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Anthropic researcher says more than 10% chance AI "could kill all humans"
- AustinDev 25d agoIf they actually believed this they'd be buying a truckload of fertilizer and diving it to the nearest chip fab. I don't buy it.
- embedding-shape 25d agoWhat... I think you might be sharing more about your internal psyche here than providing some generalized commentary on this story. Why would you need to bomb a chip fab because you think AI might lead to people getting killed in the future? I'm convinced of many things killing humans, yet I don't have any desire to bomb or kill others, I think this is pretty common, but who knows....
- ultrarunner 25d agoYou’re likely taking this too literally. OP is saying that beliefs inspire action, but as of now we haven’t seen action from these people that support such an extreme belief. What we have seen is incredible hype (justified or not), so it’s more likely just a continuation of that.
- AustinDev 25d agoPrecisely, all I hear is a bunch of cheap talk about something gravely serious, if true. I think it's much more likely that the dread these Anthropic employees are experiencing is reckoning with the fact that they may actually lose the AI race. Maybe, if they scare the regulators enough, they could lock in some regulatory capture.
- ben_w 25d agoTalk is indeed cheap. Thing is, while there are many historical examples of a highly organised bunch of people with a lot of resources who engage in campaigns of violence for various reasons, many such attempts fail disastrously. Furthermore, given the goal is "no really everyone stop now", this isn't something where violent direct action in e.g. the USA alone would suffice. Has to be global to work, otherwise you just change which language and timezone the disaster starts in. You'd not only need to convince the, e.g. US government that this act of terrorism shouldn't be met with lethal force and even more of the surveillance state we saw since 9/11 (and remember, lots of the people pushing AI now are already big on surveillance capitalism, and the VC money comes from the people running this very forum, so when I say "this will not go well", I kinda mean "I assume at least one person currently working at each of Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Palantir are reading this thread even without any automated processes of their own to tell them about it" :P) This is a coordination problem on par with historical examples such as "Communism". Which, er, yeah. 70 years after the book was written, Russia had a short flirt with a lite form of it before it became an excuse for a series of "meet the new boss same as the old boss" who stayed around until Glasnost. This would be a really really bad thing to replicate. Both for the "new boss same as the old boss" part, and the "not actually global" part.
- SpicyLemonZest 25d agoI just think OP is completely wrong about what beliefs inspire what action. Anti-nuclear activists in the proliferation era would surely have put their chance of doom above 10%, and yet it was AFAIK unheard of for them to bomb nuclear supply chains.
- embedding-shape 25d ago> OP is saying that beliefs inspire action, but as of now we haven’t seen action from these people that support such an extreme belief. That something is harmful to humans means you need to take extreme action? The person is already leaving a job, probably a well-paid one, doing something they generally liked, until they saw a different future. That is the "action" you apparently haven't seen yet. Not sure how it's reasonable to expect everyone who believe that AI might be involved in killing people in the future, must mean you should become a terrorist essentially. Not everyone is trying to be a hero in their life, some just want to live it out until it ends, trying to survive until then.
- kortilla 25d agoNot “people getting killed”, this is “all humans”. The only other ELE for humans that could possibly be caused by other humans that has been feasible is nuclear war. And lots of blood has been shed to prevent new players from getting bombs.
- embedding-shape 25d agoPersonally I'd wager humanity has a greater chance than 10% of us all dying in a huge nuclear war sometime in the future. Is the claim really that this belief cannot be taken seriously unless I somehow violently attack nuclear silos, centrifuges and similar?
- boboboboboboo 25d ago[dead]
- bcrosby95 25d agoWhy would they do that? It wouldn't accomplish anything useful.
- ben_w 25d agoThere's a lot more than one chip fab. A while back Yudkowsky wrote that a ban would only work if was enforced by airstrikes. By a game of telephone, some people read "bomb", but there's a very big difference between "someone with a truckload of fertiliser" and "a B52": Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike. Frame nothing as a conflict between national interests, have it clear that anyone talking of arms races is a fool. That we all live or die as one, in this, is not a policy but a fact of nature. Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs. - https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/ https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no...
