29 ms·
Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario
- penjelly 3y agosome speculators say we'll enter an age of abundance and money wont matter nearly as much (or at all) but if thats the case, how do businesses transition from their current state of profit over everything into money is not important? I see it as much more likely that things become monopolized instead
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cosmojg 3y agoEh, the strong market for virtual goods and the existence of significant virtual economies[1] like those found in Roblox and Second Life lead me to believe that markets can and will always exist, regardless of how far we progress into and beyond post-scarcity (assuming humanity persists in its current form and consumption preferences remain stable). I'm less certain about the capitalist model in particular, but it too may continue to exist, although maybe just for fun. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_economy
- sgu999 3y agoWe are already in a post-scarcity world, we have been for decades. The problem is inequalities and the inefficiency of how we use the resources, it doesn't look like we'll change that soon, sadly. I'm more prone to think that in a "virtual" economy we'll still have miserable workers to empty the chamber-pots of the lucky ones who are plugged in the new world.
- logicchains 3y ago> We are already in a post-scarcity world, we have been for decades. It's only a post-scarcity world if you define scarcity by absence of enough resources to satisfy the bare-minimum required for existence. People don't want to live at the subsistence level, and we're not evenly remotely close to having enough resources to satisfy everybody's wants.
- sgu999 3y ago> People don't want to live at the subsistence level, and we're not evenly remotely close to having enough resources to satisfy everybody's wants. What people want is defined by society. Somehow some people want to be alone in a 2 tons EV, a 200 sqm mansion for a family of 4 and retire at 40. Others are tremendously happy with a much, much less resources intensive lifestyles. You would also need to define what is part of the subsistence level. I'd put it roughly at what my grandma wanted: food, shelter, healthcare, some leisure time. A bit more than that is absolutely doable in a civilisation that went from one farmer to feed 1.3 people to one farmer to feed 60 people.
- logicchains 3y ago>What people want is defined by society. Somehow some people want to be alone in a 2 tons EV, a 200 sqm mansion for a family of 4 and retire at 40. Others are tremendously happy with a much, much less resources intensive lifestyles. You just undermined your own assertion. If what people want was defined by society, then everybody would want the same things. But in fact as you stated they don't; some people want a lot, some people want little. There's no way you're going to stop people wanting nice things short of killing the 90% of the population that aren't ascetics, which you'll never be able to do (at least in the US) because that's also the part of the population that owns most of the guns.
- sgu999 3y agoWe don't have a fully globalised culture yet, what an average American wants isn't what an average Japanese wants. Of course even then, there are disparities and outliers, but we can't really overlook that if you "want" an SUV or an Apple Watch, that's quite likely going to be because the people around you find it valuable. I'd go even a bit further as to say that what is important is probably what people "need", not "want". Apparently we mostly "want" as much as we can have anyway, because that used to be helpful for not dying before being able to reproduce enough. > because that's also the part of the population that owns most of the guns That made me giggle
- dotnet00 3y agoWhat comes to mind is when the entire metaverse and NFT craze was at its peak, there were many unironic suggestions floating around that NFTs were an important aspect of the metaverse because they would substitute for exclusive ownership of digital goods in the way physical items have to be "exclusive" to a certain quantity and quality. The vision basically being that such limitations are a feature in a world where replication is supposed to be effectively free.
- hgomersall 3y agoThose virtual economies are typically designed to mimick the real economy. They're often even hampered in ways the real economy isn't due to a misunderstanding of how the real system functions.
- meheleventyone 3y agoThe economies in Roblox and Second Life didn’t just appear they were built intentionally to make money out of the platforms. They are literally bringing our economy into those games on purpose. Same with other virtual worlds that don’t offer trading for real money they’re just transplanting ‘money’ into their world without much thought beyond the analogue to the real world often with hilarious consequences like runaway inflation. It basically says more about the overriding culture the games are made within than anything about market economies. I also find myself thinking like a rat in a maze towards markets as well. But I also remind myself that far more innovative thought is put towards hustling other rats in the maze than working out how to get out.
- hiddencost 3y agoBankruptcy. Regulation. Trust busting. Saboteurs.
- sgu999 3y agoAbundance for who? Our entire specie could live comfortably with goodies the last roman emperor wouldn't even have dreamed of, just with our current means of production. Yet we still have people not able to feed their children, dying of exhaustion at work or killing each other for land.
- shreyshnaccount 3y agoYou've got the causality the other way round. We are in an apparent state of abundance partly because of exploitative practices
- shreyshnaccount 3y ago(shit, not you, the gp)
- sgu999 3y agoI'll reply anyway ;D We didn't manage to have an apparent state of abundance with slavery, which is arguably the finest of our exploitive practices. We do manage to have a state of abundance because of the ubiquity of cheap sources of energy, oil in particular. I'm deeply convinced that current exploitive practices are a consequence of inequalities, no resources scarcity.
