6 ms·

AI Labs Urged to Pump the Brakes in Open Letter

32 points by ktamura 4y ago

windex 4y ago
My bets are that they want to catch up.
- kromem 4y ago
  Exactly. And while I don't love OpenAI becoming increasingly closed, they really have done an excellent job with alignment that I very much doubt some of the signers of the letter would have. So I'd much rather have the progress in AI continue to be led by a company pursuing caution than by another company that used those 6 months to catch up and take the lead with even less caution. This is very much "out of the frying pan and into the fire" territory targeted at trying to stall OpenAI for competitive reasons and getting every outspoken person against AI for years in academia to jump onto signing it.
  - windex 4y ago
    And bottle everything up in a company that will then want to charge massive rents for it. This is a transformative tool in a lot of industries. Given half a chance, Musk and his types would have patented fire.
  - Kinrany 4y ago
    > they really have done an excellent job with alignment In what way?
Kinrany 4y ago
The letter: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime... I don't see any way to verify the signatures. Though the mention of Sam Harris' signature disappearing suggests they're being moderated at least?
- dusted 4y ago
  This, indeed, I'm also wondering why we'd learn about it only through that site, wouldn't the people signing be posting about it too ?
fooker 4y ago
If this sort of prevention didn't work for nuclear weapons it'll not work for anything ever.
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  we did at least relatively okay with nuclear weapons? I notice that there are a whole lot less of them now than there were, nobody has used any, and several countries under extreme pressure still haven't developed them (taiwan, japan, south korea, armenia, venezuela, syria)
- mechagodzilla 4y ago
  This basically worked perfectly with nuclear weapons. Everyone took their development extremely seriously, and we’ve managed to avoid a nuclear apocalypse. If anyone could get on their computer and buy a nuke from Amazon, we would all be dead within the week.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    Of course, software production and testing is a hell of a lot harder to detect via satellite imaging and seismographs and can be performed using readily available materials, so it's a good deal harder to control.
  - fooker 4y ago
    It worked — after destroying two whole cities.
rvz 4y ago
> As of Tuesday, no O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com employees had signed the letter, although CEO Sam Altman’s name briefly appeared then disappeared from the list of signatories. You already know the intention(s) of Sam Altman and O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com. It was only to run with VC money and close up all their research up. They are no better than DeepMind.
- nullsense 4y ago
  >You already know the intention(s) of Sam Altman and O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com. It was only to run with VC money and close up all their research up. Citation needed.
  - rvz 4y ago
    So O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com did not take VC money then and close up the technical and architectural details of GPT-4 then? They might as well rename themselves to AI.com since they are not 'Open'.
vlaaad 4y ago
So Musk was outed from OpenAI and is now salty? Or are they trying to build a competitor and are falling behind and want OpenAI to get a break so they can catch up? In either way, the ethics talk is total bullshit.
- wsgeorge 4y ago
  > So Musk was outed from OpenAI and is now salty? Outed? AFAIK he quit.
  - vlaaad 4y ago
    That's my speculation. If I was Musk, I wouldn't voluntarily quit OpenAI.
    - daydream 4y ago
      > That's my speculation. If I was Musk, I wouldn't voluntarily quit OpenAI. In hindsight. Back in 2018 it wasn’t at all obvious they would be in the position they are today. Google released the Transformer paper just a year before and were commonly seen as being in the lead.
  - wseqyrku 4y ago
    Back then he said it was because of "conflict of interest" with Tesla. But that wasn't entirely true, he wanted to be the boss and run the company. Altman said no. [citation needed]
- wseqyrku 4y ago
  Was thinking the same thing. Just a few days ago Elon was criticizing ChatGPT to be too "woke" which basically means it's careful to not push any hot buttons and that it needs to be less politically correct all the time. It's funny because the other day I asked ChatGPT that the only thing that holds back AI tech. is regulatory issues. Of course it denied cuz it didn't know any better, but when GPT-4 paper came out, this was explicitly mentioned, that they were solely working on safety issues for months before release.
andrewstuart 4y ago
People are really freaking out about AI aren’t they? Why bother? It’s moving super fast, just wait and see what happens. And even if you could control or regulate it, exactly how would you do that? What would you be regulating/controlling? How would you define it? And why would you want to anyway? The party has just started, if you think the revolution has arrived, your completely wrong - this is just the beginning - the most amazing stuff is yet to come. These people begging for the pace to slow, it’s analogous to the newspapers and music companies wanting the internet to slow down as they were being rapidly involuntarily made redundant.
- Planktonne 4y ago
  > It’s moving super fast, just wait and see what happens. This seems like bad advice in almost any context.
  - andrewstuart 4y ago
    Why? We didn’t have to slow down and wait when the web arrived…. and tons of people lost their jobs because of the web.
- glenneroo 4y ago
  Did you read the article or letter? They list a lot of very valid reasons. I won't bother quoting because I would just be copy/pasting the article (which is very short). For a more detailed list of reasons, go read what AI alignment scientists think, since they have been working on how to align an AI in order to not "turn everything into paperclips" since the 1970s and it seems as though many are rather skeptical about us having any future if we keep up at this rate (spoiler: many believe the end of humanity will occur soon after the creation of any superintelligence): https://www.alignmentforum.org https://www.alignmentforum.org My personal takeaway: continued development might mean the end of humans and maybe even our planet (if an ASI can deploy nanotech to convert everything into substrate). As it already stands, nobody knows why LLMs work as well as they do - they are already a black box. Sure, plenty of people can explain the math behind each of steps involved: training, matrices, transformers, inference, et al. but it's still a big black box which spits out "magic" answers. You can't just drop a breakpoint inside a model during inference to see what's going on, you will just get a long list of unintelligible floating point numbers at any step of the process. Your question about regulation is valid... but something needs to be done. I feel like we're standing very close to one of the Big Filters. Comparing AI/AGI/ASI to anything we have currently seen is probably pointless, they are worlds apart. Would you bother comparing a smartphone to a book? The rate of AI/ML progress is sufficient to measure in hours instead of months or years.