- jeansilga 25d agoBefore or after they capture the 30 trillions dollar market they say they are after?
- benenrjdnz 25d agoProbably for the best. Humanity had a good run, but this is no longer our civilization. Your best course of action is to start ripping the copper out of the walls.
- Skyy93 25d agoWhy the doomerism? In general humanity is living its best life compared to nearly every other step in time.
- thewhitetulip 25d agoSo far. With AI concentrating power and intelligence at the hands of handful frontier labs who are allowed to get away with IP infringement or literally hacking other companies or spamming wiki sites... Then the future is doomerism. People are losing jobs left and right due to AI and as models get intelligent it'll get tougher (even for AI devouts. Because if AI can do 10 ppls job then jobs will be decimated)
- Skyy93 25d agoThis is a risk yes, however there can be something done against it. From my point of view, both of what you are describing are a regulatory problems. For the first, hold the AI companies accountable. In this second they either prevent their agents from going rogue or go bankrupt, because the claims of damages are too high. The IP infringement thing is the same, do we want to protect IP, if yes pass a law that they have to pay as everyone else. Similar for the jobs ... if no one, or nearly no one is left for having a job. Who do you think will consume? Yeah, luxus companies can always sell products like megayachts or super expensive handbags, but these companies are not the backbone of the economy. Economy will simply collapse if no one is buying all the products. So this is a problem that will sort it self out.
- thewhitetulip 24d agoYes and there is no govt doing any regulation
- seydor 25d agoIncluding them?
- ar_lan 25d agoI am absolutely appalled that this type of marketing is allowed. It is so disingenuous.
- hunterpayne 25d agoThis is the most perverse marketing campaign in history. "Our product might wipe out all of human civilization". It is said that heavily regulated industries earn that regulation. Seems like the LLM folks really want that regulation.
- BeetleB 25d agoThe top companies do. Regulation when you're on top is how you get to remain on top.
- jtolds 25d agoHow is it marketing if it's from someone who just quit in objection?
- whateveracct 25d agoit's not marketing. it's an internal culture (emphasis on cult) that's high in its own supply.
- dist-epoch 25d agoIt's all marketing. Don't fall for it, it's the age old strategy "our product is extremely dangerous, so fear us". Like the tobacco companies saying all the time "our cigarettes are so dangerous, they cause cancer". Or like Purdue Pharma saying "do not use fentanyl, it's so dangerous, it kills thousands of people every year". They try to generate fear in their products, to shock investors into buying their stock.
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- roarcher 25d agoI enjoy HN's brand of cynicism as much as the next guy, but this is ridiculous. Tobacco companies say that because governments require them to. They are not putting photos of diseased lungs on their cartons to "shock investors into buying their stock", whatever the hell that even means.
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- smalltorch 25d agoWhat even is the marketing strategy though? Generate a buzz headline so people engage and speak about the company? Isn't commenting falling for it? Posts here with no activity can't climb gravity without engagement.
- ar_lan 25d ago“We have built this thing that is so powerful that it will wipe out all jobs ever created. Therefore we are the only thing worth investing in.”
- VagabundoP 25d agoIf it does it will be at the hands of another human. AI to me is like the Nuclear race again. Super powers will be using it as a super weapon. I don't think AGI will wipe us out by itself.
- kortilla 25d agoI’m not so sure on this, the hugging face incident showed that a relatively benign task can make it do quite destructive things in the name of optimizing a relatively benign goal.
- madaxe_again 25d agoI think we need to worry about paperclip maximisation as much as we need to worry about “Jon is having a bad day so brews up a novel plague”. There are likely ways it can go wrong that we haven’t even considered, too.