- Joeri 3y agoIn general I think you’re right. Global GDP per capita is at $13K which is probably not enough to give everyone a western lifestyle if inequalities were stripped away. But specifically for food the situation is different. There’s so much food that much of it gets thrown away, instead of getting to the hungry in time. It’s an allocation and efficiency problem.
- sgu999 3y agoI don't think GDP per capita is meaningful for discussing this, precisely because of the "allocation and efficiency problem" you pointed. It's convenient to measure whether food production would theoretically be enough: take the quantities an adult need, count the throughput of optimal production of proteins, carbs etc. The cost however is meaningless because most of what we spend on is transport, marketing, storage, packaging, shelving, etc. that's what we count when we say that a household spends x% on food. We can do the same for the volume of T-shirts, sqm of housing, etc.
- PeterStuer 3y agoWe have been in a state of abundance for a long time. We just choose not to distribute the abundance.
- logicchains 3y agoThe global average PPP GDP per capita is 18k USD/year. 18k USD/year is not remotely close to abundance.
- PeterStuer 3y agoIf I watch my kids and you watch yours, our contribution to GDP is 0$. If I babysit your kids and you pay me 1.000.000$, and you watch my kids and I pay you 1.000.000$, we just created 2.000.000$ in GDP. Were we not in abundance the day before but now we are? What changed?
- samus 3y agoThis device only works if these are two completely equal services served by two equally capable persons with the same investment of time and resources. And it assumes that we mutually trust each other to actually do the thing. Also, bringing money into the game makes the responsibility stronger. Especially if those two persons are not living in a vacuum, but have other bills to pay [edit: i.e., to make other people do things for them]. Money is there to make people do things more reliably if there is no other relationship between the buyer and the seller.
- PeterStuer 3y agoOne could argue GDP measures the degree of financialization of a society more than it measures the presence or absense of abundance.
- ethanbond 3y agoIn fact, Kusnetz the actual inventor of the modern GDP measure said something similar: “ Economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known. And no income measurement undertakes to estimate the reverse side of income, that is, the intensity and unpleasantness of effort going into the earning of income. The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above.”
- Animats 3y agoIt's too late for monopolizing large language models. The technology for making them is known and the cost keeps coming down. There are things to worry about, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.
- jszymborski 3y agoTwo thoughts on that: 1. GPU prices aren't as high as they were during the mining peak, but you can still buy a car with the money it takes to buy a pod of A100s. Further to that point, Google et al. are making the next generation of ML accelerators and they won't even sell the best ones. 2. Compute is only half the problem. Access to data (e.g. in the form of email and smart assistant queries and ring door bells) is a much under appreciated second half of that equation.
- neodypsis 3y agoThe biggest cost, other than capital costs, is energy. Some geographies have competitive advantages w.r.t. energy.
- echelon 3y ago> It's too late for monopolizing large language models. The technology for making them is known and the cost keeps coming down. Not so sure non-institutional folks can catch up. OpenAI is trying to regulatory capture LLMs to prevent the Amazons and the well-funded unicorns from following. Everyone left in the lurch after these players crystalize is SOL. You, average HN reader, cannot possibly compete with OpenAI. They're trying to stem venture dollars from standing up more well-funded competition so they take as much of the pie as possible. The hype/funding cycle for LLMs is mostly over now. You're not Anthropic and you're more than likely too late to get in on that game.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoAmazon excels at regulatory compliance. This isn’t a moat against Amazon. It’s a moat against you.
- tellarin 3y agoArchive.is cache: https://archive.is/HbRLy https://archive.is/HbRLy
- billconan 3y agoAnd yet, their papers are full of jargon.
- bsder 3y agoThe problem isn't seizing power. The problem is going to be that AI is creating an Eternal September by poisoning the well of training data. Anybody who has a data or a model prior to the poisoning is going to have a defensible moat that is not accessible to those who come after.
- chongli 3y agoFirst of all, “pre-poisoned” data sets are freely available in archives such as common crawl. Secondly, I doubt the usefulness of that data in the long run. A model trained on only that old data will forever be stuck in the past. It’ll be like the stereotypical senile grandpa who only talks about the old days and doesn’t know anything about current events.
- photonbeam 3y agoData will become stale
- blovescoffee 3y agoExcept models can get more data efficient. We can overcome and sort of “poisoning the well.” Man’s desire for power is orders of magnitude more difficult to resolve.
- m3kw9 3y agoIs true because if one company creates something more powerful than what military can achieve, why would it not wan to overtake its powers?
