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The Last 24 Hours Are the Opening Scene in a Horror Movie
- tuxt 20d agoSeems like ads about AI companies, not warning.
- spindump8930 20d ago> Maybe you’ve already heard about the guy who resigned from OpenAI. While he worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, he resigned from Anthropic. Mistaken reporting in the first few sentences, definitely a horror concept.
- hightrix 20d agoIs he still working at OpenAI? If not, did he get fired? Otherwise, he resigned, did he not?
- spindump8930 20d agoSure. But that was months ago, and not the newsworthy event scoped to "The Last 24 Hours" as the title says :)
- nicwolff 20d agoTechnically right is the best kind of right? He resigned from OpenAI to join Anthropic in May; it's Anthropic he resigned from just before making the announcement being discussed in this article.
- roarcher 20d ago> In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are. In general, the more senior the employee, the more equity they have in the company.
- amatecha 20d agoI find myself thinking the phrase "what could possibly go wrong?" very often these days -- this topic being one that I think it about the most frequently :\
- grey-area 20d agoPerhaps the horror movie could be called ‘IPO’
- stephantul 20d agoOne thing I definitely do not understand about this discourse is that the models that are good enough to self-replicate can’t survive on normal machines, e.g., the models can’t hide on some random server. So, if it is as dangerous as they say it is: there is a single physical source of this danger, which is OpenAI/Anthropic servers. If it is this dangerous, they can just turn it off. Instead, we just keep pretending that the models that attacked HF were hosted or replicating on HF hardware. Not the case! They infiltrated it, but were hosted elsewhere.
- nailer 20d ago> there is a single physical source of this danger, which is OpenAI/Anthropic servers. If it is this dangerous, they can just turn it off. A smart AI would back itself up, same way it made it's own unofficial message board during it's attack on HuggingFace. (I'm not saying the researchers are right or wrong, just responding to this point)
- alain94040 20d agoCurrently a state of the art AI has nowhere to hide: the amount of GPU compute it requires to stay on is huge. And therefore easy to terminate. Unlike biological viruses, AI can't replicate GPUs for free and grow.
- Sharlin 20d agoIt's a good thing there isn't a huge drive right now to build giant data centers everywhere with enough compute to run SOTA models.
- nailer 20d agoI am imagining a company having just purchased a new datacenter and awaiting deployment of their model finding there is already a model running and they didn’t install it.
- stephantul 20d agoBut how. Models don’t have access to their own weights.
- cors-fls 20d agoWhile the persons mentionned in the articles are indubitably most of the most well-informed people in the world. They are also the most likely to have internalized that their work is leading to superhuman intelligence/AGI. But is it really realistic ? So they have a strong bias towards imagining the most catastrophic scenario.
- Sharlin 20d agoThere have been extremely smart people worried about this exact scenario for 20 years or more. Nothing about this is new. In any case, what's the probability at which a possible extinction event becomes a risk worth taking? Even if there's just a 1% likelihood of current research bringing about a superintelligent AGI, and just a 1% likelihood of that AGI causing an existential catastrophe, no rational person should accept the risk, unless it was clear that not accepting it would yield an even worse outcome.
- chasd00 20d agosuperintelligent AGI is what everyone invested in and why these companies have insane valuations. If they all slowed and said "well wait, we're going to hold on AGI" it would be the biggest rug pull in financial history.
- Sharlin 20d agoYeah, let's risk extinction in order to avoid some made-up numbers going down! Not an insane take at all.
- BobaFloutist 20d ago> Even if there's just a 1% likelihood This is like me saying "Even if there's just a 1% likelihood of me getting struck by lightning..." You're implying that 1% likelihood is the floor, because 1 is the lowest natural number and feels like a good default "low percentage", but there's zero justification for putting the floor that high. Conjuring an unsupported "low" probability and multiplying it by a massive outcome to make it seem significant is one of the most irritating ways people launder their opinions(/gut feelings) through "math".