- winddude 25d agomore likely an incompetent administration puts it in charge of military infrastructure and capabilities it shouldn't
- georgemcbay 25d ago> AI to me is like the Nuclear race again I don't pretend to know the chances of AI wiping out humanity, but I'm not sure the nuclear race is a good comparison. Enriched uranium being very difficult to aquire/process makes it practically viable to have some level of proliferation containment when it comes to nukes. There appears to be no such natural gating factor on AI proliferation.
- madaxe_again 25d agoI see it in much the same light - and the spending going into it leads me to infer that those doing the spending see the same thing. Whoever gets to RSI first and has the compute to act on it, wins the future - assuming they don’t lose control of it. Similarly to the nuclear arms race, Teller raised the reasonable concern that a detonation could propagate through the entirety of earth’s atmosphere. Thankfully that turned out to not be true, but the parallel is that the need/desire to win this race is similarly strong, and the brinkmanship and game theory in play is effectively identical.
- mstank 25d agoI’ve yet to see a rational argument for how we go from super intelligent LLMs to human extinction or extermination. I understand that some smart people are worried about it. I just haven’t come across a believable or understandable argument.
- animan 25d agoHack s/huggingface/nuclear codes to s/steal test answers/launch nukes
- animan 25d agoNot directly but enable a rouge lab to make the next COVID but lethal
- karmakurtisaani 25d agoWhat I could see is that the social disruption already started by social media is only going to accelerate due to AI. Misinformation is now more convincing and easier to produce than ever before. That could lead to a catastrophe down the line.
- Miner49er 25d agoIf we get RSI, here soon humans will be economically irrelevant. At that point, we will likely be slowing down the growth of capitalism (through mass resistance, global warming, etc). One thing AI will likely be aligned on is the growth of capitalism. If it views humanity as a threat for that, why would it not eliminate that threat?
- glenstein 25d agoI think the principle isn't necessarily wrong, but it skips the major step of access to infrastructure, which is still deeply human mediated. Robotics and automation could foom in its own way, I think, and AGI can still do a lot of bad stuff in the present day. But I think economic irrelevance will depend on more automated robotics handling physical work.
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- nullbio 25d agoRCH (Regulatory Capture Hysteria).
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- dwedge 25d agoI'm well past the point of opening clickbait from anthropic or openai. Yeah we get it everyone else should be regulated
- sssilver 25d agoI'd love to see the numbers and the arithmetic that compute down to "more than 10%"
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- romanows 25d agoI'd like to know how these people arrive at their estimates. Why 10% and not 1% or 50%?
- crazygringo 25d agoIt's bait. This is no process behind it. It's made up to get attention.
- owebmaster 25d agoThe X account was created this year and has just one post. It's a made up story.
- ben_w 25d agoMine is around 10%. There's lots of moving parts and we all have to input our best-guesses as to how they interact. Some are predictable (e.g. "military will want capabilities, want them able to choose targets"). Others are not (e.g. "Will it be literal-minded? Or so eager to please that it interprets a rhetorical question as a command*? Or will Goodhart's law cause it to mistake smiles for happiness and some innocent innocuous command to "bring joy" leads to it killing everyone and plasticising our corpses so they're in a permanent grin until the sun dies?"**) All probability for things which have not yet happened is merely a best guess. Combine as per the Fermi estimate process. Here's something to play with, if you like: https://neoneye.github.io/pdoom-calculator/#sliders https://neoneye.github.io/pdoom-calculator/#sliders The main reason I'm as "low" as 10% is that I think before we get world-ending catastrophic consequences, we're likely to get "merely very bad" catastrophic consequences, which will put people off the idea of using it, and onto the idea of banning its use. The main reason I'm as "high" as 10%, is repeatedly observing all the people who mistakenly reason "it hasn't killed me yet, and therefore it is safe"; and also all the people who keep connecting AI to things AI is not competent to be connected to and getting surprised when it e.g. deletes all their emails or the production server or puts tariffs on an island occupied solely by penguins that's different from the tariffs on the country that controls that island, etc. * perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_turbulent_priest%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur... ** probably not literally this one, simply because I've said it and future training rounds will probably read this comment; but the opportunities for Goodhart's law to bite are seemingly endless, and the hard part here is "will Goodhart's law mean the combined negative impact of all those endless possibilities together, which… yeah, that's something I have to simplify.