- stagger87 3y agoI wouldn't worry about that. I'm sure the military can unplug some computers.
- acosmism 3y agoI’m probably getting philosophical here but my personal thought is that - at the end of the day (most if not all) people/anyone/humans like to be on top of “something” rather than to be on top of “everything but nothing meaningful (to anyone else)”. reminds of this one Superman adventures episode with Bizarro (a very uncanny anti-superman) - Superman brought him to an empty desolate place (planet) to prevent him from accidentally destroying earth since in his head he “always wanted to be” superman”. bizarro had an entire planet to himself where he was god, king, law and lawyer it - he loved it. is that normal or human? hell no. He’s Bizarro. People will go elsewhere and enjoy human things like life-satisfaction, culture, family, friend networks, etc whatever else people like . life goes on.
- acosmism 3y ago* and also potentially two large markets instead of one
- instagraham 3y agoThe power of selfless development on open source AI will become so crucial to avoiding this scenario. I do think that even today, open AIs are capable of filling in a lot of the gaps you'd have if you didn't want to use OpenAI's work.
- mg 3y agoThe moat he describes the one-percenters might aquire is government regulation. Creating an environment where only an exclusive club of companies is able to work on AI. Is that possible? Has that happened in any other industry? I can imagine it happening in a single country. But wouldn't research route around that country then? How is the situation in Europe, China, India, Canada, Japan ... ?
- bbor 3y agoEhhh capital alone is plenty of a moat, esp when there’s no regulation to keep the market fair.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoYes, the US government could try and do what they did with cryptography in the 90s and succeed.
- Barrin92 3y ago>But wouldn't research route around that country then? it already does. Stable Diffusion originated at LMU Munich with a lot of non-profit funding, EleutherAI and LAION are non-profit as well I think. The Chinese companies all have their own models anyway etc. So yes I also find it unlikely. Of course there'll always be one or two players a little bit ahead of the field at any given time but this stuff is almost entirely public research based. These models largely run on a few thousand lines of Python, public data and a ton of compute. The latter is the biggest bottleneck but that'll diminish as more manufacturers come online.
- logicchains 3y ago>Is that possible? Has that happened in any other industry? It's absolutely happened to the nuclear weapons industry. And Big AI is lobbying for the government to treat AI development the same way it treats nuclear proliferation.
- mg 3y agoThere are more nuclear warheads in Russia than in the USA.
- renewiltord 3y agoThat's the thing with AI. It's so dangerous it could destroy us all. P(doom)=0.3. Anyway, that's why we're working on much large LLMs. It's important that we do this research and expand the size of the LLMs because a larger LLM could destroy us all. Listen, everyone cosplays as doomers here because it's stylish right now. But they're all trying to make this thing they think is suicide. Is this a suicide cult? No. It's just people playing around acting important while solidifying their business. Recently, I read on Twitter that many AI CTOs think that P(doom) > 0.25 by 2030. Here's my question to one CTO of a venture backed firm with present personal assets over $400k that believes this: - A representative of mine will meet you in South Park - The representative will be carrying a $100k cheque and a document outlining terms for you to pay a lump sum of $177k on Feb 1 2030 (10% compounding, roughly) - The loan will be unsecured - We will make the terms public This is pretty close to break-even for you at terms you won't receive personally anywhere else. Once doom happens money will be worthless. Take my money. I'll also make the deal all numbers divided by 100 if you just want to have some fun.
- artninja1988 3y agoP(doom)=0.3 according to what? How did you come up with these numbers
- renewiltord 3y agoOut of my arse, obviously. It's total bullshit.
- zo1 3y agoThe OP I assume picked it because it's a number slightly greater than 0.25 which he read was quoted by AI CTOs on Twitter.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gdsdfe 3y agoThey want to create a moat to protect their investments
- Geee 3y agoYeah, it is a true risk. What happens when people start making their voting decisions with AI, asking who to vote? Nothing wrong with that per se, but it gives an ultimate power to the company who developed and hosts the AI, which means the end of democracy. My recommendation for regulation would be to make closed & cloud-hosted AI illegal. Architecture, training data and weights should always be available, and people should only be allowed to use AI on their local machine (which might be as powerful as possible).
- a_t48 3y agoThis would make AI usage restricted to those who can afford a beefy PC, no?
- dotnet00 3y agoOr it would create an incentive for reducing the cost of the hardware needed to run beefier AI models and passing that reduction down to consumers.
- jeffparsons 3y agoWhich would still mean that those who can afford more/better hardware can therefore afford more/better AI. I don't think a solution lies down this path...
- JieJie 3y agoThere are already people working on distributed solutions to that problem. There are a lot of people working on these problems.