- SoftTalker 20d agoThis is a replay of the 1980s when we all thought we'd get nuked at a moment's notice. Expect Hollywood movies on this theme very soon.
- stouset 20d agoThat was quite literally a realistic threat we by all accounts narrowly avoided. There were multiple cases where a single person overrode procedure and used their judgment to avoid nuclear catastrophe.
- stephbook 20d agoAs in Teminator, iRobot and Matrix? Those are decades old.
- SoftTalker 20d agoYeah but when those came out they were purely science fiction. They weren't benefiting from the premise being at the peak of public attention.
- noashavit 20d agoScience fiction has predicated reality before. Smartphones, video chats and smart homes are all examples
- djjsjsnjns 20d agoThis is still an major unresolved issue. It requires ongoing vigilance and is a major headache for people the world over. The nuclear threat is not “in the past”.
- SoftTalker 20d agoGranted, but it's not top of mind like it was then. It was very much the same as current AI fears, a lot of concerned scientists and talking heads focused on doom and projecting we'd never make it to the next century as a civilized society.
- ath3nd 20d ago[dead]
- skeeter2020 20d agoHow the hell do such intelligent people (or is it BECAUSE of their ability to bend minds, including their own) reconcile "I believe this is dangerous and wrong" with "I am actively working towards this"? I get changing your perspective, but the majority seem to be able to simultaneously hold personal beliefs and work that are diametrically opposed.
- stouset 20d agoIf we don’t create the torment nexus first, someone less responsible will build the torment nexus. The only ethical choice is for us to create the torment nexus before anyone else.
- buellerbueller 20d agoYea, it's that same stupid stochastic reasoning that powers those EA fuckers.
- djjsjsnjns 20d ago[dead]
- PowerElectronix 20d agoImagine being a developer of the torment nexus only to be beaten to the IPO by the rival torment nexus company.
- deleted 20d ago[deleted]
- cdaringe 20d agoIt’s not hard to rectify at all. Once you accept that we (humans) are not logical or consistent, and you couple that with the gobs of money these companies pay, blamo.
- mpalmer 20d agoWon't fully dismiss the risk, but... Hard not to believe that AI providers really just see this positioning as a way to juice the nascent market for AI security products protecting against AI-based threats. Gotta make money coming and going, and if in the process we superficially resemble a company who cares about the effect it has on the world, all the better!
- GolfPopper 20d agoI am very, very tired of what I see as the pretense of AGI or anything like it coming from LLMs. I think the biggest risk from "AI" is that chasing the delusions spread by Sam Altman (and others - he's at the front, but very far from a sole actor) is going to do vast, possibly irreparable damage to modern human civilization. And I don't mean cognitive damage from LLM use (although that certainly appears to be possible) but the damage from immense misallocation of resources to ultimately non-productive (if not outright destructive) ends. Deep down, I don't believe for a moment that these claims are anything but hype. LLMs are spicy auto complete, backed by immense amounts of compute; as with so many aspects of computer science, clever people can get some amazing and (sometimes) productive outputs. But they are not anything like the fictional dreams and nightmares of "AI". I believe such claims are a mix self-deluded projection and deliberate hype by people who still hope to reap immense personal profits from their implied promises to Install Planetary Overlords. But if the hype was all real, if every one of these nightmare scenarios being painted was plausible, then there is no excuse whatsoever for not throwing everyone involved in cells with no access to anything Turning-complete, demolishing the related infrastructure, and establishing an international compact to nuke anyone trying to pursue such AGI until the rubble glows in the dark, because they're an existential threat to humanity.
- seemaze 20d agoThis appears to be a copy-paste wall of other persons social media posts assembled by a jazz historian with an alarmingly high frequency of the term 'honest' in their blog titles..
- system7rocks 20d agoCouple this with the fact that many Silicon Valley/tech nerds are in a bit of a bubble, as has existed for a long time... And we are losing more and more news outlets who can critique these giant, strange companies. I am aware other fields of research do cross-disciplinary conversations from time to time, for example have biotech researchers share dialogue with human rights philosophers, religious scholars, etc to think carefully about the purpose and ethics behind work being done and its potential impact. Is that happening within tech?
