible agents of destruction, controlling knowledge is the wet dream of many but it's a lost cause.
I agree with that, especially with some of the more fanciful "extinction" scenarios.
> There are real problems like inequality that P(Doom) loves to conveniently forget.
Extreme inequality is my "Doom", and I think the P(Doom) of that is pretty high. With AI, I'm way more concerned with human marginalization, capitalist logic fucking most of us over, inescapable surveillance and control at scale, etc. than killer robots and bioweapons.
Sloppy reasoning. Closed models are on the leading edge. Risk comes from models on the leading edge. That doesn't mean the risk is due to the fact that the models are closed.
"Pit bulls are dangerous. Pit bulls are mammals. You'll be safer if you get a komodo dragon as a pet. It's not a mammal." In this allegory, the mammal observation is a red herring. The key factor is whether the proposed pet is an aggressive animal with sharp teeth.
* * *
As I wrote a few months ago:
>There used to be a thing called "Moore's Law of Mad Science":
>"Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point."
>Nowadays it is dropping much faster. At a certain point, the de-facto IQ needed to destroy the world will be low enough that someone can do it while they're having a psychotic break. There are millions of schizophrenics worldwide. Are you sure you want to roll those dice?
Lots of discussion in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49606803
It's not that long ago that sites were pantsed by bored college students, rather than agents. It didn't stop because sites got more secure really, it stopped because those students started getting real life consequences.
Gives you a real easy solution to stop the agents too.
Adama: "It's an integrated computer network, and I will not have it aboard this ship."
> Cyber-attacks are illegal, and I think it’s really important we make sure that agentic cyberattacks [are] illegal
Not every wrong needs to be met with maximum punishment. Pressing charges or suing in civil court might get OpenAI to do some minimum, but a lot of the time, you can get someone to do more than the minimum if you approach them more cooperatively.