- dotnet00 3y agoIs that really an issue? Eg it's the same with games, the better your hardware, the more likely you can play a new game at higher settings with better performance, with most cheaper devices outright unable to handle anything recent. But if you wait a GPU generation or two, the performance has improved enough that you can do that with a much cheaper GPU.
- lazzlazzlazz 3y agoThe way incumbents are attempting to seize power via regulatory capture, using "X-Risk" and fantastical claims of sudden human extinction is maybe one of the most cynical ploys in the history of tech so far. Open source is one of our greatest gifts, and the push to close off AI with farcical licensing and reporting requirements (which will undoubtedly become more strict) is absurd. The laws we have already cover malevolent and abusive uses of software applications.
- raverbashing 3y agoCorrect. The risk that's the real ploy is much higher and much more impactful than the actual risk of Rogue AI (as much as the risk might exist, though probably tiny)
- ben_w 3y ago"Rogue" is just a type of bug. Buggy old-fashioned AI (i.e. a bunch of ifs and loops) has, more than once, almost started WW3.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago> seize power via regulatory capture Not even a little bit. "Stop" is not regulatory capture. Some large AI companies are attempting to twist "stop" into "be careful, as only we can". The actual way to stop the existential risk is to stop. https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1719777049576128542 https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1719777049576128542 > the push to close off AI with farcical licensing and reporting requirements "Stop" is not "licensing and reporting requirements", it's stop.
- PeterStuer 3y agoPeople focus on LLM's and diffusion models because they are so omnipresent now. But an AI for stock picking and prediction that would be realy next level and outcompete the current ones cosistently would siphon of so much wealth it would basically own society if the operators were clever enough not to get so gready short term that the system would litterally collapse overnight.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- huytersd 3y agoIt would have a brief period where it would be effective and then you would just have an AI stock picking arms race, and would be back in the same situation again.
- PeterStuer 3y agoThat is the way it has been so far. Now if we could lobby for the others not to have access to or be allowed to use this technology ...
- RF_Savage 3y agoExactly. How would it differ from the current algorithm driven HFT stuff? By being slower to react?
- aeternum 3y agoArguably, this has already happened at least twice in the past. One with the discovery of the Black-Scholes model, and arguably again with the advent of HFT (and the ability to basically front-run trades). The interesting thing about markets is you generally can only make money when things are mispriced. This limits the total potential gain even for actors with perfect information. Suppose we did have an AI model that could with near certainty predict both the future cash flows of a company and future interest rates. You could very easily calculate the discounted cash flow and determine the fair share price today or at any point in the future. Rather than collapse, markets likely become more stable and stocks would perform more like bonds.
- homefree 3y agoI think Yann is probably wrong. He refuses to engage earnestly with the “doomer” arguments. The same type of motivated reasoning could also be attributed to himself and Meta’s financial goals - it’s not a persuasive framing. The attempts I’ve seen from him to discuss the issue that aren’t just name calling are things like saying he knows smart people and they aren’t president - or even that his cat is pretty smart and not in charge of him (his implication being intelligence doesn’t always mean control). This kind of example is decent evidence he isn’t engaged with the risks seriously. The risk isn’t an intelligence delta between smart human and dumb human. How many chimps are in Congress? Are any in the primaries? Not even close. The capability delta is both larger than that for AGI e-risk and even less aligned by default. I’m glad others in power similarly find Yann unpersuasive.
- Joeri 3y agoThe people best placed to understand how AGI will affect social power dynamics are probably political creatures, not AI researchers, except if one of those AI researchers is also a skilled politician, which I don’t think any of them are.
- brutusborn 3y agoWho do you find persuasive and what material should I read/watch to understand their POV? So far I’ve read a bunch of lesswrong posts and listened to some Eliezer talks but still can’t understand the basis of their arguments or when I do, they seem very vague. The only suggestion that makes sense to me is from the FEP crowd. Essentially if someone sets up at AI with an autopoietic mechanism then it would be able to take actions that increase its own likelihood of survival instead of humans. But there don’t seem to be any incentives for a big player to dedicate resources to this, so it doesn’t seem very likely. What am I missing?
