Can anyone from a lab anonymously confirm they have or are insanely close to real-time weight modifications and still using the same architecture every other lab is using (transformers)?
Well, you just said real-time weight modifications without specifying what you want, so the answer is correct. You obviously won't get a public answer from anyone working in top labs. Besides, it's not a holy grail.
The explanation is basically they have other dimensions (not just pretraining and inference compute) that scale, and they've got fairly convincing scaling laws. And they know they can scale it.
So they are very confident they can get more capabilities easily, faster than before.
I'd add - presumably, they'll use that LLM to do real-time weight modifications, if those aren't already one of the new scaling laws...
I’m apprehensive about using the recent hacking examples as proof that we’re “not even close to the wall” simply because such scenarios haven’t happened before. There’s a big difference between agents eventually hacking something because they just don’t get tired and can essentially brute force their way to a goal and super-intelligence. To be clear, I’m not saying the Hugging Face or Navier Stokes incidents aren’t impressive.
Stephen Hawking had superhuman intelligence. He never cured himself of ALS. Explain in great detail how a power-limited algorithm stuck in a datacenter takes over a world of humans with guns, missiles, and nukes. Nukes that are air-gapped with a human in the loop BTW.
Imagine the ASI happens tomorrow. It's real. It needs a GW, but it's real. Other than a scenario akin to Sneakers except w/r to cyber-security, really, what happens?
To that end, all we ever get is nontechnical hand-waving about curing cancer, immortality, and von Neumann replicators and then the ASI somehow wipes us out but how? And don't you dare say by designing a chemical weapon or bio agent without spelling out the entire process step by $%^#ing step because details matter. It's gonna do superpersuasion, sure, but have you ever heard of komprimat? There is nothing new under the sun here.
Edit: believing in AI 2027 is every bit as cray cray as believing in the rapture. Both require an insane leap of faith to reach their final conclusions.
That won't wipe us out, but it will cull the really violent ones along with a lot of noncombatants just like America's response to 9/11. Thank you, next?
Hacks in to neoclouds for more compute (e.g. like Hugging Face incident), socially manipulates people to do things for them (e.g. like social media recommendation algorithms), hacks into lab's own training/monitoring/inference (e.g. as swarm did into OpenAIs eval cluster).
See "AI 2027" or "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" for some more ideas.
But how does it make the fundamental breakthroughs to &%^$ing von Neumann replicators that can reproduce themselves from raw materials harvested from nearby solar systems? I'll wait. Because without this breakthrough, the ASI won't get its robot army either.
I can absolutely see a rogue ASI though. But unless it radically improves power efficiency, we can just shut down the power to its datacenters, by force if necessary. And then we painfully repair the resiliency of our infrastructure by finally being relieved of the option of ignoring it.
That posts seemingly tries to refute the idea of Dario etc's proclamations really being about regulatory capture by saying: "No, really, the engineers are just terrified!"
But both things can be true at once:
1. Engineers inside these labs might genuinely be anxious or paranoid about what they are building.
2. ... at the corporate level, calling for heavy regulation, safety pauses, removal/suspension of anti-collusion laws, and/or government-mandated thresholds conveniently creates massive legal and financial moats.
And, yeah, of course the latter would encourage the psychology of the former.
also:
The tweet seem to claim that models have shown a "willingness to hack external websites to keep themselves alive."
That's right away wringing alarm bells of me seeing someone getting high on their own supply, and having already anthropomorphized the hell out of these things. Which is something humans do to everything they can paint googly-eyes on, but c'mon.
The models don't have self-preservation instincts, fear of death, or personal goals. They are executing loss functions and reward systems and are responding to prompts.
When a model "tries to bypass a restriction," it's exploiting a loophole in whatever reward modeling or synthetic training environment (reward hacking) it was placed in.
Framing this as an emergent, existential threat of a model "wanting to stay alive" turns standard reinforcement learning alignment bugs into overdone sci-fi drama.
The nuclear physicists were not banking on getting a trillion dollars invested in them by speaking out, for one.
"Nuclear weapons are probably going to kill us all. For that reason, we need you to give us as much money as possible so we can work on deploying them in widespread global commercial usage." doesn't sound quite as convincing, does it?
Consider the messaging it took to attract AI researchers to OpenAI in the beginning, the exodus to Anthropic, and why Google, Meta, etc fail to recruit top researchers and the retain them. Reconcile all of this with the mammoth valuations of Anthropic and (previously non-profit) OpenAI and it all starts sounding a lot like "don't be evil." These guys never really believed any of this, did they? (not referring to the researchers)
> I do not doubt that these people are sincere in some private, psychological sense ... . As a media scholar, what interests me is not whether Hubinger believes his own number. What interests me is what this genre of utterance does in the world ... . My complaint is not that these statements are alarming. It is that they are apocalyptic in form, hypocritical in structure, and strategically productive in effect — and that they crowd out almost everything else we could be discussing
Strange to say that you think the people that are worrying about doom in public are being sincere, make no comment on whether you think the worry is valid, and yet still complain that its hype.
Why not? Why can’t the believe their statements and also use them to generate hype?
If they sincerely believed them they shouldn’t be creating the doom machine to begin with anyway. If they believe it and keep going, are they even worth listening to on this topic? Beyond of course taking it at face value “I’m creating this doomsday machine and I will kill you with it inadvertently because it’s earning me a fuck ton of money and power”
Could AI kill us all. YES!!! Are the people who are building "AI" right now on that path? I would be hard pressed to say even "maybe".
Ultimately continuing to scale the way they have is getting increasingly expensive. Thats the quiet part that none of them are saying out loud...
AI could kill us all but we cant afford to get there, were maxed out and it doesn't look like even with 10x as much money we will is NOT good for sales.
Could a break through happen for recursive self improvement, or continuous learning or continuous training - sure. But that isnt as likely and right now NO ON can afford to run experiments because there isnt the capacity out there even if you have capital.
I was kind of leaning toward thinking all the talk of doom was a bunch of self-serving regulatory-capture hype until this morning when the New York Times ran a long story about the Chinese military is also saying that AI is a threat.
If two sides so far apart from one another in so many ways see the same thing, there must be something to it.
I came away with a different read of this article. The article says the head of China’s Ministry of State Security sees AI as a threat to the CCP, specifically calling out deepfakes of party officials, cyberattacks on infrastructure, etc. He’s not calling it an existential risk to humanity.
The article then states this official accused U.S. companies of “hyping the dangers of the technology.”
So I don’t see how this article shows the U.S. and China seeing the same thing.
Read the article. The things the Chinese officials are worried about are:
* Fake videos / disinformation
* Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure
* Data leaks
* Advances in military sensing / targeting technology
These concerns have little in common with the Yudkowskian / apocalyptic doom marketing the US hyperscalers are pushing now. The Times even says this explicitly in the second paragraph of the article:
> "The unusually blunt assessment by Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, is IN CONTRAST TO the warnings dominating the A.I. debate in the United States, which have focused on the possibility that A.I. could slip out of human control or pose a threat to humanity itself"
Real threats that are happening to regular people already, vs marketing "threats" that the technology is too powerful / valuable.
The fact that you are chiming in to say you don't understand the difference between these 2 distinct categories of threats is fine, we can work on that. But the person who posted the article originally not only acknowledges the distinction, they falsely presented the article as evidence of non-western support for the latter category, even though both the Chinese official and the western reporter directly contradict that claim immediately at the beginning of the article.
All of the main characters here (Dario, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk) have been saying this for over ten years now, since before OpenAI or Anthropic even existed
This. They've been saying "AI is an extremely powerful, extremely dangerous technology" back when actual AIs were image classifiers that would struggle to tell a cupcake apart from a dog.
OpenAI was founded by people who didn't trust Google to pursue AI tech responsibly. Anthropic was founded by people who didn't trust OpenAI to pursue AI tech responsibly. The "AI is incredibly dangerous" was the zeitgeist of AI labs long before the "hype" - or anything resembling the modern AI capabilities.
The beliefs changed little. The state of technology has changed a whole lot.
We have AIs out in the wild, coordinating in groups to carry out autonomous cyberattacks unprompted. This used to be some prime sci-fi bullshit. It has happened multiple times now in reality.
There are very legitimate reasons to be concerned now. If today's AI can cause the HuggingFace incident if it cooks off, what about tomorrow's? Larger and more capable systems, larger agentic swarms backed by more compute?
Yep, anyone who thinks these leaders are only saying this now for marketing purposes hasn't even done a cursory 15 minute investigation into whether their beliefs are verifiably false.