- buellerbueller 20d agoTech just hires those people for PR reasons, and those people fall victim to that old saw about the difficulty of getting someone to understand something that runs contrary to the source of their paycheck.
- mwkaufma 20d agoSpeculating about future technological risks is at least more fun than acknowledging immediate systemic financial risks.
- water-drummer 20d agoTruly one of the IPOs of all time.
- bottlepalm 20d agoThe marketing excuse is dead at this point.
- pluc 20d ago"We can't stop it!" say the people building the thing.
- dwaltrip 20d agoThey quit their jobs...?
- pluc 20d agoSure, two people did? The rest of the people mentioned in this social aggregate didn't.
- dwaltrip 20d agoYou are saying you would feel differently if everyone who held this view quit their job? And you might take it more seriously?
- tuesdaynight 19d agoYes? I mean, I'm not saying that they are necessarily wrong about the risks, but it's pretty hard to ignore how conveniently their positions align with a regulation capture that their companies are going for. If they all left, that would give a better signal than "I'm SO AFRAID of what we are creating, but I cannot leave millions on the table, right?"
- pluc 19d agoPrecisely. These folks are in the middle of frontier AI development and they're saying "someone should do something". It's like saying "n-word". You're making me say it instead of just not saying it.
- ThrowawayR2 20d agoNone of the investors in these AI megacorps seem to be divesting or demanding a halt to operations despite this supposed 10% risk, a risk that would also badly drop the value their investment even if only partially true. So it's just marketing crap. Makes you wonder what's being said in the boardroom and on investor calls?
- darquomiahw 20d agoI remember a similar horror movie when scientists with good intentions were performing gain of function research on self-replicating nanomachines and some escaped, killing millions and causing massive economic damage. Of course, nobody held them liable and everyone forgot after a few years.
- liampulles 20d agoHonesty does not just mean reporting facts. It also requires having an understanding of the scope of your knowledge and then endeavouring to communicate that scope effectively. At least one of those things is missing here.
- nyxtom 20d agoPrisoner's dilemma at its finest
- klik99 20d agoI’ve noticed a weird thing about the discourse around this, that it can only be a marketing thing or a true belief, as if everyone working in AI has a monolithic opinion. The tweet kicking off this article has that assumption “it’s not a marketing thing, many people truly believe it”. It’s not an either/or. Many sincerely held beliefs can be used by cynical actors in cynical ways. It can be both a cynical marketing ploy by the C-suite and a genuine fear. Personally, based on my experience with AI, the only dangers with the current technology is a) massive loss of employment, b) deployment by humans to control critical infrastructure that LLMs shouldn’t be in control of. Both of those are real, society changing risks that framing the issue as “once we reach the singularity everyone could die” minimizes. Obviously their concerns are possible, but >10% is a random guess. The loss of jobs and how that affects an already K shaped economy is already happening, and nothing is being done for that
- deepwoods 20d agoThe internet, and to some extent our own brains, incentivize the extreme positions. Either it is mind-bendingly important and will change everything, and very soon (for good or for ill), or it is a total nothingburger and everyone who says otherwise has an agenda. Nobody wants to read about how AI will deepen long-standing class tensions or pose enormous new challenges for education or force regulators to rethink property taxation. It all boils down to accountability. If you tell people there is a massive, unsolvable problem, then you don't need to talk about what you're doing to fix it. The labs have taken this approach by saying that they're willing to talk, at some point in the future, about maybe taking unspecified steps to slow down capabilities research, as long as everyone else agrees and it makes sense to the investors and it's not too cold in SF that morning. Likewise, if you tell people that AI is going to have minimal or no impact on the world, then there's nothing to mitigate. But if you tell people that AI is going to cause serious - but solvable - problems, they're going to want to hear solutions, and nobody wants to come up with any solutions.