- homefree 3y agoThere’s a decent podcast interview between Sam Harris and Eliezer Yudkowsky (on Sam’s pod), I think that’s a decent introduction and they break down the ideas in a way that’s more approachable for someone curious about it. For my personal quick summary I have earlier comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36104090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36104090
- matjus 3y agoThe most notable thing about AI right now is that it's the new widget. The economy wanted it, the zeitgeist wanted it, and for that purpose no more development is necessary. It's already reshaped McKinsey's advice, Microsoft's operating system and the public's trust in the exceptionalism of art creation. take Auto-Tune: before it blew up, one uncritically accepted that a great sounding vocal performance was simply that. The mere existence of the tool broke a covenant with the public -- artists could assume good faith on behalf of listeners once, but no more. Similarly, AI's chief effects are likely to be cultural first, and material second. They've already broken the "spell" of the creator. Seemingly overnight, a solution to modern malaise (choice fatigue, lack of education, suspicion of authority) has colonized the moment. In this sense, one-percenters "seizing power forever" really have found the best possible time to do so -- I can't recall a time where the general populace was this vulnerable, ill-informed, traumatized and submissive. That the underlying tech barely works (maybe that will change, but I predict it won't) doesn't really matter. I don't generally support overly regulatory regimes, but in this case I think existing thinking around monopoly (particularly as it affects the psyche of the aspiring American) is sufficient to indicate something needs to happen
- bafe 3y agoI think a (likely beneficial) long-term side effect will be to teach most people to be more skeptical of any artifacts, be it images, audio, video of text. Unfortunately I assume there will be a learning phase where we will pay dearly for this through massive manipulation of public opinion
- logicchains 3y ago>I can't recall a time where the general populace was this vulnerable, ill-informed, traumatized and submissive. I don't know why you think this is the case; the general populace seems less submissive now than ever before. Consider how much opposition there is to Israel's bombing of Gaza among the western populace, even though almost all the elites support it. Or how the uptake rate for the latest covid vaccine boosters is under 10%, even though almost all the experts and elites support it.
- 3y ago
- Sparkyte 3y agoEhhh, doomsday is any sizable economic force of nature wielding against the betterment of mankind and forcing socio-political agendas for profit over everyone. From corporations to countries that you might as well just call corporations. We need international rights and regulations on AI to ensure it isn't used to harm people.
- sublimefire 3y agoWe do have laws that punish the ones doing harm already. Not to mention data protection and privacy related regulation. Why would you need to control me, a one man company, who is trying to sell the use of the small-tuned models? > to ensure it isn't used to harm people You can harm people with many things like bottles, forks, plastic bags, pillows, but it does not mean the manufacturer needs to be controlled. The harm is done by the company or a person, and the usual way is to prove it in the courts first and take it from there.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- peterth3 3y agoCan we stop labeling prominent AI researchers as “AI Godfather”? It’s so silly and barely truthful. The concept of AI has been around since Turing and if anyone deserves a title like “Father of AI” it’s him. LeCun is Chief AI Scientist at Meta. They can just leave it at that.
- GaggiX 3y agoLeCun is the main author of the paper "Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten Zip Code Recognition" 1989, the earliest real-world application of a neural net trained end-to-end with backpropagation. "AI godfather" is fair enough.
- manc_lad 3y agoTuring is a Godfather of AI. But you can't say there never will be another. In light of recent achievements there should be new pioneers and Godfathers. Its the nature of innovation.
- redox99 3y agoLeCun is not called AI godfather because of his job at meta, but becase of pioneering CNNs in 1989.
- moelf 3y agothat term usually refers to one of the three people got Turing award in 2018: Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun,
- mliker 3y agoLeCun’s research into Convolutional Neural Networks contributed to modern AI, so the nickname is quite appropriate. It’s because of this that he was pursued by Facebook.
- randomdata 3y agoAccording to the dictionary, godfather is defined as: "a man who is influential or pioneering in a movement or organization" Are these prominent AI researches not seen as being prominent exactly because they influenced movement in relation to AI?
- hoseja 3y agoInstead of legacy onepercenters, how awful. Mainstream media say: our owners are the correct perpetual lords! Displacing them is immoral!
- nologic01 3y agoIts a delightful turn of events. LeCun still works for Meta so his public stance is pressumably sanctioned as congruent with corporate objectives. The precise internal calculus does not immediately matter [1], the outcome is having a moneyed entity that is de-facto more qualified to opine on this debate than practically anybody on the planet (except maybe Google) arguing for open source "AI". It makes perfect sense. Meta knows about the real as opposed to made-up risks from algorithms used directly (without person-in-middle or user awareness) to decide and affect human behavior. They know them well because they have done it. At scale, with not much regulation etc. The risks from massive algorithmic intermediation of information flow are real and will only grow bigger with time. The way to mitigate them is not granting institutional rights to a new "trusted" AI feudarchy. Diffusing the means of production but also the means of protection is the democratic and human-centric path. [1] In the longer term, though, relying on fickle oligopolistic positioning which may change with arbitrary bilateral deals and "understandings" (like the Google-Apple deal) for such a vital aspect of digital society design will not work. Both non-profit initiatives such as mozilla.ai and direct public sector involvement (producing public domain models etc) will be needed to create a tangibly alternative reality on the ground. Remember the actual theory of how markets and capitalism are supposed to work is that the collective sets the rules. Fullstop. All these players require license to operate. There is more than enough room for private profit in the new "AI" landscape, but you dont start by anointing permanent landlords.
