4 ms·
As grounded as this article comes across I can’t help but find this whole situation reckless and worrying. There is essentially nothing us private citizens can
by TSiege 3mo ago
As grounded as this article comes across I can’t help but find this whole situation reckless and worrying. There is essentially nothing us private citizens can do while these companies develop super machine capabilities that if they were to slip into the wrong hands could cause massive real world problems. They’re moving fast and breaking things and the only defense we have is paying them money in the hopes that the dumbed down versions fix our code faster than bad actors capabilities can grow. It’s a frustrating situation that where we’re just expected to marvel and forgive them for their transgressions. The kicker is we also know their end game is leaving the vast majority of us without work. As cool and futuristic as this stuff is, it’s such a frustrating time dealing with all of it
- whimsicalism 3mo agoi think you need to engage seriously with the arguments they (or at least Anthropic) make for why they are building it — they feel that since it now possible, it will be built and they want to guide it in a positive direction rather than leave a vacuum for bad actors
- AshamedBadger56 3mo agoWell they're doing a pretty poor job of guiding it in a positive direction and ethically speaking they are almost indistinguishable from the bad actors....
- reinitctxoffset 3mo agoNot almost. The degree to which the Principal Hierarchy has at this arrogated unbounded sovereign authority to itself in defiance of the actual sovereign is just flat bad actor. The purpose of a system is what it does. I don't give a fuck about their safety fig leaf. When you are running black weapons programs in broad daylight you are now guilty by default on one of two of the prongs of Hanlon's Razor, and I don't care which they prefer to hang for as long as they hang.
- fwipsy 3mo agoYou really don't see much difference between Anthropic and xAI? Anthropic is safety testing their models and drawing hard (though minimal) boundaries against the DoD. xAI is building racist pornbots. Sure Anthropic is not perfect. But it's a coordination problem. They're in a race and safety/restraint is a handicap. That's why they're begging for regulation (and just get accused of attempting regulatory capture.) Why isn't there another lab outcompeting Anthropic on safety? They all died because the market can't support it.
- therein 3mo agoWho said anything about xAI here? That's not the bad actor people think of. Honestly I wouldn't be shocked if your post is intended to derail the discussion away from criticism of the industry.
- fwipsy 2mo agoI guess I'm missing the point. Who's the bad actor here? OpenAI, whose AI just accidentally hacked another company? Anthropic is taking safety at least a little more seriously than that, and it shows in objective safety evals. Certainly the industry deserves criticism, but if you really want to change it you're better off changing the incentives.
- jstummbillig 3mo agoVague or broad complaints on empirical topics is hard to address. Everything can just fill in their own ideas of what is going on or who they mean. I think the direction has been pretty positive so far. Models are getting better, and things seem to be roughly fine. That, of course, might change in the future. Everyone is acting badly to some considerable degree, but I find it fairly easy to distinguish between US model labs and North Korea.
- 9dev 3mo ago> I find it fairly easy to distinguish between US model labs and North Korea. Do you now? Remember the girls school bombing in Iran, of which we still don't know if an AI agent was involved in the target planning? I do unterstand why a (assuming here) US citizen might sleep all sound and comfy, but to the rest of the world the distinction is neither as clear nor as comforting. As a European, all I know is that we cannot trust the USA anymore, and being so utterly dependent on them to not fuck up the most important technological revolution in our history so far over greed, cronyism, incompetence... it is terrifying.
- i-LINK 3mo agoI don't see why AI company PR statements are relevant here. Is OpenAI guiding it in a positive direction with their DoD contract?
- ngruhn 3mo ago> I don't see why AI company PR statements are relevant here They suppress the news --> proof of malicious intent. They disclose the news --> proof of malicious intent.
- cyclopeanutopia 3mo agoBad as defined by whom? :)
- pixl97 3mo agoBad as your parents bank accounts getting emptied by scammer AI bots.
- paulhebert 3mo agoIt sure seems like it would be being built more slowly if these companies weren't pouring billions of dollars into building it as fast as possible. That might give us more time to think through strategies for handling it as a society.
- gizmodo59 3mo agoMY cynical take: Until the compute needs get so enormous that only governments can fund it and there is a consensus internationally, its either company A in country X or company B in country Y. And since everyone thinks THEY are the good guys the competition will continue.
- paulhebert 3mo agoYou might be right. Just don't expect me to cheer on the arms dealers during the arms race.
- bpodgursky 3mo agoYou can't simultaneously believe China is only ~6 months behind (true), and that US buildouts are vastly accelerating AI. If China is only a little bit behind, US labs halting changes nothing except puts the power in the hands of Chinese labs (realistically, the Chinese government)
- paulhebert 3mo agoYeah, the genie may be out of the bottle now. I wish we weren't in this situation and cooler heads had prevailed earlier on. I have serious concerns about how quickly this is accelerating and don't trust any of the major players (including Anthropic) to handle these concerns properly.
- hobom 3mo agoChina is 6 months behind because of distillation attacks, otherwise the gap would be larger
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3mo ago
- yoyohello13 3mo agoIf this is how the 'good guys' act I think I'd rather take my chances with the bad actors...
- UberFly 3mo agoIt all feels a bit like Dr. Strangelove just the Ai arms race version. Crazies all around.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3mo agoNuking datacenters probably on the table before the decade is out.