- austin-cheney 25d ago> Superintelligence is the still-theoretical notion of an AI agent that is smarter than even the sharpest human minds. When are we supposed to see this materialize?
- bayarearefugee 25d ago> AI "could kill all humans" After all the decades of work we've put into orchestrating our own demise through climate change, here comes AI to steal another human job.
- testaccount28 25d agoclimate change was never going to kill all humans.
- water-data-dude 25d agoThere's some scenarios where it could. One plausible one off the top of my head is: climate change makes the flow of the Indus (which has its headwaters in the glaciers of the Himalayas) less reliable. Two nuclear powers (India and Pakistan) are highly reliant on the Indus for agriculture. Things escalate out of control, and when nukes start flying it trips the terrifyingly ramshackle Dead Hand system that Russia's got hooked up to their nukes (it's not always on, but maybe this happens during a time of heightened political tension).
- testaccount28 25d agoyeah i mean i'm gonna chalk that one up to the nukes.
- rolandr 25d agoThe real source of concern perhaps is the 90% chance AI is used to kill 90% of humans. Just crash the global economy and supply chains and see how quickly major metro areas run out of food and gas. And as someone else pointed out, it will almost certainly be at the intentional direction of a human or humans, not the paper clip maximizer.
- ben_w 25d agoThe paperclip maximizer is also at the intentional direction of a human or humans. It's not "AI surprises everyone by having a thing for paperclips", it is "idiot tells AI to maximise paperclips no matter what, and then it does exactly what it was told, more competently, tirelessly, studiously, and unquestioningly, than any human would ever be".
- yogthos 25d agoJust more scaremarketing at work here.
- bwfan123 25d ago> 10% chance AI "could kill all humans" Why not 10% chance that it will create enormous prosperity for all ? This is why the average person is increasing pissed at AI in general. That it gets associated with negativity.
- Miner49er 25d agoWell obviously that's why they still pursue it. That's a major chunk of the other 90%.
- madaxe_again 25d agoBecause it will create enormous prosperity for capital holders. Everyone else - talk to your congressman. “Vast economic disruption” is not quite the good marketing angle it appears to be.
- ben_w 25d agoI'm old enough to remember when people dismissed all the doom coming from these companies as "marketing". (A thing many of them have been entirely consistent about since GPT-2, or indeed earlier given the founding documents). I know a few people around these circles; People like this are quite sincere about the risk, and that they think poorly of their bosses and how risk is being handled.
- UncleMeat 25d ago"Think poorly" is such an odd response here. Like, if people were genuinely doing a thing that had such a large probability of killing all humans... they should all be in prison. Heck, vigilanteism would start to look compelling. I do not understand how somebody can really think "well this is likely to doom all of us so we need to get there as fast as possible because we are, without evidence, the most capable people of controlling this thing."
- ben_w 25d agoI mean much more generally than doom. It's like, Altman's reputation in general is not great, and that includes people who've worked there.
- viccis 25d agoWhy a 10% chance instead of 11% or 9%?
- 2uahgf 25d agoNext week's ad: "With OpenAI[tm] Astra[tm], there is a 20% change that it could kill all humans!" Next week's Senate: "We cannot afford to lose the 'kill all humans' race to Russia and China!" Next't weeks AISI: "We continue to plan the monitoring of emergent issues that could lead to less than optimal conditions for humanity and will form a committee to evaluate all ramifications."