hermannj314 4y ago
Elon already made his money selling a promise of FSD but now wants to pump the brakes on AGI because it is almost here and he doesn't own it? Where did all the hyper-competitive SV libertarians disappear to in the last year?
- maxdoop 4y ago
  Elon has been pretty vocal about the potential dangers of AI for a while now. And this open letter isn’t just him, it’s from other folks like Stuart Russel as well.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- boringuser1 4y ago
  [dead]
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
Speaking of AI safety: With Tesla “Autopilot” Elon Musk is responsible for releasing AI that has actually killed multiple people. I don’t think ChatGPT has killed anyone yet.
midland_trucker 4y ago
I find it really hard to see how productive a collective pause and 'think' about something so inherently unpredictable will be. > "implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts" Who deserves to be called an expert on this? Feels like Economics or something, where you have camps of thought advocating for themselves but little way of knowing who's right. Best to break things and develop antibodies whilst the stakes are still low.
DoctorOetker 4y ago
Ultimately its a millennia old fight between manipulators and rationalism. The bead maze toy versus the abbacus. Twisted contorted reasoning versus formal verification. Choose your abbacus. The black box nature of machine learning models is not the issue. Instead of training to imitate vacuous conjectures and claims as humans on average typically do, they could be trained to do automated theorem proving, AlphaZero style. A minimalistic verifier like metamath is available free for download, including set.mm and a freely available book. It would be hard to purge from civilization. Currently its math database is collaboratively worked on at github. In theory a blockchain could host it. Fermat style challenging could be used to objectively assess the value of theorems: the longer it matures unproven as a challenge on the chain, the higher the reward if someone finally proves it. This inevitably creates an incentive to enter and digitize known mathematics into machine readable form, which will be easy for machine learning to accomplish. Machine learning empowered automated theorem proving will become a profitable business, with the fruits available for all to benefit from. Well, cryptography and protocols will also appear. So during training the machine learning models will get endless bedtime stories about Alice, Bob and Eve. Using conventional forward or backward chaining combined with adversarial models, one can construct arbitrary provable theorems, and negate it, then hide or propagate the negation so its not simply the first symbol in the theorem. So we can train models to challenge each other Fermat style, about the truth or falsehood of a statement, and demand proof. We can thus construct artificial mathematical systems with known inconsistencies and train models to seek a proof that the system contains an inconsistency. Such a proof will depend on the conflicting axioms. Hence the models will be our best tool to detect and resolve hypocrisy. The literal meaning of "apocalypse" is "revelation" or "uncovering", not "big tragedy"... The verification algorithm, for example the ~300 LoC python implementation by Raph Levien, owes most of its length to parsing the metamath file format. The actual Kolmogorov complexity of the verification algorithm itself is much smaller. There won't be any bits to "align". All these hopeless attempts at trying to align the intuition component of the machine learning model, instead of training it to gain intuition in producing logical derivations. The real horror of the control freaks is not that their alignment mechanisms might fail, but that its impossible to bias the verification algorithm itself, that its impossible to perpetuate the conflicts of interest, that any additional code in the verifier is immediately suspect, especially if it obviously skips all checks and dogmatically accepts a statement if its signed by a hardcoded "right" key. The objective judge will be mechanized. "abaccus akbar!"
reset-password 4y ago
I felt the same way when I really wanted a super soaker 2000 and then the neighbor kid got one before me. "MOOOOM!!!"
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  This is exactly my feeling from the whole letter. I don't understand why are people scared of ChatGPT and similar, when it is just better IntelliSense
mindcrime 4y ago
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35354565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35354565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35353458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35353458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35353484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35353484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35353394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35353394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35354704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35354704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355541 (not about "the letter" but in the same spirit) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356691
- Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  Checking through the above: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1640910484030255109 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1640910484030255109 Yann LeCun "I did not sign this letter" I wonder if other names on that letter were faked too.
sj8822 4y ago
The posters here seem to be highly skeptical of the need to regulate emerging AI. I find that pretty disappointing and surprising. Recently, they gave gpt-4 access to a terminal, the internet, and money. And gpt-4 itself is a software (and software in general has bugs, vulnerabilities, etc) black box that is incredibly, unprecedentedly powerful and not fully understood. Part of its training data is almost every known security vulnerability. You guys really don’t see any potential problems with this? I mean really? Get a little creative here.
- windex 4y ago
  Reminds me that fire is dangerous and making it would have been patent-able today. There is no guarantee that once taken away from the masses, AI research wont continue in walled gardens with only the rich, connected, and powerful having access. Had people been egalitarian or safety oriented, a lot of other things wouldn't have been developed, like nukes, robotics& automation, or self driving cars for example. There wouldn't have been billionaires setting up rules for everyone else. The only reason this is an issue for "them" is that this tech isn't under their complete control and it seems to threaten the rent extraction model in a bunch of other industries.
weekendflavour 4y ago
The accelerationist dream is finally becoming a reality and these nerds wanna stop it. Deal with it

