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Palantir CEO Rejects Calls to Pause AI Development
- neilv 3y agoTo Palantir's credit, at least they're objecting publicly. I assume many parties will be pursuing pushing the envelope on LLM training (and sometimes deployment) regardless of regulations/pledges/treaties.
- quenix 3y agoCEO of what again?
- seattle_spring 3y agoPalantir
- sho_hn 3y agoA weird military contractor with one of the most perculiar internet cult followings of any company (seriously - if you thought Tesla fans were a bit much, check out the Palantir crowd) who believe it's the next big thing in tech despite consistently performing ... okay. Big overlap with the WSB-alike social media investment community.
- hammock 3y agoThe F-35 performs … okay. That doesn’t mean I would want to go up against it in a fight
- pavlov 3y agoNobody pretends Lockheed Martin is the next Tesla and Nvidia. Palantir fans do.
- ben_w 3y agoI wouldn't want to go up against a Spitfire, but donating some to Ukraine would probably be considered rude rather than helpful. (Although, given how Russia is doing, I wouldn't be surprised if a Spitfire won a few battles…)
- sho_hn 3y agoIt's SAP-style software with a slightly prettier UI, not a cool jetfighter. Your analogy was a perfect example, though.
- activiation 3y agoPausing AI is like pausing the economy... Countries that don't pause it will be at an advantage.
- newsnotfound 3y agoPalantir CEO Alex Karp has rejected calls to pause the development of artificial intelligence (AI), stating that it is only those with “no products” who want a pause. Karp believes that the West currently holds key commercial and military advantages in AI and should not relinquish them.
- imiric 3y ago> Karp believes that the West currently holds key commercial and military advantages in AI and should not relinquish them. Delusional take, considering the East holds the AI advantage.
- bbor 3y agoVery curious to hear your reasoning!
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y agoI wold scarcely call it 'reasoning', it's closer to 'wild guessing' I think 'the east' has working multi-language LLMs, but the west's version doesn't quite perform as well with multiple languages
- imiric 3y agoI'm mostly trolling to stir the pot and see HN's response, and you don't disappoint. :) But since we're all speculating here, if I had to place my money on who will come out on top with AI, it would be the East. And by East, I specifically mean China. While the West is scrambling to limit the pace of AI development, no such regulation exists in China. There have certainly been regulations to limit the power of Chinese companies in the past few years, but ultimately the shot caller is the CCP. An autocracy has more power and influence to direct its resources in a single direction much more efficiently than any democratic government. Then there's the manufacturing side. The West does still control the most advanced chip fabrication technologies, but China is quickly ramping up development with results that rival those of TSMC/ASML[1]. If any country can be self-sufficient with chip fabrication, it's China. There's only so much harm US sanctions can do to a self-sufficient country. [1]: https://thediplomat.com/2022/08/chinas-semiconductor-breakthrough/ https://thediplomat.com/2022/08/chinas-semiconductor-breakth...
- _xivi 3y agoNo one who advocate "pausing AI development" see Palantir as much of a threat anyway
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hammock 3y agoPalantir is one of the AIs that’s more likely going to go into kill drones, etc so in that sense it is a threat
- alephnerd 3y agoWrong company. That's Anduril. Palantir is mostly in the analytics, ingest, and business intelligence space. That said I think they are making an AI Platform of sorts, but it's not that impressive.
- lagniappe 3y agoAnduril is hiring, for anybody looking, there are lots of positions all over the globe, all skillsets - https://jobs.lever.co/anduril/ https://jobs.lever.co/anduril/ edit: there were some interesting responses, but it seems HN has pruned the entire comment chain. i'd like to encourage others to consider whether censorship is necessary in adult spaces, especially HN - i did not ask to be insulated from criticism. critical comments are a chance to have a healthy discourse. for what it's worth, to answer the person who asked me what it feels like to be a murderer, since their comment didn't deserve to be censored - i don't feel like a murderer. this is my first time even hearing about anduril, but i did notice that there is a whole spectrum of jobs open on their page and it felt right to pass that on. given that we're all adults here, capable of self moderating our own emotions, im not impressed that the comment chain was removed, and am hoping to interpret this in the most charitable way possible: that it may have been an automated measure responsible.
- Nullabillity 3y ago
- hudon 3y agoThis is missing a key argument from the AI-cautious, which is that we shouldn't "pause AI development", but rather "pause public deployment". The case for only pausing the public deployment solves the "China problem" because we could continue development. On top of that, it would be harder for China to fast-follow if there isn't any public deployment of what is being researched and built. edit: I'm realizing there may be different classes of people who want to regulate AI in some capacity. I'm basing myself off of this train of thought from the Center for Humane Technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ
- sebzim4500 3y agoI think most AI doomers (I don't mean the term as an insult) think that would be worse than the status quo. The people who think that the biggest risk of AI is that it won't hire black people or something would probably love the idea, though.