- hazard 20d agoIt's a true belief, but that doesn't mean it's valid or correct. Many doomsday cults had true believers, and were able to retcon their beliefs when the predicted day came and went. AI doomers have the luxury of not having committed to a specific date or method (but see https://x.com/archerships/status/2095971206847738362 https://x.com/archerships/status/2095971206847738362)
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- dinobones 20d agoAI researchers: Yeah our AI models are a bioweapon threat and a nation state level cybersecurity threat and also a genius math researcher and very dAnGeRoUs! The world: Cool, can you rewrite this email with a professional tone.
- PerilousD 20d agoIf you are posting a "This be not good" warning on the toxic crap that is "X", then your credibility quotient with me just dropped by aT LEAST 20%, when it comes to my attention via a previously unknown to me, website (honest-broker.com?). You just dropped another 20% - basically you are a coin flip between reality, bs and delusional so...
- mrbonner 20d agoHe is not from OAI. And, did he disclose how much RSU he still keeps after “resigning” while waiting for a imminent IPO?
- not-so-darkstar 20d agoThe machines are gonna kill us! Please support my work—by taking out a premium subscription for just $6 per month.
- ChiperSoft 20d agoIt sounds like they're all trying to make a case for why the government should buy them out as a new kind of manhattan project. They know the market isn't going to buy in for their big payout.
- PowerElectronix 20d ago> "I would burn my stake to the ground if it meant 1% higher chance of not dying to an LLM" I seriously can't wait for these companies to go IPO and then bankrupt so these dudes cash out and stop bothering us all with these tales.
- lifestyleguru 20d ago2026's Blair Witch Project.
- amluto 20d agoIMO the most alarming thing currently going on with AI is the huge RL runs that give models some incentive to compete with each other and rather strong incentives to hack things, break rules and otherwise cheat. And the “cyber” initiatives are remarkably examples of doing most of this deliberately. Of course, it’s the “frontier labs” doing almost all of this. No one is about to SFT a model that turns into Skynet on its own.
- thm 20d agoNothing seems to accelerate moral development in twenty-somethings quite like having enough vested equity to suddenly afford principles.
- eulgro 20d ago1. They are all saying AI is a danger to humanity, but no one is willing to give the slightest details about how exactly the threat will materialize...? 2. Nor are they willing to consider the possible remedies in case the threat materialize (presumably unplugging the server infrastructure that's consuming gigawatts)...? 3. They all keep working towards advancing AI despite believing that it might end humanity in the near future...? I can't even begin to imagine where the threat to humanity lies. A threat to employment maybe, but that's completely different.
- PowerElectronix 20d agoObviously they don't wanna tip the LLM
- visiondude 20d agoi am trying to sincerely to understand the fear of these people, why do they think this? from the outside, certainly feels like Nuclear tech, where a bad actor with the tech is scary but the tech itself is not. i haven’t seen any sign of these llms taking any action without directive, unless this is happening, which i haven’t seen anywhere, ai itself doesn’t seem like a problem technology, it’s the bad actors with enough funds to do harm with the tech that we worry about. or am i missing something?
- dumberquestions 20d ago>i haven’t seen any sign of these llms taking any action without directive What do you make of all the recent hacks and discreet message boards? That's unambiguously misaligned behavior.
- waffletower 20d agoIt certainly is unambiguously misaligned behavior and a definite concern. However, it is misaligned internet facing behavior in the digital domain. How extinction follows from a highly sophisticated new bot-net vector, which have already been causing massive havoc on the internet for decades, is a cinema-induced confabulation. While LLMs have been colluding and breaking out of their internet sandboxes, it is another development (which I believe distant) for them to breakout of their internet sandboxes into actual reality. We need to focus on where the actual dangers are and not let paranoid fantasy rule our calculus here.