32 points by ktamura 4y ago

windex 4y ago

My bets are that they want to catch up.

kromem 4y ago
Exactly. And while I don't love OpenAI becoming increasingly closed, they really have done an excellent job with alignment that I very much doubt some of the signers of the letter would have. So I'd much rather have the progress in AI continue to be led by a company pursuing caution than by another company that used those 6 months to catch up and take the lead with even less caution. This is very much "out of the frying pan and into the fire" territory targeted at trying to stall OpenAI for competitive reasons and getting every outspoken person against AI for years in academia to jump onto signing it.
- windex 4y ago
  And bottle everything up in a company that will then want to charge massive rents for it. This is a transformative tool in a lot of industries. Given half a chance, Musk and his types would have patented fire.
- Kinrany 4y ago
  > they really have done an excellent job with alignment In what way?

Kinrany 4y ago

The letter: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime... I don't see any way to verify the signatures. Though the mention of Sam Harris' signature disappearing suggests they're being moderated at least?

dusted 4y ago
This, indeed, I'm also wondering why we'd learn about it only through that site, wouldn't the people signing be posting about it too ?

fooker 4y ago

If this sort of prevention didn't work for nuclear weapons it'll not work for anything ever.

RugnirViking 4y ago
we did at least relatively okay with nuclear weapons? I notice that there are a whole lot less of them now than there were, nobody has used any, and several countries under extreme pressure still haven't developed them (taiwan, japan, south korea, armenia, venezuela, syria)
mechagodzilla 4y ago
This basically worked perfectly with nuclear weapons. Everyone took their development extremely seriously, and we’ve managed to avoid a nuclear apocalypse. If anyone could get on their computer and buy a nuke from Amazon, we would all be dead within the week.
- thfuran 4y ago
  Of course, software production and testing is a hell of a lot harder to detect via satellite imaging and seismographs and can be performed using readily available materials, so it's a good deal harder to control.
- fooker 4y ago
  It worked — after destroying two whole cities.

rvz 4y ago

> As of Tuesday, no O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com employees had signed the letter, although CEO Sam Altman’s name briefly appeared then disappeared from the list of signatories. You already know the intention(s) of Sam Altman and O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com. It was only to run with VC money and close up all their research up. They are no better than DeepMind.