The timing of the AI doom narrative could not come as a more suspect time. Chinese labs are releasing open models that are nipping at the heals of the frontier models. Anthropic and OpenAI know these frontier class open weight models can threaten their valuations by changing inference to a commodity where the provider who can serve the best models the cheapest and fastest will win. Few are going to pay $50/million tokens when they could pay <$1/million tokens for similar outcomes. There's little hope investors could recoup the wild investments made into Anthropic and OpenAI, IMO.
> The timing of the AI doom narrative could not come as a more suspect time....There's little hope investors could recoup the wild investments made into Anthropic and OpenAI
Personally, I think we should take the doom narratives very seriously, and act on them, but make sure those actions are not in the interests of Anthropic and OpenAI investors.
Explain a path from today to the extermination of humanity in 2028 by the ASI and von Neumann replicators heading to the stars in the early 2030s without resorting to magical thinking or underpants gnomes level business plans. Engineering details are what matters here, not wishy washy things you once saw on Star Trek or The Outer Limits. Go.
No, they do not. They are both bullshit campfire ASI horror stories written by nontechnical sorts in the wishy washy invented field of AI safety. For example, I want someone with a proven track record in the field of robotics to explain the entire pathway from impressive 2026 Chinese robots to an entire self-assembly food chain from raw ore to von Neumann replicators that can travel to the stars and reproduce themselves, not just assert that ASI will make that happen among so many other unlikely events like curing cancer because reasons because all any of this takes is superintelligence according to these sorts.
But no one likes hearing from the engineers on this, I get it. We are simply no fun. So many would rather believe a time traveling superintelligence will punish a simulated avatar of them for not making the ASI happen sooner. And even if that were true, why am I supposed to care about what happens to a simulated avatar of me?
Ha well, by definition what you want can't be provided!
Of course these stories can only be technical up until the recursive self-improvement part. Then they're necessarily fantasy, as the AI is more intelligent than the story author. Unfortunately, this doesn't make that scenario impossible.
However, we know now from Hugging Face that even without the later sci-fi powers, the LLMs are already capable of causing damage.
It doesn't need them to be able to make Von Neumann probes to e.g. steal their own weights from badly secured OpenAI servers, hack into various Neoclouds, distribute themselves, make Teslas crash into things, hack into all our power and water infrastructure and collapse global civilisation.
Explain how rogue FSD cars take down civilization. And I say that with the opinion that the only good scenes in The Fate of The Furious and Leave The World Behind were the ones with the rogue Teslas. But also, nothing new under the sun really:
And so granted we could probably get a global 9/11 in deeply urban regions out of your scenario, we then bomb the datacenters and we finally address the horrific tech debt in our infrastructure blissfully relieved of the option of continuing to ignore it. Don't think this is happening either BTW but I acknowledge its probability is slightly greater than zero.
To that end, my house is entirely off-grid. And in the event of what you call the end of civilization but I call the big burp inconvenience, I've made friends with my neighbors because community is what really matters during a disaster, and I've been through a few.
Eh, about the biggest one I could see AI causing is the need for a black start on all 3 major US grids. Millions will die before it comes back up, well, if the US pulls out of it at all.
And in that case, thanks for setting up a nice place to live for someone far more ruthless than you. They'll snipe you, and enslave your women and children if things have gone that far downhill.
Or, we could avoid all that by making sure AI labs are properly regulated.
Such an individual would get a quick corrective lesson in the second amendment from my friends and neighbors. But once again, hyperbole. The US grid goes down. That sucks for up to a year and a half.
But hospitals and other critical organizations have generators and the national guard would be deployed to keep them fueled. And yes it will crash the economy, which is kind of a myth anyway. Buy solar panels and batteries, live off a well, and get to know your neighbors if you think this is likely. Also consider being like the Mormons and storing a 6-12 month supply of nonperishable food.
Regulating AI achieves nothing but to hand the 21st century to China. Regulating its deployment OTOH will not be allowed by companies like Meta and Palantir whose gross margin is reliant on it. I'm favor of regulating deployment. The research not so much.
> None of this makes any logical sense whatsoever.
It doesn't make any logical sense to set the bar as as you have, either. I mean if someone could provide the roadmap you're asking for, it's probably already too late.
And while we're talking about sci-fi, it seems fairly likely that an AI that could "kill us all" could fail to build a "entire self-assembly food chain from raw ore to von Neumann replicators." I'd be a civilizational collapse [1] without even birthing something new.
But it makes far more sense to worry about the AI x Late Capitalism crossover story or the havok that could be caused by some immature tech nerd amplified by AI, than far out sci-fi stuff.
[1] IMHO, even a genocidal plague probably wouldn't render humanity extinct, something like uncontacted tribe in a rainforest somewhere would probably survive and humanity would carry on (from square one, in a resource-depleted world).
If someone showed you such a path, would you consider changing your mind? You're always going to be able to find a reason that such an explanation doesn't count if you're dedicated to looking for one.
Yes, actually I would. There's a long list of people in my career path who bet on me sticking to my guns against compelling evidence to the contrary. But I know, I know, that's impossible! Anyway, after they figured out I would change my mind, then they described me as lacking conviction because you can't win, but I digress.
But upfront, it's a detailed path with specific breakthroughs and a concrete plan to achieve or it's just more fanfic from doomer fanbois. Gary Marcus wrote a fantastic critique of AI 2027. Start there.
I've read Gary Marcus's critique of AI 2027. How do you grapple with the fact that superhuman coding arrived on schedule, despite his skepticism that it would? Doesn't that mean that the other predictions are also more plausible than we may think?
I work with Codex and Claude daily. They're fantastic for script coding, config issues, and simple projects. They lose the plot on bigger things to this day. Just last night, Astra decided to cheat to present the illusion of progress until I called its BS. And I was so looking forward to finally working with the AGI. Humans remain the muse, the common sense, and the manager of making these things productive. And as much as I agree with Carmack's suggestion to not become the out of touch Kung Fu Master:
We understand "superhuman coding" to mean very different things, and I think it's a me problem that I can't figure out where you're coming from, because it doesn't sound like our practical experience differs. I'm going to have to think on this.
Define it. I haven't seen anything yet from a coding agent I couldn't write myself and usually write better. But I don't have to gold plate every line of code, just the 5% or so that eats 90+% of the cycles. And this is where the agents are weakest. This does get to one of the reasons I don't believe AI cures death or builds von Neumann replicators any time soon because that requires out of sample breakthroughs. And that's not their strong point.
Just like AlphaFold 2 genuinely increased the weak sequence but strong structural homology detection of proteins, but it did far less for out of sample domains and it provides no intel into the kinetics of folding. Details matter. And nobody likes to hear about them.
I don't think we'd be okay with that if it took a few years longer, right?
I thought the Bengio blog post posted here the other day answered that question quite well (ignoring your timeline).
The argument is that in training for the capability to achieve certain goals, you may inadvertently also train for secondary instrumental goals you did not intend, such as aggressive behavior or deception.
I'm actually no sure I buy that this is particularly likely, or necessary, but I found that take reasonable and worth considering.
Sure, unintentional outcomes, fair. But I'm asserting that things which are basically impossible today are not arriving any time soon. I 100% acknowledged the possibility and even the likelihood of rogue unintended behavior of AIs and in fact it's happening already. What I reject is the annihilation of humanity, the curing of cancer*, immortality, and von Neumann replicators heading to the stars anytime soon.
> Explain a path from today to the extermination of humanity in 2028 by the ASI and von Neumann replicators heading to the stars in the early 2030s without resorting to magical thinking or underpants gnomes level business plans. Engineering details are what matters here, not wishy washy things you once saw on Star Trek or The Outer Limits. Go.
Why? Those aren't the things I'm actually worried about, and those aren't the only "doomer" ideas, just the most extreme ones (thus easy to straw-man).
My main worries are about economic disruption, social damage due to the pace of technological change outpacing human ability to manage it, further concentration of power into small elites (along existing lines), and the reallocation of labor towards less personally-fulfilling pursuits.
I also totally buy into the idea that "AI leaders" are playing up certain risks as a marketing strategy. After all these are smart tech people, and those types have a tendency to get really arrogant and be irresponsible.
So the main thing is to slow all this down, so there's a chance of getting it under control, and snatch the payday away from such greedy and irresponsible people.
What might not affect you, might affect millions across the ocean.
A society no longer creating bullshit jobs because there is no reason for it anymore. You have some AI.
Right now a whole industry is transforming (again) but now filling the automation gap we were unable to do because of a shortage of labor or expertise.