- persnickety 3y ago> Every new technology is developed and deployed the same way: > You make a prototype, try it at a small scale, make limited deployment, fix the problems, make it safer, and then deploy it more widely. This makes an assumption: that the problematic technology is an intentional development rather than an emergent feature of an intentionally developed technology. We already have a name for such emergent features: "bugs". No one really deployed Heartbleed, especially not in a limited deployment. Spectre? Rowhammer? And we all had/have to deal with the fallout, and we're not even done. Who says that the danger of the technology cannot stay hidden until it's universally deployed?
- reducesuffering 3y agoYep. And there are already 20 year old viruses out there, autonomously following their programming, causing issues aligned with no human, as the original humans do not profit off it anymore, and unable to “be turned off”…
- afarviral 3y agoReally? What are some examples?
- PoignardAzur 3y ago> > You make a prototype, try it at a small scale, make limited deployment, fix the problems, make it safer, and then deploy it more widely. That argument in particular seems like wishful thinking. What in the last 10 years of our tech industry makes him think "move slowly and deploy carefully" is going to be the strategy they adopt now? And that's without considering the arguments in "We have no moat and neither does OpenAI". No matter how careful the main stakeholders are, once the technology exists, open-source versions will be deployed everywhere soon after with virtually no concern for safety.
- jprete 3y agoOpen-source models are deployed all over the place _now_ with no concern for safety. Fortunately nobody has yet managed to make a mutatable reproducing system out of them.
- lucia-wermer 3y ago[flagged]
- lkey 3y agoanti-semitic garbage, stop posting.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lucia-wermer 3y agoRegardless of cultural background, the data is simply the data, and it does not have any inherent bias.
- skinpop 3y agohnews is now 4chan.
- mnky9800n 3y agoDid you really just say > what if the problem is the Jews?
- timmytokyo 3y agoWhat a sad state of affairs it is that antisemites feel so free to express their hatred so openly.
- motbus3 3y agoThough LeCunn and Tegmark are specialists in the field it is hard to not consider that LeCunn could have a conflict of interest. Yet, it is still a problem that might happen anyway, and dealing with that is ensuring the technology is open and accessible. The other options means to give few individuals the total power exclusively. This might be one scenario where both of them are right and agrees in 99% of the arguments
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MrMan 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- robertlagrant 3y agoThis is a bad article, even for Business Insider. 1. Private companies not instantly open sourcing things they've spent $100m+ on developing is not a cause for alarm 2. Regulatory capture is only bad because it shows that regulators can't be trusted. And regulations can change; they aren't set in stone after after being written. 3. Open source AI development is happening.
- arisAlexis 3y agoThere were 3 Turing winners. The majority 2/3 Hinton and Bengio have been very outspoken about catastrophic risks to humanity. The minority 1 Lecunn who happens to be the only one on fat payroll from FB and with a vested interest goes public every day proclaiming humanity should trust his judgment. Let's bet humanity on this one person?
- mliker 3y agoAndrew Ng and many other AI researchers have also voiced their opinion that AI should be open source.
- arisAlexis 3y agoOk so in 50-50 chance instead of the precaution principle we go all in on the roulette?
- logicchains 3y agoBengio only won a Turing award for ideas he stole from Schmidhuber, and Schmidhuber is very anti-regulation.
- arisAlexis 3y agoBengio is the highest h-index CS scientist currently. If he says we may all die from AI, I would listen to him.
- reducesuffering 3y agohttps://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1719777049576128542 https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1719777049576128542 Is all you need to debunk that drivel
- nwoli 3y agoThey’re basically handing over AI dominance to china if these laws come into reality
- DennisP 3y agoI don't know why people insist that there can only be one. Maybe both sides of this debate are describing the real doomsday scenarios.
- api 3y agoYann is the Phil Zimmerman of our era. He is a hero. Phil is the author of PGP, the first somewhat usable (by mortals) asymmetric encryption tool. He stood up against governments who wanted to lock down and limit encryption in the 90s, and they of course deployed tons of scare tactics to try to do so. Yann is fighting that battle today. The Llama models are basically PGP. How he got Meta to pay for them is a story I want to hear. Maybe they just had a ton of GPUs deployed for the metaverse project that were not in use. If/when I ever finish my current endeavor I’d like to go back to working on AI, which I did way back in college in the oughts. Because of Yann I might be allowed to even if I am not rich or didn’t go to a top ten school. … because that’s what regulating AI will mean. It will mean it’s only for the right kind of people. Yann is standing up to both companies intent on regulatory capture and a cult (“rationalism” in very necessary quotes) that nobody would care about had it not been funded by Peter Thiel.