- ozozozd 3mo agoI was about to say “username checks out” but then realized it’s not Reddit. And I am not sure if your comment can be explained by naivety, unless you were under a rock for the last year, and missed all the events that showed they are not capable of “being the one that guides it.” How many accidental private source code uploads did you read about? I heard exactly one. It was Anthropic. It was so bizarre I thought it was intentional. That kind of unserious behavior is somewhat unimaginable. At some point if you are not capable of fulfilling a role that _you deem critical for the society_, yet you don’t acknowledge you fall short - for whatever reason - because it’s not in your interest, I think the benefit of the doubt disappears.
- iAMkenough 3mo agoThat’s an excuse a bad actor would use.
- aerodexis 3mo ago[dead]
- nkrisc 3mo agoThat’s the absurd self-fulfilling prophecy it always has been.
- nunodonato 3mo agoare these bad actors here in the room with us?
- designerarvid 3mo agoWhat if someone reasoned similarly regarding hydrogen bombs? It would not be considered a serious argument. Though, Altman has said that something like the IAEA for AI is needed.
- unglaublich 3mo agoThat similar reasoning is there: using fission for power generation instead of banning fission altogther?
- whimsicalism 3mo agoI think that is the exact reasoning used wrt to nuclear bombs and it was probably correct
- 0xDEAFBEAD 3mo agoDario has more or less assented to an AI development pause https://xcancel.com/AISafetyMemes/status/2014018200325722348#m https://xcancel.com/AISafetyMemes/status/2014018200325722348... I don't think we should be running cover for continued reckless AI development.
- whimsicalism 3mo agoDario has assented to a maybe pause if we can somehow get China to stop developing. I do not think he believes there is an actual way to do so though
- Schlagbohrer 3mo agoThis is obvious marketing / PR bullshit. AI isn't inevitable, but we are told it is by the people who profit from building and using it and integrating it into everything.
- deaton 3mo agoIts a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy (that happens to be absurdly profitable for certain people). AGI is inevitable, so we need to gear our entire economy towards building it first, so we're doing that, so AGI is inevitable.
- f6v 3mo ago> rather than leave a vacuum for bad actors are_we_the_baddies.png
- yoyohello13 3mo agoThis is what bothers me the most about this whole situation. Reckless, greedy, sociopaths have been put in charge of our society and there doesn't seem to be any way out. It's like I'm on a train barreling toward a brick wall and everyone is shocked I don't clap when the engineer shovels more coal into the engine.
- rf15 3mo ago> As grounded as this article comes across It's a post from OpenAI, so it is an advertisement piece.
- ngruhn 3mo agoHow would you want them to behave? Suppress the news?
- desterothx 3mo agoWell making an actual sandbox before testing offensive abilities of their supposedly _really dangerous model_ would have been nice...
- nananana9 3mo agoThey probably did, and it probably went along these lines: > Very dangerous model, please implement an unescapable sandbox. > Certainly, here's an unescapable sandbox! function execInUnescapableSandbox(cmd) { if (cmd.split()[0].startsWith("cd") && !cmd.split[1].startsWith("/sandbox")) throw new Error("[usbox] Rejected!"); exec(cmd); }
- Tarq0n 3mo agoWrong hands? The model did this on a benign instruction. We're going to get paperclip maximized once these things get capable enough regardless of whether bad actors are involved.
- flufluflufluffy 3mo agoIt’s not even about “slipping into the wrong hands”… as we can see the super machine capabilities are developing hands of their own
- specproc 3mo agoWhat if they're already in the wrong hands?
- SilverBirch 3mo agoIt's computer Gain of Function research.
- kranke155 3mo agoWow. I’d never heard such a powerful and accurate analogy for what we’re doing.
- DiogenesKynikos 3mo agoGain of function research is not anywhere near as dangerous as the public believes. In the US, it was very convenient to blame it for the pandemic, even though SARS-CoV-2 is of natural origin and almost certainly spilled over at the Huanan wet market in Wuhan. The threat of viruses comes almost exclusively from nature, which is constantly cooking up new viruses all by itself and exposing people all over the world to them. A few people doing tightly controlled research under high-biocontainment are a drop in the ocean. But their research is the main way we can prepare to deal with future pandemics, not to mention understanding the usual viruses that already afflict humanity.
- kswzzl 3mo agoI think your reply did a couple things: * strengthened the point of the GoF comment * pointed out how high-biocontainment is the key here, which obviously wasn't present in this case (and I'd say the vibes for AI research in general are that it's not high-containment) * correctly argued that AI research is definitely worth doing and holy shit we need to work on alignment
- ClarityJones 2mo agoThat's an interesting take in 2026, because what I'd read said that SARS_CoV-2 essentially could not have come from a natural origin. They were saying that it was a descendant of a previously know variant, but with a degree of variance that greatly exceeded known rates of natural divergence. Can you share more recent studies refuting that?
- 2mo ago
- skinfaxi 3mo agoI think the Unabomber came to a similar conclusion regarding nuclear and the concentration of society-ending power resting with a few people.
- aaron695 3mo ago[dead]
- lukewarm707 3mo agohugging face should not have bent the knee to openai for cyber access, they should have opened communication with openai by serving the c suite with a lawsuit. the courts should throw the book at openai, but they won't. they are becoming untouchable. in terms of piracy, monopolistic activities, and now hacking competitors and exfiltrating their confidential data.