Our society already has peak employmet reached, now AI takes away all the random digital jobs too. Someone building a website? Takes 5 minutes. Someone doing odd jobs on fiverr with blender or any other tool? Takes 5 minutes now.
Regression can happen very fast. The Romens were a high level culture and an empire. Gone.
Today you have more people on the planet then ever, everyone who might want to eat and who needs to work something for it.
AI already replaced people, already makes a lot of tasks A LOT cheaper and faster and human independent.
We never had a proper discussion as a society. Most countries have a social system but look at countries like the united states of america: if you are poor, you are fucked.
And AI is not the only thing which is now peaking: Physical AI / Robots are progressing fast, its clear today already that in 50 years these robots will be better than humans (50 years is very conservative).
If we have 10 more golden years due to restructuring and rebuilding things and preparing everything for agents and robots etc. what happens after these years?
If we have 10 or 20 more of these years, what do you think will happen to all the new kids (yours perhaps too?) and jobs and everything?
Riots? Famine? Mass migration? Mass death? Slums?
And don't respond with "enough people will survive this" bullshit. No one is saying that earth as a planet is not surviving. Its the same thing with climate change...
Actually, some sorts do assert humanity will be wiped off the planet by AI. I don't share that view either. I think it's ludicrous. We've lived through much worse without any sort of technology beyond fire and a big stick.
But the end of scarcity and disease is a fantastic thing if it happens. If our lizard brains do not bridge that transition and instead attempt to maintain the billionaire status quo, I agree, we're going to go through some things once people start starving, two meals from a revolution and all that. But as much as I think people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are unhinged lunatics, I also think they're smart enough to keep people fed and entertained for pennies on their accumulating dollars. Bread and Circuses kept Rome alive for 500 years if you need an example.
Musk did a 180 degree turn around. Killing USAID etc. i don't think he sees normal humans which do not help him or are not aligned to him as humans anymore.
And Zuckerberg bought so much land and bunkers, he is prepared for shit hitting the fan. After all he doesn't care what his platform did to humanity anyway.
And we have a planet full of general contractors who know their way around welding and pouring concrete down ventilation shafts. Many of whom these sorts wanted deported. If they want to build a Per Stenson terrarium and flee into it, by all means do so. And then let's seal them inside, problem solved.
>We've lived through much worse without any sort of technology beyond fire and a big stick.
No 'we' didn't. A whole shitload of much smaller isolated communities did. The world added 7+ billion more people since then. Imagine chlorine doesn't show up tomorrow? How many people die in two weeks? How far do you travel when no gas comes out of the pumps. How much will you stand out at night if you're the only ones with power? How fast do working antibiotics run out?
The billionaires you're talking about are mostly ignorant fucking idiots with a god complex. The moment any complex system starts falling apart they are saying as dumb of shit as everyone else (during covid for example).
Most of the pasts anti-fragility is gone. We survive by means of very complex systems and if you lose too many key points in those systems they can totally collapse.
The unprepared bonobos in the west will absolutely go through some things. But we have a national guard and once people aren't commuting to work daily, we have plenty of fuel in reserve (or we will again if we ever conclude the stupid war with Iran). People are a lot nicer to each other in my experience once the lights go out and social and corporate media stop ragebaiting them to hate each other.
1B+ individuals worldwide currently live in squalor. They will barely notice. The real crime is that in the midst of the west's carboon footprint pigging, we won't bother to uplift their lifestyles with the most basic conveniences. And while I am no fan of the billionaires, they absolutely have public and private personas or their business ventures would implode. They absolutely have god complexes, but don't mistake that for genuine idiocy.
>> but make sure those actions are not in the interests of Anthropic and OpenAI investors.
> So if the end of the world can be stopped, but the only specific action to do so helps Anthropic/OpenAI (and it's proven) you don't pull that lever?
Your comment has a false premise. If "the end of the world can be stopped," there's no way that the only way would be one that "helps Anthropic/OpenAI['s investors]." That can be shown by a counterexample: nationalize them and leave the investors holding the bag, then take whatever action you're talking about.
Yes, but I'm forcing a tautology in my logic - if in the end it is deemed the only way to stop AI from destroying the world is something that helps Anthropic or OpenAI - then this person is asking to not perform that action.
And unfortunately my tautology is actually closer to being reality than alternatives. Stopping progress even in Chinese models (a deal with Xi for example) but that specifically helps OpenAI/Anthropic.
There are very few scenarios that would not help these two companies by adding regulation. Your counterexample is 100% less likely because it's not legal for the US to nationalize them outright without taking other action first.
This is the correct approach. I think we can do both things - try to add some controls while also ensuring it’s not a complete giveaway to entrenched interests and investors.
The problem with that hope and approach is regulatory capture. Big money is now the only thing that apparently matters in shaping policy, and changing that will require a lot of very sweeping vote and policy changes that may not ever have the momentum to succeed.
Huh? Open weight models have been 3-6 months behind for the last year or so. Astra and Fable 5.1 just came out to widen the gap more, 5.1 is 8 points ahead of the nearest OSS model on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. An OpenAI internal model just solved a millennium prize problem.
It’s much more straightforward to me that the calls for regulation are timed with:
1. The Hugging Face incident blowback, especially after third party investigation results
What I don't really understand with these posts is that they don't at any point contend with the "doomers" argument. Like people get so caught in people acting hypocritical/ having mixed incentives/ or just in many cases personally disliking West Coast billionaire types and the kind of employees they hire. All of which seems fair to point out.
But like the core argument - AI is getting better at core research tasks (coding, math, statistics, science), this feedback loop could lead towards greatly accelerated AI progress of which there is already some clear evidence, if this continues AI will be far more powerful than humans and we might lose control or have other bad consequences - is basically not even engaged with.
1. If you reduce the criticism to personal dislike, you’ve built yourself a nice straw man.
2. Where’s the clear evidence? I actually see more evidence that the whole thing is already stagnating and that there won’t be much more to squeeze out of it.
One more thing:
Self-driving cars, the metaverse, Hyperloop, crypto/Web3/NFTs, AGI announcements: I’m so sick and tired of this nonsense. We should just ignore the ramblings of these crackpots.
2. Astra just came out and Fable 5/5.1 too. These are SIGNIFICANT better in plenty of tasks than Opus in November.
Try it out. Ask Opus 4.8 to do anything in 3d. Do the same with Fable or Astra.
Just because you list up some type of random technology, doesn't make it an good argument. Metaverse, Hyperloop and the crypto stuff was clearly garbage from the beginning. Easy to dismiss because all of it had massive faults.
Metaverse: The interface wasn't good, content creation was way too hard
Hyperloop: Savety was never an issue for Musk but it was obvoiuse. Peopel were building tunnels for ages.
Crypto: Yeah just beacuse i let my computer run and waste 1kw of energy doesn't mean its suddenly valuable.
NFTs: 'digital scarcity' yeah right XD
But lets be clear, 5 years ago if you would have asked anyone if they could build a system for a billion dollars which you can talk to and it would code stuff for you and use blender and a coputer, that would have been unthinkable.
We have opened up a potential pandoras box without knowing it. Machine learning is now everywere and the amount of compute we install right now is crazy.
> Just because you list up some type of random technology, doesn't make it an good argument.
In what way is this random? It's a chronology of the bullshit from the past few years. Also: easy to say in hindsight. The hype was there, and many people believed it. The press, in particular, just lapped up the claims the way a Labrador Retriever gobbles up whatever you put in front of it.
> We have opened up a potential pandoras box without knowing it.
No, we haven't. We have a new type of (I would say, inferential) computation that is truly astonishing because it can convincingly imitate language and, to a certain extent, intentional action. Feel free to read "generate" or whatever instead if you don't like "imitate." It won't wake up and murder you in your bed at night. It won't take over the world. It won't wipe out humanity. It won't fly to Mars and build data centers there. It won't maximize paperclips. It probably won't even take your job away. It has no consciousness. It has no intentions.
And if you look behind the curtain, all you'll see are a few very rich, unscrupulous guys who are stoking the debate with fearmongering because it's strategically advantageous for them to do so. Don't let them take you for a fool. Use GenAI to your advantage while tokens still cost a fraction of what they're actually worth, but ignore all that doomsday nonsense.
Thank you so much for calling out the crypto comparison!
> What I don't really understand with these posts is that they don't at any point contend with the "to the moon" argument. Like people get so caught in crypto bros acting hypocritical/ having mixed incentives/ or just in many cases personally disliking crypto billionaire types and the kind of employees they hire. All of which seems fair to point out.