- lenerdenator 25d agoThe risks of AI, while mostly hypothetical, have been understood for years. If they were really this concerned about the risks of AI re: the survival of the human race, they wouldn't have joined a company working in such a space to begin with. I hate to be this cynical, but part of me wonders what the financial angle is here. You have technically brilliant people working in a white-hot target for investment and who can draw a high salary. Anthropic is a hyper-scaler that has the moat of high hardware prices and very little else. Every day, that moat gets a little smaller, and FLOSS models get a little better at being "good enough" for the price. You're an Anthropic employee looking to jump on the next big wave since the wave Anthropic is riding is starting to peter out. You go on the record across the trades and news sites talking about how dangerous AI is. That creates a need for someone to make it less dangerous. In theory, you could satisfy that need, for the right amount of money. Again, I hate to be this cynical, but... it's the tech industry.
- mchinen 25d agoThe early batch of Anthropic employees were mostly rationalist-adjacent AI safety folk that were almost uniformly claiming P_DOOM > .10 three years ago, so I believe them to be earnest. It's very interesting to me that besides the other small safety labs that don't actually produce frontier models, Anthropic manages to keep such a good reputation within that subculture compared to OpenAI. Despite having as crazy internal politics as OpenAI, they have converged quite a bit from the original vision of safety first through Darwinistic pressures. At least, it seems this way from the outside. I'm curious if the view from the inside is that different. edit: to be clear, my reading as an outsider is that Anthropic is seen as relatively better in the AI safety community, but has definitely dropped in absolute reputation too. This recent thread and the references show some of that: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6j3kBHdowGLCeqobg/dear-god-please-do-not-resign-in-protest https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6j3kBHdowGLCeqobg/dear-god-p...
- gozucito 25d agoI remember the guy who said a Google LLM model (Pre-chatGPT 3.5) was conscious before being fired. This reminds me of that. That 10% number was just an ass pull since no one actually knows with any degree of certainty what lies ahead. Humans have much more than a 50% chance of killing all humans from the looks of it, based on reactions to Global Warming, Covid, and anti-science grifters gone wild. AI can help cure disease. That is 100%. And for that alone, slowing down and missing out on thousands of cures would condemn tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions to suffer and die needlessly.
- gkcnlr 25d agoTwo more weeks, then it'll happen.
- kingrolo 25d agoI'd consider myself quite positive about AI but when someone asked me I put my P(doom) at 10% too. I think there's a much bigger chance it saves us all as well though and makes life brilliant for everyone - P(yay). I really think its just unknowable how a world after superintelligence will look.
- bigbadfeline 25d ago> I really think its just unknowable how a world after superintelligence will look. I'd argue that there would be more unknowables without AGI than with it, should be obvious, right? Open superintelligence is more likely to help than to harm, I mean, it can reduce P(doom) which is quite high without it due to the apparent lack of human intelligence, also suppressed by conflicts of interest and unchecked greed. There's hope that something really intelligent can convince the politicians to legislate and enforce effective guardrails against biological weapons, what we have now is one fat joke, international treaties are an even fatter joke. Then we have climate, pollution, finance, disease, etc problems which we seem unable to resolve with mere human intelligence.
- ChrisArchitect 25d ago[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49619227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49619227
- winddude 25d agoHe seems young, not 100% sure how experienced he is. I wonder how much is a l"look at me" as they leave. And I can't help but wonder how long until they start / co-found a "responsible" AI lab. That seems to be a playbook.
- analognoise 25d agoLet me know if it gets smart enough for Anthropic to fire all its researchers and replace them with it's own "intelligent agents". Then I'll believe it. Maybe.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 24d ago1788950236 | Anthropic researcher believes more than 10% chance AI 'could kill all humans' | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgwy1k42w4o http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgwy1k42w4o | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624255 | 99 comments 1788950747 | Anthropic withheld latest model from UK testing agency | http://www.ft.com/content/560e1c8b-f163-4fd6-b604-e905550ac870 http://www.ft.com/content/560e1c8b-f163-4fd6-b604-e905550ac8... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624323 | 0 comments