- whimsicalism 3y agoI don't think you are accurately representing the views of the 'doomers' in the sense that it is much more about development
- hudon 3y agoMaybe we're not talking about the same people, then. I am repeating almost verbatim what the folks at the Centre for Humane Technology say here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ
- whimsicalism 3y agoYeah, briefly perusing the founders wiki page, I perceive this as standard, east coast chattering class non-profit take on social media (fake news, it’s hurting our kids), but the AI pause people are coming from a considerably different perspective.
- spiderice 3y ago
- 0y 3y agoarchive link https://web.archive.org/web/20230610150420/https://newsnotfound.com/palantir-ceo-rejects-calls-to-pause-ai-development-amid-global-debate/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230610150420/https://newsnotfo...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mrits 3y agoI find it much more likely we will be wiped out by weaponized biology long before AI becomes a threat. Though I'm pretty surprised we haven't already killed ourselves from it.
- agentultra 3y agoThe easiest thing we can do to destroy ourselves is to continue on as we are without changing our use of fossil fuels, concrete, farming practices, transportation, etc. The mass extinction combined with a 2+C world will kill enough of us fast enough that most of these imagined problems probably won’t be a threat. Who will care about killer robots when feeding ourselves, getting clean water, and finding clean air will be a constant challenge?
- ben_w 3y agoEasiest? Perhaps. Certainly the default if nothing else were to happen. But between PV, vat-grown meat, the fact other edibles like Quorn and yeast and Spirulina are on old-news vat-grown foods, etc. I'm focussing most of my attention on the killer robots that want to maximise shareholder value by ${insert any of a bajillion examples of how almost any goal expressed in natural language has a literal interpretation that's catastrophically bad}.
- agentultra 3y agoThe interlocutor here in this scenario isn’t “AI,” it is, as always, unfettered capitalism. I’m all down for regulation and forcing AI companies, as the others, to pay for the externalities the enforce on us. It isn’t a rogue language model that it suddenly going to brute force it’s way to sentience and kill us all; it’s billionaire tech companies with profit motivations. That they can point the finger to a computer and say, “AI did it and you didn’t listen to us when we tried to warn you,” is some fabulously weird post-capitalism.
- ben_w 3y ago> The interlocutor here in this scenario isn’t “AI,” it is, as always, unfettered capitalism. One of them is. AI also enables every conversation to be transcribed and indexed in a way that would make the Stasi envious. This is because evil isn't limited to fat-cats twirling moustaches — such villains are just the easy-to-spot examples in the modern world because the big scary Communists fell on their faces decades ago. > it’s billionaire tech companies with profit motivations Could be. Could also be the next Pol Pot. Did the PRC's Great Leap Forward cause such death on purpose, or by accident? Were Stalin and Sir Robert Peel malicious or incompetent with the Holomodor and the Great Famine of Ireland respectively?
- skepticATX 3y agoI am in general unconcerned with AI risks. However, AI should be permanently banned from use in war. There is no good that can come from this.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoIts probably been used in war for decades now
- dontupvoteme 3y agoIntelligence agencies have certainly been using it, but I could imagine the military was a bit more cautious with it given how much more can go wrong and how much worse the PR would be.
- getmeinrn 3y agoYou mean to pull a trigger, correct? There are plenty of other areas where AI can shine like (excuse the layperson terms, I don't know what these are officially called) threat identification, intelligence gathering, logistics, population control.
- eganist 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_control#Derivative_terms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_control#Derivative... Useful list here for some of what you're looking for.
- mpalmer 3y agoGood luck, we tried it already with nukes!
- Varqu 3y agoGood luck enforcing that. With most high tech it's rather the other way around: the technology gets first used in the military and after some delay, the general public receives the tampered version to play with.
- 3y ago
- sergioisidoro 3y agoI share the sentiment, that many calls to pause AI development come from fear of market disruption and fear of competition, not from genuine concerns over safety. Especially coming from the people who created attention machines that have changed the course of elections, had a major impact in spreading misinformation during a global pandemic, and are contributing to a mental health crisis. And yet we don't hear them call for more regulations for their own markets...
- efficientsticks 3y agoFriendly FYI that Palantir is considered an AI stock, because unfortunately BBC and newsnotfound felt no need to mention it.
- MH15 3y agoWho considers it an AI stock and why was this compulsory to mention?
- efficientsticks 3y agoOk, only in iShares Exponential Technologies ETF as the 3rd entry. There has been press hype linking Palantir with AI however: FT: AI has given Palantir its mystique back The Register: Former NHS AI leader joins US spy-tech firm Palantir It’s fairer to say it probably aspires to be seen as an AI stock. They’re financially incentivised to lobby for unregulated AI to realise “upside”.
- throwaway5959 3y agoIf anyone wants to see how this will go: https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/Faro_Plague https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/Faro_Plague
- laichzeit0 3y agoIf anything, we’ll hopefully get a definition of AI out of all of this. Worst case we’re going to ban matrix multiplication or the GPU acceleration thereof.
- superkuh 3y agoPalantir is a criminal organization that should have their corporate charter dissolved. Re-posting what their CEO says is enabling them. And there's especially no reason to listen to them on the topic of machine learning. I agree there's no reason to "pause" anything but it's just a broken clock being right twice per day.