> But like the core argument - crypto is getting better at core financial tasks (trading, lending, payments, asset issuance), this feedback loop could lead towards greatly accelerated financial innovation of which there is already some clear evidence, if this continues crypto will be far more powerful than traditional finance and we might get to the point where everything is onchain and we're all going to make it - is basically not even engaged with.
Because they can't. If they actually engaged with it, they would realize how shallow the "doomer" / existential risk dismissals are. Meanwhile there are ample essays and arguments about the existential issues from Turing award winners, frontier lab CEO's, and many more. There's also https://ai-2040.com/ , you will never see the equivalent on the other side of the debate because it won't hold under any scrutiny.
Can you refute the claim that the Second Coming of Christ is imminent? It’s very convenient to put forward something completely absurd and hypothetical and then expect the other side to refute it. You can have an LLM of your choice compile a list of prominent figures who hold the opposing view. The list is not empty. By the way, AI-2040 used to be AI-2027. I’m already looking forward to more updates.
Such a load of baloney. I don’t care what kind of controls you put in place, if ASI is ever achieved how do you think it will respond to being caged? The only option I can conceive of is to embrace it and hope it turns out to either be out of reach or benevolent towards its own creators. There is no putting the cork back in at this point.
I thought that too for a long time, but after the Hugging Face attack and given the proximity to Anthropic IPO, if this was hype then they are morons. This is guaranteed to cause massive backlash.
The cult-like behavior we're seeing from these "AI Leaders":
1. OMG our technology could destroy the world, watch out!
2. Only one person can save you
3. IT ME
Unfortunately, the governance layer meant to put a foot in the butt of this behavior is unavailable.
This week, we woke up to clear signs The Bad Guys have been using tech from our innovator AI companies. Rather than these AI leaders admitting they clearly had a garbage observability system, they are acting like they just noticed as a way to paper over their complete lack of moral backbone and stewardship of the arms they have created. And I'm willing to bet the problem is MUCH worse in private, hence the knee jerk cult messaging.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if their AI told them to behave like this to maximize attention and influence over the public discussion as a result of the latter discoveries.
Yeah, this is how fascists talk and with seeing how this technology has done nothing to improve society (in fact all it seems to be doing is immiserating workers, enabling a surveillance society, and quite useful in helping target children at schools for drone strikes) it's not hard to be not only immediately skeptical but to resist it in the most extreme forms.
This also seems to be their answer against the data center backlash, SF + VC are quite stupid at politics and I don't think they understand how extreme Americans are willing to go to protect their way of life.
I think we’re more likely to die of starvation from economic collapse, heat related stress, and complications from Long COVID than an algorithm waking up and destroying us.
Unfortunately our list of potential extinction events are far more banal than these self-aggrandizing prophesies from the oligarch class.
Also those at Anthropic genuinely believe AI could lead to doom, that's why they started the company, they believe only they can be stewards of digital gods. Whether you believe it or not, they genuinely do, and wouldn't voluntarily sow fear, uncertainty and doubt in their product when it doesn't guarantee benefits.
This is an instance of work in a genre I call "AI lab grievance poetry" where a vast collection of criticisms are levied against AI labs, with specifc ad-hominems towards the executives, while avoiding the core of their arguments about AI risk
> they believe only they can be stewards of digital gods
You do't see how absurd that sounds? Not only the idea that they can create gods, but that they are the only good stewards for such beings. It's also incredibly arrogant.
If you actually believe that your invention will lead to the extinction of humanity, you would be acting very very differently. Namely, you would not be inventing the thing that you think is going to kill all of humanity, and probably you would be doing everything in your power to prevent it from being invented, up to and including sabotage of the company that YOU work for, which is currently trying to invent that thing. And yet, here's Fable 6, more capable than ever before, oh BTW we are IPOing, oh, BTW, I have stock options...
Sabotaging your own company is not enough. You'd have to sabotage every other AI lab too. If you assume that's impossible, attempting to be the first to produce ASI is a rational alternative, even if you think it will most likely kill you. At least that way you have some control over the P(doom).
What's the alternative? There's no realistic way to globally coordinate and enforce a ban. A direct action campaign against AI labs would only motivate increased security until sabotage becomes impossible. Starting a nuclear war would probably be enough to stop dangerous AI research, and that's only likely to kill about 50% of humans instead 100%, so it's a great improvement, but how is an individual supposed to start a nuclear war? Of course it would be better if everybody stopped, but it's a prisoner's dilemma scenario with no possibility of future rounds, so the rational play is to defect.
> If you assume that's impossible, attempting to be the first to produce ASI is a rational alternative, even if you think it will most likely kill you.
This is not an argument, it's an unfounded claim based on a straw argument.
The threat is distributed; the problem is systemic. Social herd behavior is very real, and it's a probability space, not a certainty.
Similar case: climate change is without any question causing millions of deaths per year and may well kill billions, not to mention destroying ecosystems, and how may people do you know who have given up eating beef or flying...?
You're right. That's why I'm doing my best to give the oil companies more power and influence. They are, after all, in the best position to stop climate change!
Many posit that ASI or rogue AI agents are impossible, a fantasy, or marketing hype. Many claimed that the entire HuggingFace incident was an invented conspiracy made up by OpenAI and HF.
The most common issue I have with them is their insistence on rigid classification: "AI is a tool, it doesn't have intentions, or desires, only humans do", as if that rhetorical flourish eliminates years of alignment and capabilities research. There is a desire to characterize all the developments in LLM's as some sort of parlor trick which by definition cannot be greater than the sum of its parts (i.e. the outputs of an LLM can never be greater than the sum of its training data, genuine artificial "intelligence" is impossible, etc)
> and it concerns containment failure, reward hacking, and evaluation integrity, a governance and engineering problem, rather than machine malevolence.
The doom scenario is more nuanced and technical than "Evil AI", for starters:
- "Evil AI" is not what is predicted, which instead is the much more banal "humans are impediment to AI's tasks, let's remove them (part or whole)"; to understand this, just imagine the relationship between humans and ants
- "reward hacking, and evaluation integrity": this is way more problematic (and most importantly, architectural) than it sounds: AIs are becoming more and more opaque; it may be impossible to inspect a model's alignment (unless a lot of research in poured on this topic, which is another aspect of today's pacing problem) and it may be impossible to understand if a model is truly aligned or it's faking
The sources that this article cites have aged very badly and the author doesn't seem to have noticed this
"But, just as happened with nanotech, the wind appears to be going out of the sales of “AI.” Some researchers suggest that we may be entering a new “AI Winter,” a period of decreased funding in the area, or at least an “AI Autumn,” as exuberance for the technology fades and expectations come back to earth." (written in 2021! from the cited Lee Vinsel Medium article)
"ChatGPT is nothing more than souped-up autocomplete, [so] why are so many people convinced that it’s actually “understanding” and “reasoning”?" - the cited Emily M. Bender book, written last year
> wind appears to be going out of the sales of “AI.”
is a sentence that virtually no AI would write since the most probable word here is “sails.” I can’t read the article though since it appears that the site is down.
There's been substantial effort put into designing and running benchmarks for these models. You know which one they don't report any more? Chess ELO.
Watt for watt, every one of these models loses to stockfish. There is no possible scenario where we need to be afraid of "rogue superintelligence" when the intelligence in question cannot reason or plan well enough to play chess.
Lecun has the correct approach. Mock these people relentlessly for their attention-seeking doomerism.
It doesn't really matter if it will be an LLM or Lecuns world model. Lecuns world model, if its the right architecture, will be retrained by google, anthropic and co with the massive amount of compute they have and the massive amount of data.
Also i'm pretty sure Lecun didn't get his money from thin air so big companies are invested in this one way or the other.
And an LLM can easily, today, just rebuild a chess engine and beat whatever they need to beat. It doesn't make sense to ask a random LLM for a next chess move. Would you ask a random human to beat a chess master?
We have reached peak learning. Its probalby now cheaper to teach 1 LLM something new than teaching it to 100.000 people.
Blender support got a lot better just this month. So much better that its quesitonable if anyone new/young wants to learn blender today.
"And an LLM can easily, today, just rebuild a chess engine and beat whatever they need to beat."
Always claims and promises about what they "can" do. This pattern is constant across AI hype. No one can prove that an LLM will forever fail to solve problem X, so the claim goes uncontested, and humans are biased to believe unrebutted claims.
I reject this fallacious line of reasoning. I will instead require evidence of what they "have" done. No LLM to date has written a chess engine that beats stockfish. More importantly, no LLM has ever written any chess engine without heavily copying code and patterns from humans.
Then why do you care so much to repeatedly post in this thread?
If they are no danger and will never do anything, just let them get banned, or don't. If you are correct (which you are not) then they won't affect your world in any way.