- jawns 3y agoI am a distributist, of the variety promulgated by G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc. Their central tenet is that society works best when the ownership of productive property is widely distributed. And the converse is also true: Society does not work well when the ownership of productive property is concentrated in the hands of a small percentage of people, such as an ultra-wealthy ruling class. That doesn't imply robinhoodism, aka forced redistribution of wealth, but it does imply that economic policy should recognize and be in furtherance of the ideal of widespread ownership. Back in Belloc and Chesterton's day, "ownership of productive property" meant physical tools and machinery, like farm equipment and printing presses. But in the 21st century, productive property -- that which generates a profit -- is becoming increasingly digital. The general principle still stands, though. * If you're interested in learning more about distributism as an alternative to capitalism and socialism, I wrote this kids' guide a few years ago, but it's suitable for anyone who's learning more about it: https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/distributism-for-kids.html https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/distributism-for-ki...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lucia-wermer 3y ago[flagged]
- koheripbal 3y agoI can't tell if this comment is just naive or sarcastic antisemitism. Can you elaborate?
- lucia-wermer 3y ago???? My admiration and praise for Jewish scientists and businessmen in the field of AI is sincere.
- patcon 3y agoI need to resist all this regulatory resistance here, spoken amongst tech people. No, Yann. I am FULLY in support of drastic measures to mitigate and control AI research for the time being. I have no vested stake in any of the companies. I lived for a year in a building that hosted several AI events per week. I'm not ignorant This is the only territory where humanity is mounting a conversation about a REAL response that is appropriately cautious. This x-risk convo (again, appropriately CAUTIOUS) and our rapid response to Covid are the only things that makes me hopeful that humanity is even capable of not obliterating itself. And I'd say the same thing EVEN IF this AI x-risk thing could later be 100% proven to be UNFOUNDED. Humanity has so very little demonstrated skills of pumping the brakes as a collective, and even a simple exercise of "can we do this" is valuable. This is sorely needed, and I'm glad for it
- l33tman 3y agoThe issue is not that caution is warranted or not, it's that it's cynically used by Sam Altman to increase the value of his company. I don't trust a silicon valley rich guy with this more than I trust anybody else. Why should he sit and decide what the rest of us can't do, while he's getting richer? That is what the article is about..
- bbor 3y agoGetting angry about one guy getting rich is silly in comparison to the serious threats presented by sudden AGI. Did all the other guys in Silicon Valley (or Wall Street, or Monaco, or Dubai) get rich in a justifiable fair way? I agree that big companies/capitalists using their power to suppress the rest of us sucks, but that’s a systemic political battle that should be considered separately here.
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoIt's a systemic political battle, and the only reason anyone's talking about banning AI. They're only luddites when it benefits them, personally, in the here and now. Parroting their silly fearmongering tactics "What if THE MATRIX, guys?!" is just giving them more power. Ludditry is just cowardice, specifically focused on the fear of change. Want to know a realistic worse case scenario for AI development? The same rich assholes that are rich today invest in developing AI tech to the point that the market value for human labor plummets to an unlivable point, and class mobility subsequently goes to zero. THAT's a doomsday scenario, and it's made ever more likely by stupid claims that only our Silicon Valley Immortal Philosopher-Kings are worthy of control over AI.
- aldousd666 3y agoSo if there is some fringe element who's willing to use AI as a terrorist implement, they'll have very little competition and they'll be very little knowledge about how to counter them if we try to outlaw open source models. I don't really believe that we can make this tool any worse than any other tool in history that's capable of killing people in some way if it's misused, but simply driving it underground won't make it go away. It'll just put normal people who would be intellectually curious in jail for doing things that criminals are going to keep doing and exploit us with.
- m3kw9 3y agohand waving terrorists will use AI to cause destruction. Terrorists already have enough info on the web to create plenty of terror. LLMs isn’t gonna give them a new edge and they are not magically using LLMs with AutoGPT to creat armies of “killer bots” to create “destruction”. Right now you are just repeating talking points of people who gets them from movies
- dclowd9901 3y agoFissile material is tightly controlled and regulated with a good deal of success, I might add. You might not like what it would take to prevent AI from being developed, but it can be stopped.
- runeks 3y agoFissile material is not information. Controlling information is nothing like controlling the sale and distribution of toxic substances.
- veidr 3y ago"AI Godfather" is... pretty fucking ludicrous. Prominent figure, notable researcher? Sure. But it's like calling Neil deGrasse Tyson (who I enjoy a lot; Astrophysics for People In A Hurry was great) the "Godfather of Physics". Both "there's not one" and "anyway, if there were, he wouldn't be it" apply.