- jntvjnvutnuvt 3y agoThe irony of you advocating for Ukraine and then calling one of its main intelligence partners, whose product has helped save countless Ukrainian lives, a criminal organization.
- throwawayadvsec 3y agothe mob helped multiple governments during WW2
- humanistbot 3y agoSo by your logic, if someone supports entity A, and A is supported by entity B, there are no grounds to ever criticize entity B without also undermining support for entity A? This seems like the kind of team sports mentality that has destroyed politics.
- yanderekko 3y agoI would also argue that describing an organization as "criminal" based on allegations that only concern a small share of its overall scope of impact to also be reflective of poor rhetoric.
- lolive 3y agoPalantir is a solution provider for my company [Airbus]. We are reasonably satisfied with the product they provide us. Not being politically involved, and as a European not really aware of the action of Palantir in the US, could you elaborate on the « nastiness » of that Palantir?
- agnosticmantis 3y agoSomewhat off-topic, but this puzzles me to no end: How come Peter Thiel, an outspoken libertarian, becomes a government contractor, doing data collection and analysis for spying and surveillance on the masses? Like isn’t that what libertarians warn against all the time?
- gg-plz 3y ago[dead]
- amval 3y ago[flagged]
- edgyquant 3y agoI’m sure you’d agree that the libertarian side of all parties, including the left, would count as fascism then?
- amval 3y agoNo, that wouldn't make any sense. I would count them as anarchists.
- dotnet00 3y agoAnother manifestation of "everything I dislike is fascism"
- amval 3y agoThere are plenty of things I dislike that are not fascism: soup as a main course, jogging, different flavours of authoritarian regimes. Where I live no one pretends "libertarianism" is a real ideology. This has some upsides. For example, we can call a spade a spade. This doesn't, however, stop Peter Thiel's company from receiving enormous sums of money from the government to set up illegal, massive surveillance operations over its citizens. How should we call those who use their massive wealth to undermine democracy and relax legislation so they can do as they please, if not fascists? Is "libertarian" already clear enough of a term?
- web3-is-a-scam 3y agoIf Palantir is rejecting it then we definitely should
- jimsimmons 3y agoPalantir is Infosys for governments. This remark is a psyop by Karp to make them seem like some frontier CS place.
- objektif 3y agoI find these arguments to pause AI development laughable. It feels similar to western countries calling for pause to using fossil fuel after they destroyed the ffing world.
- activiation 3y agoIt's much worst then that because AI could increase productivity by 10x or more with little environmental impact
- dariosalvi78 3y agoThe people scared of the AI doom are so funny to me because the idea is highly speculative, when there's climate change happening under our noses and nobody says we should stop anything...
- narush 3y agoWe should stop climate change. We should also be careful about developing the capabilities of new technology that will put us in similarly precarious situations going forward.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoThe two problems aren’t unrelated either, as we arrived at climate change (in part) because of decades of lies, propaganda, and dissimulation. Before, fossil fuel companies and their ill had to pay quite a bit of money to accomplish this. The prices has now fallen dramatically.
- thx-2718 3y agoPlenty of people are happy to say we should do this or do that. When it comes time to vote though people tend to go with the person telling them they'll have more.
- moffkalast 3y agoNot necessarily, it can also be the person telling them that others will have less.
- lisasays 3y agoPeople have reasonable concerns about AI blowback. That doesn't mean they are doomsayers, or "scared".
- ZephyrBlu 3y agoYud is most definitely a doomsayer.
- kingTug 3y agoAlex Karp and Peter Theil... the famously trustworthy individuals guiding our society.
- LightBug1 3y agoPalantir can stick their agenda, their company, and their CEO, right up their own jacksie. Quote me.
- quesera 3y agoThe call to "Pause AI dev!" reminds me of the COVID-era call to "flatten the curve!". It sounds reasonable, and if it was possible to do, might be effective. But it's absolutely not possible after a certain point, and that point is past. The people who don't realize that just look silly, or they have an agenda.
- azinman2 3y agoAt least that had some obvious problem it was trying to solve. Here there’s no proposal as to what would happen in those 6 months, what’s at stake if we don’t, why 6 months specifically, how could you even plausibly get cooperation when it’s about competition vs viral spread, no attempt to get cooperation in other countries (eg China), who would even come up with whatever restrictions in those 6 months and what that would look like, etc. The reality is the cat is out of the bag in so many ways, particularly if you’re a bad actor LLAMA models are available to you. It’s already possible to just create infinite propaganda/spam now. What would 6 months possibly solve?
- Sporktacular 3y agoOnly those with “no products” want a pause. I presume he means among producers of AI products. But factoring in others (like researchers, lawmakers, concerned citizens, me, Sarah Connor) you could flip that around to 'only those with products don't want a pause'. Which is a bit like meth producers not wanting to surrender their labs. But something tells me Alex Karp isn't concerned about ethics.