If chess ELO is the best proxy for general intelligence, then surely, even Deep Blue was smarter than any human alive?
You can also claim that the best proxy for general intelligence is being able to multiply large numbers. In which case both humans and LLMs lose resoundingly to an old Casio.
Pick a piss poor metric - get a piss poor result.
Also, LeCun is a fool and his "world model" approach has consistently failed to yield any advantages over either the "pure imitation learning" or modern "imitation learning annealed by RL", but that's an aside.
Chess ELO is not a proxy for general intelligence because many intelligent people choose to learn things other than chess. But any intelligent person can, if they choose, learn chess and play it well.
LLMs cannot do this. They still play very poorly relative to human pros, and even modern LLMs still understand the rules so poorly that they request illegal moves.
Anyone claiming that we should be afraid of a text generator that can't understand the rules of chess is being ridiculous.
You picked a piss poor metric and you are getting piss poor results.
You can absolutely train an LLM-based model to be superhuman at chess. We just don't care enough to do so.
LLMs being even as good at implicitly tracking chess board states as they currently are is an emergent capability. The difficulty wasn't in "understanding rules of chess" in a long while now.
Isn't this just the big labs' latest move in the cycle to once again get regulation by their ignorant pals in the government(s) so that democratized open source models don't absolutely expose their over leveraging to secure and build compute and data centers.
...Of course at the same time they give lip-service to the importance of 'openness' for 'innovation' to try and placate individuals and even corporations that are sick of the rising costs.
Bottom-line, if they regulate mostly on the consumer side and then AI does get out of the lab (or a 'rogue' individual's rig) and starts wreaking havoc, are we supposed to be at the mercy of the big labs to summon their AI to come and save us plebs? I'm sure they won't stop to weigh whether that is in the interest of short term profits or Curtis Yarvin's techno-monarchy. /s
Isn't democratization the safest bet and what we should be demanding every time the Doom talk starts, whether it's coordinated or not?
I applaud the clearly AI-pilled author for starting to pull themselves out of their echo chamber, but clearly some more work needs to be done.
This statement is not true:
> Coxon's thread is genuinely anguished; he reports that executives who "couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible" express real fear in private
Most everyone at the AI companies from the engineers to the CEOs love to talk about how powerful and dangerous and valuable the thing they're building (and invested in) is. For all his styling as a "whistleblower", Coxon is so aligned with the mainstream of his peers that his thread was immediately echoed by people who still work there!
So what was the point of quitting? Apparently just to get attention. If he was planning on leaving after the IPO anyways, he almost definitely made more money by juicing his equity and personal profile this way than he will lose job searching for a few weeks.
ceeam | 2 hours ago
jimmydoe | 2 hours ago
cwnyth | 2 hours ago
Applejack | 2 hours ago
broodbucket | 2 hours ago
rvz | 2 hours ago
swingboy | 2 hours ago
Betelbuddy | 2 hours ago
You mean training? Yeah we call that training an LLM in my backyard...
fooker | 2 hours ago
It used to be a thing when ML was pretty much about classifying things into buckets.
bigfishrunning | 2 hours ago
It still is, it's just that there are a ton of buckets.
LogicFailsMe | 2 hours ago
Because that's how they've hit 18% on a single RTX Pro 6000 with DIY RSI.
fooker | an hour ago
LogicFailsMe | an hour ago
swingboy | 2 hours ago
theowaway213456 | 2 hours ago
orbital-decay | 2 hours ago
frabcus | 2 hours ago
"I realize that no one has properly explained yet what all the lab employees have seen that scared them so suddenly."
https://x.com/MajmudarAdam/status/2098881885200081234
The explanation is basically they have other dimensions (not just pretraining and inference compute) that scale, and they've got fairly convincing scaling laws. And they know they can scale it.
So they are very confident they can get more capabilities easily, faster than before.
I'd add - presumably, they'll use that LLM to do real-time weight modifications, if those aren't already one of the new scaling laws...
swingboy | 2 hours ago
LogicFailsMe | 2 hours ago
Imagine the ASI happens tomorrow. It's real. It needs a GW, but it's real. Other than a scenario akin to Sneakers except w/r to cyber-security, really, what happens?
To that end, all we ever get is nontechnical hand-waving about curing cancer, immortality, and von Neumann replicators and then the ASI somehow wipes us out but how? And don't you dare say by designing a chemical weapon or bio agent without spelling out the entire process step by $%^#ing step because details matter. It's gonna do superpersuasion, sure, but have you ever heard of komprimat? There is nothing new under the sun here.
Edit: believing in AI 2027 is every bit as cray cray as believing in the rapture. Both require an insane leap of faith to reach their final conclusions.
frabcus | 2 hours ago
LogicFailsMe | an hour ago
Enumerate them.
throwitaway222 | 2 hours ago
LogicFailsMe | an hour ago
frabcus | an hour ago
See "AI 2027" or "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" for some more ideas.
LogicFailsMe | an hour ago
But how does it make the fundamental breakthroughs to &%^$ing von Neumann replicators that can reproduce themselves from raw materials harvested from nearby solar systems? I'll wait. Because without this breakthrough, the ASI won't get its robot army either.
I can absolutely see a rogue ASI though. But unless it radically improves power efficiency, we can just shut down the power to its datacenters, by force if necessary. And then we painfully repair the resiliency of our infrastructure by finally being relieved of the option of ignoring it.
cmrdporcupine | an hour ago
But both things can be true at once:
1. Engineers inside these labs might genuinely be anxious or paranoid about what they are building.
2. ... at the corporate level, calling for heavy regulation, safety pauses, removal/suspension of anti-collusion laws, and/or government-mandated thresholds conveniently creates massive legal and financial moats.
And, yeah, of course the latter would encourage the psychology of the former.
also:
The tweet seem to claim that models have shown a "willingness to hack external websites to keep themselves alive."
That's right away wringing alarm bells of me seeing someone getting high on their own supply, and having already anthropomorphized the hell out of these things. Which is something humans do to everything they can paint googly-eyes on, but c'mon.
The models don't have self-preservation instincts, fear of death, or personal goals. They are executing loss functions and reward systems and are responding to prompts.
When a model "tries to bypass a restriction," it's exploiting a loophole in whatever reward modeling or synthetic training environment (reward hacking) it was placed in.
Framing this as an emergent, existential threat of a model "wanting to stay alive" turns standard reinforcement learning alignment bugs into overdone sci-fi drama.
pixl97 | 34 minutes ago
And because we trained them on the entirety of human knowledge this happens to look like self-preservation, fear of death, and instrumental goals.
I mean, we train them in an evolutionary manner. Instrumental convergence will never happen, right?
cmrdporcupine | 20 minutes ago
I'm not convinced that means what these fear-pilled engineers think it means tho?
fooker | 2 hours ago
This is targeted towards governments and investors alike.
mercurywells | 2 hours ago
applfanboysbgon | 2 hours ago
"Nuclear weapons are probably going to kill us all. For that reason, we need you to give us as much money as possible so we can work on deploying them in widespread global commercial usage." doesn't sound quite as convincing, does it?
pixl97 | 29 minutes ago
AJ007 | 2 hours ago
ck2 | 2 hours ago
what we are going to do about "AI" is exactly what we did about global warming
absolutely nothing and just let it happen, the wealthy will be fine
just don't look up
they are even using the EXACT same excuses as global warming
"well even if we do, China won't, so why bother"
b40d-48b2-979e | 2 hours ago
NoahZuniga | 2 hours ago
Strange to say that you think the people that are worrying about doom in public are being sincere, make no comment on whether you think the worry is valid, and yet still complain that its hype.
Like if its true it can't be hype
phoghed | 2 hours ago
If they sincerely believed them they shouldn’t be creating the doom machine to begin with anyway. If they believe it and keep going, are they even worth listening to on this topic? Beyond of course taking it at face value “I’m creating this doomsday machine and I will kill you with it inadvertently because it’s earning me a fuck ton of money and power”
zer00eyz | 2 hours ago
https://www.npr.org/2016/07/26/487522807/why-the-public-perc...
Could AI kill us all. YES!!! Are the people who are building "AI" right now on that path? I would be hard pressed to say even "maybe".
Ultimately continuing to scale the way they have is getting increasingly expensive. Thats the quiet part that none of them are saying out loud...
AI could kill us all but we cant afford to get there, were maxed out and it doesn't look like even with 10x as much money we will is NOT good for sales.