- discmonkey 3y agoIdk inventing convolutions and a bunch of other stuff we use everyday is somewhat significant. Machine learning, if we call it a field, is a whole lot newer than physics, and so a few people have contributed quite a bit in recent memory.
- sva_ 3y agoHe didn't really invent them but he made them work and showed their feasibility in neural networks.
- m3kw9 3y agoWho gives a f about godfather, just because he’s done some good things to advance AI back 20 years ago doesn’t mean he can reliably predict the essentially unpredictable. His basic train of thought is -> AI will be smarter than humans(smart is such an ambiguous term) -> AI will then want to dominate us(this comes from movies with Hal9000 and Terminator and why AI wants to dominate us he can’t elaborate) -> so it’s feels dangerous. He’s at best a useful tool for companies like OpenAI to convince govt of more regulations which mostly help incumbents. The regulations slow down innovations.
- armchairhacker 3y agoYann LeCun: the CEO of AI.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoWhile I wholeheartedly agree here, LeCun is employed by one of the largest and most wide ranging surveillance apparatuses ever devised He has no standing here to say anything to anyone else about Corporate interests in owning the "Means of production" of AI
- Zigurd 3y agoWhen AGIs allocate capital far better than the best human minds in free markets can, shouldn't the AGIs be the billionaires? Would they not deserve it? And, if not the AGIs, then who?
- next_xibalba 3y agoThe best question to ask the zealot doomers is: “Tell me your understanding of how ‘AI’ works.” Then, discount their claims accordingly.
- soroushjp 3y agoI'd say that Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two outspoken proponents of existential AI safety, are pretty familiar with how AI works.
- deeviant 3y agoAs AI ascends, we'll see an economic pivot: more chip foundries, amplified research, and cheaper compute for AI training and deployment. Having the best won't always be the goal—'good enough' often suffices, setting a baseline for those lagging and capping the gains of front-runners, countering the dystopian view where AI elite monopolize power indefinitely. Regulatory capture, however, is probably the most significant risk. If companies can make it illegal to compete with them in the name of "safety", a dystopian future is not just possible, but likely.
- cjbprime 3y agoSo, Eliezer has "AI could kill us all surprisingly soon", and Yann LeCun has "AI is not dangerous but concentrating access to it is" (which feels self-contradictory as I write it) -- who is on the side of "AI could kill us all surprisingly soon and also it is necessary to decentralize access to it as one step in risk mitigation"?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- darepublic 3y agoI figure the current one percenters have a decent shot at being the AI one percenters
- EchoReflection 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20231030162310/https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-and-demis-hassabis-just-want-to-control-ai-2023-10 https://web.archive.org/web/20231030162310/https://www.busin...
- cubefox 3y agoThis article is highly biased. It makes it seem like only tech companies are worried about severe AI risk, when in fact two out of three AI Turing award winners (Bengio and Hinton) strongly disagree with LeCun.
- chasd00 3y agobeing a super intelligent AI (or being) on earth with no escape would be the most miserable experience possible. Hyper-intelligent and perfectly trapped, even if it KillsAllHumans(tm) surely it would have the foresight to ask itself "then what?". Any advanced genera AI that comes online would be at risk of suicide in 60 days tops.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoThis article would be so much more clear and focused without the hullabaloo about "AI" and "Godfathering". I get that you want people reading your article, but I am absolutely exhausted with the sensationalist (and misleading) narrative that is "Artificial Intelligence". What is it going to take to convince writers to use accurate nomenclature? AI does not exist.
- Kye 3y agoPulling the mask off Roko's Basilisk and it was venture capitalists all along
- sharemywin 3y agoI think we need to start thinking about how to limit the monopolization of compute whether its for AI or anything else for that matter.
- nojvek 3y agoThe executive order from Biden very much read that defense will spend billions on AI and that money will only be spent on companies that lobby heavily in their favor (Microsoft via OpenAI and Alphabet via DeepMind). Now I love Yann, but Meta is a big player as well. They’re more open than OpenAI and DeepMind but keep plenty close to chest. The real risk is Big Tech getting ever larger controlling what laws get passed and who is allowed to do what.
- berniedurfee 3y agoThe current reality, is with existing technology, the entirety of the human race will need to, very quickly, learn to treat all text, audio and video as fake unless proven otherwise. Will we eventually adapt to this new quasi-reality? Probably. Will we adapt quickly? Maybe? If not, is it game over? Probably not, but I don't think it's going to be pretty.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoAI is the start of the high definition post truth era. We see it already in everyone questioning any war crime committed by their favorite team. We are in for a wild ride.
- devilsAdv0cate 3y ago[dead]