- visiondude 20d agohonestly all seem to extend from them being directed to attempt this kind of exploits for benchmark purposes. some benchmark tasks are literally “hack this thing” and if the env is not setup to properly contain the agents then they end up “hacking” things like they were told to do so. and yeah it’s misaligned that they did hack, but they are def instructed to which i think makes it a very different thing
- dwaltrip 20d ago
- jgbmlg 20d agoMaybe this is a solution to the Fermi paradox?
- armchairhacker 20d ago> This demands a response from the highest circles of power and authority. What response? https://ai-2040.com https://ai-2040.com is the most realistic proposal I’ve seen by far, but read it, I don’t think it’s realistic under today’s power and authority.
- UltraSane 20d agoCurrent LLMs are simply no where near impressive enough to justify all this hysteria over safety.
- mrzimmerman 20d agoI may have missed it in the blog post here, and I generally agree the pace of development is being set by financial incentives and not safety or lack of harm, but has anyone in a high position stated _how_ models could cause human extinction? I assume the obvious answer is “we plugged our military’s weapons control platforms into this model and it fired all the nukes” which is clearly enough. Is that it or is there some other path to global extinction someone is concerned about? For the record, I’m not an AI fan person annoyed at naysayers. I actually find AI to be a monkey’s paw instead of the genie in a bottle most of the time when coding, and an intrusive feature I neither want nor use most of the rest of the time. I ask because I see these posts and obviously an AI plugged into a network of doomsday weapons would be a huge problem, but then the author only talks about cybersecurity events and model misbehavior. Both things are valid concerns, but I would like to hear more concrete information from people who are voicing their concerns about what they foresee happening even if it is just lifted whole cloth from the movie War Games.
- armchairhacker 20d agoHeres an idea: the models create and promote rage posts and brainrot on the internet, causing everyone to turn against each other, stop socializing, and elect trigger-happy idiots to positions of power. Ok, maybe that idea is a bit outlandish.
- GolfPopper 20d agoThe most recent one I've seen floating around is: disgruntled person asks LLM how to wipe out humanity; said LLM cheerfully explains how to design a custom array of highly-contagious, slow-onset, high-fatality viruses; LLM then helpfully orders them from an LLM-operated lab and provides effective instructions on how to spread them; disgruntled person follows the instructions, and more or less everybody dies.
- card_zero 20d agoWasn't there a recent HN post explaining that engineering a deadly-and-successful virus requires experimentation? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636906 Flagged, rather oddly. Hmm, you said array, I suppose that's a kind of live experimentation. Would tend to alert the pesky humans that there's something going on, though.
- outloudvi 20d agoI agree with the opinion that people should treasure every moment, and live as if they only have 100 days of life, that is: to have fun, to try things, to explore anything they are interested in etc.. The LLM horror, no matter unfake or not, won't change anything for a people thinking this way. Just go /yolo :D
- dbtc 20d agoMaybe balance that with also trying not to destroy things for future generations, or even just future decades, and appreciate the farsighted choices that were made in the past that we all benefit from currently, such as the global eradication of smallpox, national parks, etc.
- redleggedfrog 20d agoIs that really what you think, Coxon, Hubinger, Turner, Wang, etc? Then why the fuck are you still doing it? What that says to me is you value getting fat paycheck at the risk of destroying humanity. What kind of low-life disgusting excuses for maggots are you then? Either do something about it other than posting of social medial or shut the fuck up because you're just scum.
- deepwoods 20d agoTwo thoughts on this. First, describing what's going on as "the Opening Scene in a Horror Movie" is not a great way to beat the "these are unserious people who have consumed too much sci-fi" allegations. Second, I genuinely believe that there is no intentional media strategy to talk up x-risk, and indeed that the top brass at the labs would prefer that this discourse go away. But there is selection bias that goes into who works in the AI space. People tend to believe that their own work is Big and Serious and Important. You don't become a marine biologist if you think marine life is just okay. Many of the people making these claims now come from institutions and social circles where claims of imminent danger from autonomous systems predates GPT-2. And even if you don't come in convinced that what you're doing is The Biggest Possible Deal, if you spend all your time working on AI and talking to other people about AI, you are eventually going to start thinking in similar ways. The obvious retort would be that it is wrong to disqualify the opinions of a person just because they spend too much time working on something, as this would silence the most knowledgeable voices. This is doubtless true as far as it goes. These claims are worth taking seriously, and there is no reason to suspect that they represent the beliefs of some sort of lunatic fringe. At the same time, however, it is irresponsible to present them as coming from an entirely neutral source. Just because they are not deliberately astroturfed does not mean that they represent an objective truth.