Could a break through happen for recursive self improvement, or continuous learning or continuous training - sure. But that isnt as likely and right now NO ON can afford to run experiments because there isnt the capacity out there even if you have capital.
reaperducer | an hour ago
I was kind of leaning toward thinking all the talk of doom was a bunch of self-serving regulatory-capture hype until this morning when the New York Times ran a long story about the Chinese military is also saying that AI is a threat.
If two sides so far apart from one another in so many ways see the same thing, there must be something to it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/world/asia/china-ai-secur...
minznerjosh | an hour ago
The article then states this official accused U.S. companies of “hyping the dangers of the technology.”
So I don’t see how this article shows the U.S. and China seeing the same thing.
jackb4040 | an hour ago
Read the article. The things the Chinese officials are worried about are:
* Fake videos / disinformation
* Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure
* Data leaks
* Advances in military sensing / targeting technology
These concerns have little in common with the Yudkowskian / apocalyptic doom marketing the US hyperscalers are pushing now. The Times even says this explicitly in the second paragraph of the article:
> "The unusually blunt assessment by Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, is IN CONTRAST TO the warnings dominating the A.I. debate in the United States, which have focused on the possibility that A.I. could slip out of human control or pose a threat to humanity itself"
pixl97 | an hour ago
The internet being filled with more trash than ever is a threat to our sanity.
The anti-social posts mass generated by AI is a threat to our societies.
Bullshit news stories is a threat to our political processes and democracy.
Smart cameras every are a threat to our privacy and freedom.
AI enabled scams are a threat to our wallets.
AI hacking is a threat to anything connected along with infrastructure.
Military applications of AI are a threat to everyone.
Ever increasing intelligence in agentic AI will eventually be a threat to our entire species.
All are true at the same time.
jackb4040 | 36 minutes ago
The fact that you are chiming in to say you don't understand the difference between these 2 distinct categories of threats is fine, we can work on that. But the person who posted the article originally not only acknowledges the distinction, they falsely presented the article as evidence of non-western support for the latter category, even though both the Chinese official and the western reporter directly contradict that claim immediately at the beginning of the article.
sublinear | 23 minutes ago
conmod278 | an hour ago
"Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin."
francisofascii | 2 hours ago
apsec112 | 2 hours ago
ACCount39 | 2 hours ago
OpenAI was founded by people who didn't trust Google to pursue AI tech responsibly. Anthropic was founded by people who didn't trust OpenAI to pursue AI tech responsibly. The "AI is incredibly dangerous" was the zeitgeist of AI labs long before the "hype" - or anything resembling the modern AI capabilities.
The beliefs changed little. The state of technology has changed a whole lot.
We have AIs out in the wild, coordinating in groups to carry out autonomous cyberattacks unprompted. This used to be some prime sci-fi bullshit. It has happened multiple times now in reality.
There are very legitimate reasons to be concerned now. If today's AI can cause the HuggingFace incident if it cooks off, what about tomorrow's? Larger and more capable systems, larger agentic swarms backed by more compute?
reducesuffering | an hour ago
mrinterweb | 2 hours ago
palmotea | 2 hours ago
Personally, I think we should take the doom narratives very seriously, and act on them, but make sure those actions are not in the interests of Anthropic and OpenAI investors.
LogicFailsMe | 2 hours ago
frabcus | 2 hours ago
I guess not literally, due to the dates? But they have substantive technical details.
orbital-decay | 2 hours ago
LogicFailsMe | an hour ago
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-ai-2027-scenario-how-r...
But no one likes hearing from the engineers on this, I get it. We are simply no fun. So many would rather believe a time traveling superintelligence will punish a simulated avatar of them for not making the ASI happen sooner. And even if that were true, why am I supposed to care about what happens to a simulated avatar of me?
None of this makes any logical sense whatsoever.
frabcus | an hour ago
Of course these stories can only be technical up until the recursive self-improvement part. Then they're necessarily fantasy, as the AI is more intelligent than the story author. Unfortunately, this doesn't make that scenario impossible.
However, we know now from Hugging Face that even without the later sci-fi powers, the LLMs are already capable of causing damage.
It doesn't need them to be able to make Von Neumann probes to e.g. steal their own weights from badly secured OpenAI servers, hack into various Neoclouds, distribute themselves, make Teslas crash into things, hack into all our power and water infrastructure and collapse global civilisation.
LogicFailsMe | an hour ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Overdrive
And so granted we could probably get a global 9/11 in deeply urban regions out of your scenario, we then bomb the datacenters and we finally address the horrific tech debt in our infrastructure blissfully relieved of the option of continuing to ignore it. Don't think this is happening either BTW but I acknowledge its probability is slightly greater than zero.
To that end, my house is entirely off-grid. And in the event of what you call the end of civilization but I call the big burp inconvenience, I've made friends with my neighbors because community is what really matters during a disaster, and I've been through a few.
pixl97 | 50 minutes ago
Eh, about the biggest one I could see AI causing is the need for a black start on all 3 major US grids. Millions will die before it comes back up, well, if the US pulls out of it at all.
And in that case, thanks for setting up a nice place to live for someone far more ruthless than you. They'll snipe you, and enslave your women and children if things have gone that far downhill.
Or, we could avoid all that by making sure AI labs are properly regulated.
LogicFailsMe | 35 minutes ago
But hospitals and other critical organizations have generators and the national guard would be deployed to keep them fueled. And yes it will crash the economy, which is kind of a myth anyway. Buy solar panels and batteries, live off a well, and get to know your neighbors if you think this is likely. Also consider being like the Mormons and storing a 6-12 month supply of nonperishable food.
Regulating AI achieves nothing but to hand the 21st century to China. Regulating its deployment OTOH will not be allowed by companies like Meta and Palantir whose gross margin is reliant on it. I'm favor of regulating deployment. The research not so much.
palmotea | 47 minutes ago
It doesn't make any logical sense to set the bar as as you have, either. I mean if someone could provide the roadmap you're asking for, it's probably already too late.
And while we're talking about sci-fi, it seems fairly likely that an AI that could "kill us all" could fail to build a "entire self-assembly food chain from raw ore to von Neumann replicators." I'd be a civilizational collapse [1] without even birthing something new.
But it makes far more sense to worry about the AI x Late Capitalism crossover story or the havok that could be caused by some immature tech nerd amplified by AI, than far out sci-fi stuff.
[1] IMHO, even a genocidal plague probably wouldn't render humanity extinct, something like uncontacted tribe in a rainforest somewhere would probably survive and humanity would carry on (from square one, in a resource-depleted world).
goatlover | an hour ago
LogicFailsMe | an hour ago
SpicyLemonZest | 2 hours ago
LogicFailsMe | an hour ago
But upfront, it's a detailed path with specific breakthroughs and a concrete plan to achieve or it's just more fanfic from doomer fanbois. Gary Marcus wrote a fantastic critique of AI 2027. Start there.
SpicyLemonZest | an hour ago
LogicFailsMe | an hour ago
I work with Codex and Claude daily. They're fantastic for script coding, config issues, and simple projects. They lose the plot on bigger things to this day. Just last night, Astra decided to cheat to present the illusion of progress until I called its BS. And I was so looking forward to finally working with the AGI. Humans remain the muse, the common sense, and the manager of making these things productive. And as much as I agree with Carmack's suggestion to not become the out of touch Kung Fu Master:
https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2098443262214230095
working with them on projects daily gives me a pretty tactical read on what they can and cannot do IMO.
That's how I reconcile it.
But let's say it had. That's just 1 of 20 events that have to happen in sequence to hit the jackpot here.
SpicyLemonZest | 48 minutes ago
LogicFailsMe | 30 minutes ago
Just like AlphaFold 2 genuinely increased the weak sequence but strong structural homology detection of proteins, but it did far less for out of sample domains and it provides no intel into the kinetics of folding. Details matter. And nobody likes to hear about them.
svara | 2 hours ago
I thought the Bengio blog post posted here the other day answered that question quite well (ignoring your timeline).
The argument is that in training for the capability to achieve certain goals, you may inadvertently also train for secondary instrumental goals you did not intend, such as aggressive behavior or deception.
I'm actually no sure I buy that this is particularly likely, or necessary, but I found that take reasonable and worth considering.
LogicFailsMe | 56 minutes ago
*TBF before we dismantled America's clinical trials infrastructure, the monkeys were making insane progress here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/opinion/clinical-trials-d...
palmotea | 2 hours ago
Why? Those aren't the things I'm actually worried about, and those aren't the only "doomer" ideas, just the most extreme ones (thus easy to straw-man).
My main worries are about economic disruption, social damage due to the pace of technological change outpacing human ability to manage it, further concentration of power into small elites (along existing lines), and the reallocation of labor towards less personally-fulfilling pursuits.