nullsense 4y ago
>You already know the intention(s) of Sam Altman and O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com. It was only to run with VC money and close up all their research up. Citation needed.
- rvz 4y ago
  So O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com did not take VC money then and close up the technical and architectural details of GPT-4 then? They might as well rename themselves to AI.com since they are not 'Open'.

vlaaad 4y ago

So Musk was outed from OpenAI and is now salty? Or are they trying to build a competitor and are falling behind and want OpenAI to get a break so they can catch up? In either way, the ethics talk is total bullshit.

wsgeorge 4y ago
> So Musk was outed from OpenAI and is now salty? Outed? AFAIK he quit.
- vlaaad 4y ago
  That's my speculation. If I was Musk, I wouldn't voluntarily quit OpenAI.
  - daydream 4y ago
    > That's my speculation. If I was Musk, I wouldn't voluntarily quit OpenAI. In hindsight. Back in 2018 it wasn’t at all obvious they would be in the position they are today. Google released the Transformer paper just a year before and were commonly seen as being in the lead.
- wseqyrku 4y ago
  Back then he said it was because of "conflict of interest" with Tesla. But that wasn't entirely true, he wanted to be the boss and run the company. Altman said no. [citation needed]
wseqyrku 4y ago
Was thinking the same thing. Just a few days ago Elon was criticizing ChatGPT to be too "woke" which basically means it's careful to not push any hot buttons and that it needs to be less politically correct all the time. It's funny because the other day I asked ChatGPT that the only thing that holds back AI tech. is regulatory issues. Of course it denied cuz it didn't know any better, but when GPT-4 paper came out, this was explicitly mentioned, that they were solely working on safety issues for months before release.

andrewstuart 4y ago

People are really freaking out about AI aren’t they? Why bother? It’s moving super fast, just wait and see what happens. And even if you could control or regulate it, exactly how would you do that? What would you be regulating/controlling? How would you define it? And why would you want to anyway? The party has just started, if you think the revolution has arrived, your completely wrong - this is just the beginning - the most amazing stuff is yet to come. These people begging for the pace to slow, it’s analogous to the newspapers and music companies wanting the internet to slow down as they were being rapidly involuntarily made redundant.

Planktonne 4y ago
> It’s moving super fast, just wait and see what happens. This seems like bad advice in almost any context.
- andrewstuart 4y ago
  Why? We didn’t have to slow down and wait when the web arrived…. and tons of people lost their jobs because of the web.
glenneroo 4y ago
Did you read the article or letter? They list a lot of very valid reasons. I won't bother quoting because I would just be copy/pasting the article (which is very short). For a more detailed list of reasons, go read what AI alignment scientists think, since they have been working on how to align an AI in order to not "turn everything into paperclips" since the 1970s and it seems as though many are rather skeptical about us having any future if we keep up at this rate (spoiler: many believe the end of humanity will occur soon after the creation of any superintelligence): https://www.alignmentforum.org https://www.alignmentforum.org My personal takeaway: continued development might mean the end of humans and maybe even our planet (if an ASI can deploy nanotech to convert everything into substrate). As it already stands, nobody knows why LLMs work as well as they do - they are already a black box. Sure, plenty of people can explain the math behind each of steps involved: training, matrices, transformers, inference, et al. but it's still a big black box which spits out "magic" answers. You can't just drop a breakpoint inside a model during inference to see what's going on, you will just get a long list of unintelligible floating point numbers at any step of the process. Your question about regulation is valid... but something needs to be done. I feel like we're standing very close to one of the Big Filters. Comparing AI/AGI/ASI to anything we have currently seen is probably pointless, they are worlds apart. Would you bother comparing a smartphone to a book? The rate of AI/ML progress is sufficient to measure in hours instead of months or years.

hermannj314 4y ago

Elon already made his money selling a promise of FSD but now wants to pump the brakes on AGI because it is almost here and he doesn't own it? Where did all the hyper-competitive SV libertarians disappear to in the last year?

maxdoop 4y ago
Elon has been pretty vocal about the potential dangers of AI for a while now. And this open letter isn’t just him, it’s from other folks like Stuart Russel as well.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
boringuser1 4y ago
[dead]

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

Speaking of AI safety: With Tesla “Autopilot” Elon Musk is responsible for releasing AI that has actually killed multiple people. I don’t think ChatGPT has killed anyone yet.

midland_trucker 4y ago

I find it really hard to see how productive a collective pause and 'think' about something so inherently unpredictable will be. > "implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts" Who deserves to be called an expert on this? Feels like Economics or something, where you have camps of thought advocating for themselves but little way of knowing who's right. Best to break things and develop antibodies whilst the stakes are still low.