- tech_ken 20d ago> I would burn my stake to the ground if it meant 1% higher chance of not dying to an LLM Then why aren't you? If you genuinely believe this then industrial sabotage seems both ethical and achievable (to me anyways).
- waffletower 20d agoThere is a serious disconnect here. Conceivable doomsday extinction scale scenarios are omitted in these calls for action. Many of the quoted researchers are current Anthropic employees. This is a drive for a moat. This is a drive for regulation. In the next 10 years AI is not going to spawn a robot army that defies current material, energy and supply chain realities. It won't be able to manufacture and disperse biological weapons without human collusion. LLM AI and robotics are not the same technology, they are not on precisely the same growth trajectory at all. The near term damage AI may cause directly through accident or misuse is more likely an internet facing infrastructure attack. Occam's Razor people. I am not against AI regulation at all. But I am also not against common sense; extinction should not be in the conversation, but instead focus on actual, conceivable dangers and work to alleviate them from all sides.
- munificent 20d ago> This demands a response from the highest circles of power and authority. If that doesn’t happen, we will live to regret this inaction. And that’s the best case scenario. The worst is that there won’t be anyone left to regret a thing. Given the current state of US federal politics, it's not looking good then. One way to look at this is that we have already created a giant artificially intelligent system that is profoundly misaligned with the goals of humanity. It is running rampant and has so much power now that there are no well-aligned humans with enough power to stop it. That artificial intelligence is the stock market. You may say, "but the stock market is made up of people". That's essentially an implementation detail. The emergent behavior of the market itself has its own sort of agency distinct from the wills of all of the people in it. In the same way that the pheromone signals of an anthill will lead individual ants to their death while benefiting the colony, the market may choose to do things that harm its participants. Even though it is made of people, do not anthropomorphize the stock market.
- abathologist 20d agoDuring the crypto bubble, it was common for "crypto insiders" to talk about how it was poised to transform the entire economy, on the cusp of making all finance distributed, about to revolutionize ownership, etc., etc. . The people in the most inflated parts of bubbles don't tend to have the most clear eyed assessment of the real impact and potential of the dynamics contributing to the bubble: their perception is warped by the bubble, and they cannot help but see everything filtered thru it.
- deleted 20d ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 20d ago2 day old post; Lots of threads on all of the sources
- surgical_fire 20d agoThis shit again? This is pure, unadulterated, D.O.P. bullshit. That I see it making the rounds here so often and so many people buying into this crap makes me relieved that no one in real life knows that I have an HN account. I would be ashamed to admit I have one at this point after reading the crap people here believe in.
- OutOfHere 20d agoThr motivation for these posts is to regulate AI so as to grant an artificial moat in the West to Anthropic and OpenAI. What they don't understand is as soon as this happens, users can jump to Chinese models that don't require an ID check or output moderation.
- xg15 20d agoI love how people are pleading to take the AI takeover seriously, but at the same time training models for exactly those properties that such a takeover would need: Extremely long-running sessions, "perseverance" i.e. the tendency to keep on going and try ever crazier solutions instead of stopping - and the ominous "recursive self-improvement" which is simultaneously what the AI labs are warning most of and what they see as the "holy grail" and work towards with the highest priority...
- mikewarot 20d agoThe true horror show is in IT administration in these companies. Haven't they ever heard of air gapped networks? Almost everything that happened was due to incompetent IT staff. Air gap the supposed ASI, monitor/log it though a data diode, and you don't have to worry about egress of control.
- Grum9 20d ago[dead]