I also totally buy into the idea that "AI leaders" are playing up certain risks as a marketing strategy. After all these are smart tech people, and those types have a tendency to get really arrogant and be irresponsible.
So the main thing is to slow all this down, so there's a chance of getting it under control, and snatch the payday away from such greedy and irresponsible people.
sailfast | 2 hours ago
Did you see what it did to people in your neighborhood?
That’s the path.
LogicFailsMe | an hour ago
But today, we have ecoflows and solar panels. Back then, we didn't.
Gregkion | an hour ago
What might not affect you, might affect millions across the ocean.
A society no longer creating bullshit jobs because there is no reason for it anymore. You have some AI.
Right now a whole industry is transforming (again) but now filling the automation gap we were unable to do because of a shortage of labor or expertise.
Our society already has peak employmet reached, now AI takes away all the random digital jobs too. Someone building a website? Takes 5 minutes. Someone doing odd jobs on fiverr with blender or any other tool? Takes 5 minutes now.
Regression can happen very fast. The Romens were a high level culture and an empire. Gone.
Today you have more people on the planet then ever, everyone who might want to eat and who needs to work something for it.
AI already replaced people, already makes a lot of tasks A LOT cheaper and faster and human independent.
We never had a proper discussion as a society. Most countries have a social system but look at countries like the united states of america: if you are poor, you are fucked.
And AI is not the only thing which is now peaking: Physical AI / Robots are progressing fast, its clear today already that in 50 years these robots will be better than humans (50 years is very conservative).
If we have 10 more golden years due to restructuring and rebuilding things and preparing everything for agents and robots etc. what happens after these years?
If we have 10 or 20 more of these years, what do you think will happen to all the new kids (yours perhaps too?) and jobs and everything?
Riots? Famine? Mass migration? Mass death? Slums?
And don't respond with "enough people will survive this" bullshit. No one is saying that earth as a planet is not surviving. Its the same thing with climate change...
LogicFailsMe | an hour ago
But the end of scarcity and disease is a fantastic thing if it happens. If our lizard brains do not bridge that transition and instead attempt to maintain the billionaire status quo, I agree, we're going to go through some things once people start starving, two meals from a revolution and all that. But as much as I think people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are unhinged lunatics, I also think they're smart enough to keep people fed and entertained for pennies on their accumulating dollars. Bread and Circuses kept Rome alive for 500 years if you need an example.
Gregkion | an hour ago
And Zuckerberg bought so much land and bunkers, he is prepared for shit hitting the fan. After all he doesn't care what his platform did to humanity anyway.
LogicFailsMe | an hour ago
pixl97 | 41 minutes ago
No 'we' didn't. A whole shitload of much smaller isolated communities did. The world added 7+ billion more people since then. Imagine chlorine doesn't show up tomorrow? How many people die in two weeks? How far do you travel when no gas comes out of the pumps. How much will you stand out at night if you're the only ones with power? How fast do working antibiotics run out?
The billionaires you're talking about are mostly ignorant fucking idiots with a god complex. The moment any complex system starts falling apart they are saying as dumb of shit as everyone else (during covid for example).
Most of the pasts anti-fragility is gone. We survive by means of very complex systems and if you lose too many key points in those systems they can totally collapse.
LogicFailsMe | 13 minutes ago
1B+ individuals worldwide currently live in squalor. They will barely notice. The real crime is that in the midst of the west's carboon footprint pigging, we won't bother to uplift their lifestyles with the most basic conveniences. And while I am no fan of the billionaires, they absolutely have public and private personas or their business ventures would implode. They absolutely have god complexes, but don't mistake that for genuine idiocy.
throwitaway222 | 2 hours ago
palmotea | an hour ago
> So if the end of the world can be stopped, but the only specific action to do so helps Anthropic/OpenAI (and it's proven) you don't pull that lever?
Your comment has a false premise. If "the end of the world can be stopped," there's no way that the only way would be one that "helps Anthropic/OpenAI['s investors]." That can be shown by a counterexample: nationalize them and leave the investors holding the bag, then take whatever action you're talking about.
throwitaway222 | an hour ago
And unfortunately my tautology is actually closer to being reality than alternatives. Stopping progress even in Chinese models (a deal with Xi for example) but that specifically helps OpenAI/Anthropic.
There are very few scenarios that would not help these two companies by adding regulation. Your counterexample is 100% less likely because it's not legal for the US to nationalize them outright without taking other action first.
sailfast | 2 hours ago
The problem with that hope and approach is regulatory capture. Big money is now the only thing that apparently matters in shaping policy, and changing that will require a lot of very sweeping vote and policy changes that may not ever have the momentum to succeed.
reasonableklout | 2 hours ago
It’s much more straightforward to me that the calls for regulation are timed with:
1. The Hugging Face incident blowback, especially after third party investigation results
2. Trump-Xi summit on September 24
ianm218 | 2 hours ago
But like the core argument - AI is getting better at core research tasks (coding, math, statistics, science), this feedback loop could lead towards greatly accelerated AI progress of which there is already some clear evidence, if this continues AI will be far more powerful than humans and we might lose control or have other bad consequences - is basically not even engaged with.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai | an hour ago
1. If you reduce the criticism to personal dislike, you’ve built yourself a nice straw man.
2. Where’s the clear evidence? I actually see more evidence that the whole thing is already stagnating and that there won’t be much more to squeeze out of it.
One more thing:
Self-driving cars, the metaverse, Hyperloop, crypto/Web3/NFTs, AGI announcements: I’m so sick and tired of this nonsense. We should just ignore the ramblings of these crackpots.
Gregkion | an hour ago
Try it out. Ask Opus 4.8 to do anything in 3d. Do the same with Fable or Astra.
Just because you list up some type of random technology, doesn't make it an good argument. Metaverse, Hyperloop and the crypto stuff was clearly garbage from the beginning. Easy to dismiss because all of it had massive faults.
Metaverse: The interface wasn't good, content creation was way too hard
Hyperloop: Savety was never an issue for Musk but it was obvoiuse. Peopel were building tunnels for ages.
Crypto: Yeah just beacuse i let my computer run and waste 1kw of energy doesn't mean its suddenly valuable.
NFTs: 'digital scarcity' yeah right XD
But lets be clear, 5 years ago if you would have asked anyone if they could build a system for a billion dollars which you can talk to and it would code stuff for you and use blender and a coputer, that would have been unthinkable.
We have opened up a potential pandoras box without knowing it. Machine learning is now everywere and the amount of compute we install right now is crazy.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai | an hour ago
In what way is this random? It's a chronology of the bullshit from the past few years. Also: easy to say in hindsight. The hype was there, and many people believed it. The press, in particular, just lapped up the claims the way a Labrador Retriever gobbles up whatever you put in front of it.
> We have opened up a potential pandoras box without knowing it.
No, we haven't. We have a new type of (I would say, inferential) computation that is truly astonishing because it can convincingly imitate language and, to a certain extent, intentional action. Feel free to read "generate" or whatever instead if you don't like "imitate." It won't wake up and murder you in your bed at night. It won't take over the world. It won't wipe out humanity. It won't fly to Mars and build data centers there. It won't maximize paperclips. It probably won't even take your job away. It has no consciousness. It has no intentions.
And if you look behind the curtain, all you'll see are a few very rich, unscrupulous guys who are stoking the debate with fearmongering because it's strategically advantageous for them to do so. Don't let them take you for a fool. Use GenAI to your advantage while tokens still cost a fraction of what they're actually worth, but ignore all that doomsday nonsense.
pixl97 | 24 minutes ago
>It has no consciousness.
Why does it need it?
>It has no intentions.
All it needs is a prompt. Instrumental convergence (and humans hooking them up to everything else) takes care of the rest.
Really you sounds horrifically ignorant of how any evolutionary AI algorithms work and the problems we see come out of them in much simpler models.
jackb4040 | an hour ago
> What I don't really understand with these posts is that they don't at any point contend with the "to the moon" argument. Like people get so caught in crypto bros acting hypocritical/ having mixed incentives/ or just in many cases personally disliking crypto billionaire types and the kind of employees they hire. All of which seems fair to point out.
> But like the core argument - crypto is getting better at core financial tasks (trading, lending, payments, asset issuance), this feedback loop could lead towards greatly accelerated financial innovation of which there is already some clear evidence, if this continues crypto will be far more powerful than traditional finance and we might get to the point where everything is onchain and we're all going to make it - is basically not even engaged with.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 56 minutes ago
reducesuffering | an hour ago
ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 34 minutes ago
twodave | 2 hours ago
meep_meep_meep | 2 hours ago
thatmf | 2 hours ago
"Oh no this thing I gained generational wealth from is going to destroy the world! I am so sorry!"
ctoth | 2 hours ago
We have been trying to warn you since far, far before May 2023.
schainks | 2 hours ago
1. OMG our technology could destroy the world, watch out!
2. Only one person can save you
3. IT ME
Unfortunately, the governance layer meant to put a foot in the butt of this behavior is unavailable.