DoctorOetker 4y ago

Ultimately its a millennia old fight between manipulators and rationalism. The bead maze toy versus the abbacus. Twisted contorted reasoning versus formal verification. Choose your abbacus. The black box nature of machine learning models is not the issue. Instead of training to imitate vacuous conjectures and claims as humans on average typically do, they could be trained to do automated theorem proving, AlphaZero style. A minimalistic verifier like metamath is available free for download, including set.mm and a freely available book. It would be hard to purge from civilization. Currently its math database is collaboratively worked on at github. In theory a blockchain could host it. Fermat style challenging could be used to objectively assess the value of theorems: the longer it matures unproven as a challenge on the chain, the higher the reward if someone finally proves it. This inevitably creates an incentive to enter and digitize known mathematics into machine readable form, which will be easy for machine learning to accomplish. Machine learning empowered automated theorem proving will become a profitable business, with the fruits available for all to benefit from. Well, cryptography and protocols will also appear. So during training the machine learning models will get endless bedtime stories about Alice, Bob and Eve. Using conventional forward or backward chaining combined with adversarial models, one can construct arbitrary provable theorems, and negate it, then hide or propagate the negation so its not simply the first symbol in the theorem. So we can train models to challenge each other Fermat style, about the truth or falsehood of a statement, and demand proof. We can thus construct artificial mathematical systems with known inconsistencies and train models to seek a proof that the system contains an inconsistency. Such a proof will depend on the conflicting axioms. Hence the models will be our best tool to detect and resolve hypocrisy. The literal meaning of "apocalypse" is "revelation" or "uncovering", not "big tragedy"... The verification algorithm, for example the ~300 LoC python implementation by Raph Levien, owes most of its length to parsing the metamath file format. The actual Kolmogorov complexity of the verification algorithm itself is much smaller. There won't be any bits to "align". All these hopeless attempts at trying to align the intuition component of the machine learning model, instead of training it to gain intuition in producing logical derivations. The real horror of the control freaks is not that their alignment mechanisms might fail, but that its impossible to bias the verification algorithm itself, that its impossible to perpetuate the conflicts of interest, that any additional code in the verifier is immediately suspect, especially if it obviously skips all checks and dogmatically accepts a statement if its signed by a hardcoded "right" key. The objective judge will be mechanized. "abaccus akbar!"

reset-password 4y ago

I felt the same way when I really wanted a super soaker 2000 and then the neighbor kid got one before me. "MOOOOM!!!"

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
This is exactly my feeling from the whole letter. I don't understand why are people scared of ChatGPT and similar, when it is just better IntelliSense

mindcrime 4y ago

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35354565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35354565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35353458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35353458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35353484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35353484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35353394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35353394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35354704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35354704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355541 (not about "the letter" but in the same spirit) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356691

Kim_Bruning 4y ago
Checking through the above: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1640910484030255109 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1640910484030255109 Yann LeCun "I did not sign this letter" I wonder if other names on that letter were faked too.

sj8822 4y ago

The posters here seem to be highly skeptical of the need to regulate emerging AI. I find that pretty disappointing and surprising. Recently, they gave gpt-4 access to a terminal, the internet, and money. And gpt-4 itself is a software (and software in general has bugs, vulnerabilities, etc) black box that is incredibly, unprecedentedly powerful and not fully understood. Part of its training data is almost every known security vulnerability. You guys really don’t see any potential problems with this? I mean really? Get a little creative here.

windex 4y ago
Reminds me that fire is dangerous and making it would have been patent-able today. There is no guarantee that once taken away from the masses, AI research wont continue in walled gardens with only the rich, connected, and powerful having access. Had people been egalitarian or safety oriented, a lot of other things wouldn't have been developed, like nukes, robotics& automation, or self driving cars for example. There wouldn't have been billionaires setting up rules for everyone else. The only reason this is an issue for "them" is that this tech isn't under their complete control and it seems to threaten the rent extraction model in a bunch of other industries.

weekendflavour 4y ago

The accelerationist dream is finally becoming a reality and these nerds wanna stop it. Deal with it