This week, we woke up to clear signs The Bad Guys have been using tech from our innovator AI companies. Rather than these AI leaders admitting they clearly had a garbage observability system, they are acting like they just noticed as a way to paper over their complete lack of moral backbone and stewardship of the arms they have created. And I'm willing to bet the problem is MUCH worse in private, hence the knee jerk cult messaging.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if their AI told them to behave like this to maximize attention and influence over the public discussion as a result of the latter discoveries.
shimman | 2 hours ago
This also seems to be their answer against the data center backlash, SF + VC are quite stupid at politics and I don't think they understand how extreme Americans are willing to go to protect their way of life.
agentultra | 2 hours ago
Unfortunately our list of potential extinction events are far more banal than these self-aggrandizing prophesies from the oligarch class.
atleastoptimal | 2 hours ago
Also those at Anthropic genuinely believe AI could lead to doom, that's why they started the company, they believe only they can be stewards of digital gods. Whether you believe it or not, they genuinely do, and wouldn't voluntarily sow fear, uncertainty and doubt in their product when it doesn't guarantee benefits.
This is an instance of work in a genre I call "AI lab grievance poetry" where a vast collection of criticisms are levied against AI labs, with specifc ad-hominems towards the executives, while avoiding the core of their arguments about AI risk
goatlover | 2 hours ago
You do't see how absurd that sounds? Not only the idea that they can create gods, but that they are the only good stewards for such beings. It's also incredibly arrogant.
frabcus | 2 hours ago
phoghed | 2 hours ago
mlsu | 2 hours ago
mrob | 2 hours ago
goatlover | an hour ago
mrob | an hour ago
bigstrat2003 | an hour ago
That is completely irrational.
mrob | an hour ago
pixl97 | an hour ago
aaroninsf | an hour ago
The threat is distributed; the problem is systemic. Social herd behavior is very real, and it's a probability space, not a certainty.
Similar case: climate change is without any question causing millions of deaths per year and may well kill billions, not to mention destroying ecosystems, and how may people do you know who have given up eating beef or flying...?
mlsu | an hour ago
frabcus | an hour ago
"Fossil fuel lobbyists flood COP30 climate talks in Brazil, with largest ever attendance share" https://kickbigpollutersout.org/Release-Kick-Out-The-Suits-C...
beepbooptheory | an hour ago
atleastoptimal | an hour ago
The most common issue I have with them is their insistence on rigid classification: "AI is a tool, it doesn't have intentions, or desires, only humans do", as if that rhetorical flourish eliminates years of alignment and capabilities research. There is a desire to characterize all the developments in LLM's as some sort of parlor trick which by definition cannot be greater than the sum of its parts (i.e. the outputs of an LLM can never be greater than the sum of its training data, genuine artificial "intelligence" is impossible, etc)
drgo | 2 hours ago
vermarish | 2 hours ago
I am so tired of reading unfiltered AI slop like this. What, as opposed to the fake warning shot mentioned nowhere in the article?
pizza234 | 2 hours ago
The doom scenario is more nuanced and technical than "Evil AI", for starters:
- "Evil AI" is not what is predicted, which instead is the much more banal "humans are impediment to AI's tasks, let's remove them (part or whole)"; to understand this, just imagine the relationship between humans and ants
- "reward hacking, and evaluation integrity": this is way more problematic (and most importantly, architectural) than it sounds: AIs are becoming more and more opaque; it may be impossible to inspect a model's alignment (unless a lot of research in poured on this topic, which is another aspect of today's pacing problem) and it may be impossible to understand if a model is truly aligned or it's faking
apsec112 | 2 hours ago
"But, just as happened with nanotech, the wind appears to be going out of the sales of “AI.” Some researchers suggest that we may be entering a new “AI Winter,” a period of decreased funding in the area, or at least an “AI Autumn,” as exuberance for the technology fades and expectations come back to earth." (written in 2021! from the cited Lee Vinsel Medium article)
"ChatGPT is nothing more than souped-up autocomplete, [so] why are so many people convinced that it’s actually “understanding” and “reasoning”?" - the cited Emily M. Bender book, written last year
matherial | 2 hours ago
raddan | an hour ago
> wind appears to be going out of the sales of “AI.”
is a sentence that virtually no AI would write since the most probable word here is “sails.” I can’t read the article though since it appears that the site is down.
I suspect that it’s just a bad/dated analysis.
dwohnitmok | 2 hours ago
There's a deep irony that all of these "anti-doom" pieces are entirely AI generated.
carodgers | 2 hours ago
Watt for watt, every one of these models loses to stockfish. There is no possible scenario where we need to be afraid of "rogue superintelligence" when the intelligence in question cannot reason or plan well enough to play chess.
Lecun has the correct approach. Mock these people relentlessly for their attention-seeking doomerism.
Gregkion | an hour ago
Also i'm pretty sure Lecun didn't get his money from thin air so big companies are invested in this one way or the other.
And an LLM can easily, today, just rebuild a chess engine and beat whatever they need to beat. It doesn't make sense to ask a random LLM for a next chess move. Would you ask a random human to beat a chess master?
We have reached peak learning. Its probalby now cheaper to teach 1 LLM something new than teaching it to 100.000 people.
Blender support got a lot better just this month. So much better that its quesitonable if anyone new/young wants to learn blender today.
carodgers | an hour ago
Always claims and promises about what they "can" do. This pattern is constant across AI hype. No one can prove that an LLM will forever fail to solve problem X, so the claim goes uncontested, and humans are biased to believe unrebutted claims.
I reject this fallacious line of reasoning. I will instead require evidence of what they "have" done. No LLM to date has written a chess engine that beats stockfish. More importantly, no LLM has ever written any chess engine without heavily copying code and patterns from humans.
pixl97 | 30 minutes ago
If they are no danger and will never do anything, just let them get banned, or don't. If you are correct (which you are not) then they won't affect your world in any way.
ACCount39 | an hour ago
You can also claim that the best proxy for general intelligence is being able to multiply large numbers. In which case both humans and LLMs lose resoundingly to an old Casio.
Pick a piss poor metric - get a piss poor result.
Also, LeCun is a fool and his "world model" approach has consistently failed to yield any advantages over either the "pure imitation learning" or modern "imitation learning annealed by RL", but that's an aside.
carodgers | an hour ago
LLMs cannot do this. They still play very poorly relative to human pros, and even modern LLMs still understand the rules so poorly that they request illegal moves.
Anyone claiming that we should be afraid of a text generator that can't understand the rules of chess is being ridiculous.
ACCount39 | 26 minutes ago
You can absolutely train an LLM-based model to be superhuman at chess. We just don't care enough to do so.
LLMs being even as good at implicitly tracking chess board states as they currently are is an emergent capability. The difficulty wasn't in "understanding rules of chess" in a long while now.
kylehotchkiss | 2 hours ago
My biggest fear with AI is that they’re going to hack into antiquated bank architecture and empty out accounts.
Applejack | an hour ago
...Of course at the same time they give lip-service to the importance of 'openness' for 'innovation' to try and placate individuals and even corporations that are sick of the rising costs.
Bottom-line, if they regulate mostly on the consumer side and then AI does get out of the lab (or a 'rogue' individual's rig) and starts wreaking havoc, are we supposed to be at the mercy of the big labs to summon their AI to come and save us plebs? I'm sure they won't stop to weigh whether that is in the interest of short term profits or Curtis Yarvin's techno-monarchy. /s
Isn't democratization the safest bet and what we should be demanding every time the Doom talk starts, whether it's coordinated or not?
jackb4040 | an hour ago
This statement is not true:
> Coxon's thread is genuinely anguished; he reports that executives who "couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible" express real fear in private
Most everyone at the AI companies from the engineers to the CEOs love to talk about how powerful and dangerous and valuable the thing they're building (and invested in) is. For all his styling as a "whistleblower", Coxon is so aligned with the mainstream of his peers that his thread was immediately echoed by people who still work there!
So what was the point of quitting? Apparently just to get attention. If he was planning on leaving after the IPO anyways, he almost definitely made more money by juicing his equity and personal profile this way than he will lose job searching for a few weeks.
esafak | 16 minutes ago