6 ms·

P(doom)

158 points by lumpa 19d ago

demibabs 18d ago
I’m not the biggest fan of Ed Zitron, but something he said that stuck with me is: OpenAI and Anthropic spend much time warning us about “what if powerful AIs got into the wrong hands?” But it’s already in the wrong hands.
- passive 18d ago
  Just the fact that Musk is in the conversation, and he's one of the most hated people on the planet, should give anyone pause as to whether we want these folk in charge of our future to any degree at all.
  - monomyth 18d ago
    non sequitur
    - genxy 18d ago
      pareto parrot
    - dakolli 18d ago
      I think it has everything to do with the subject at hand. Elon, Dario and Altman are all terrible human beings, along with 99.99% of the rest of the ruling class. We don't need any of them, and we definitely shouldn't trust a single syllable that comes out their mouth.
      - qup 18d ago
        Young people who start companies that become successful are now "the ruling class"?
        hdgvhicv 18d ago
        Money equals power. If you have the wealth you have the control. Any politicians are owned by you as you simply threaten to buy their opponent. The public can be brainwashed by a trillion dollar advertising industry. You own the platforms everyone communicates on. You have inprecented resources to bend the world to your will and your only competiton is other people equally wealthy.
        wpm 18d ago
        Yes.
        qup 11d ago
        It's me! I'm ruling!
        dakolli 18d ago
        [flagged]
  - wincy 18d ago
    I think there are plenty of people that like Elon Musk. They just know to keep their mouth shut in front of the people that act like he’s the Antichrist.
    - tuatoru 18d ago
      And still others who think he has an difficult personality and set of beliefs, but who greatly respect his achievements.
    - ascorbic 18d ago
      Those are not incompatible. He can still be one of the most hated people on the planet, even if lots of people like him. The same would apply to all of the most hated people in history.
    - customguy 18d ago
      No, they don't keep their mouth shut, they just don't have any relevant arguments. Many people are liked by plenty people and also not hated for doing Hitler salutes and the like. That's the part that matters, not that "somebody likes them", which is true for everyone. Charles Manson had women lining up to marry him, so?
    - hdgvhicv 18d ago
      There are plenty who like him. There are plenty who wave confederate flags. There are plenty who support the mass corruption of the current administration. You’re technically correct yes.
      - falserum 18d ago
        “Technically correct" means a statement or action follows strict rules or exact facts precisely, even if it ignores the wider meaning or real-world intention. I think op was also actually-correct. (For better or worse, that is the objective reality; Musk still has lot of fans)
        sjbzbeiks 18d ago
  - deleted 18d ago
    [deleted]
  - sph 18d ago
    Somehow I’m more afraid of it being in the hands of Altman, with his ‘I’m creating a better world for everyone’ god complex, than Musk who is just a run-of-the-mill sociopathic nerd. There is no one is more dangerous than one who believes he is doing the right thing.
    - hdgvhicv 18d ago
      Someone with the resources to do things is far more dangerous than someone without. If you local librarian thinks He is doing the right thing he’s not going to cause massive war or destroy the economy and wipe out 2/3rd of crops. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. People like musk, altman, trump have unprecedented power in history - far more than the kings of medieval times.
      - sph 18d ago
        Thank you, but we're discussing who's the worse to decide the fate of humanity between Amodei, Musk and Altman, not if one should be afraid of their local librarian. All three currently hold a lot of power in their hands. Though I know I attracted all the downvotes for not agreeing with most Americans that Musk is the worst person since Adolf.
    - shakna 18d ago
      Sociopathic nerd, putting an awful lot of money into legalising CSAM, and interfering in elections domestic and foreign. Dunno if I'd rank Musk's danger down - he screams a certain ideology these days. He might well believe he is doing the right thing.
      - falserum 18d ago
        > awful lot of money into legalising CSAM Could I ask what you have in mind (I doubt there was a US bill for that; google won’t help me without knowing what to look for)
        shakna 18d ago
  - brainwad 18d ago
    Musk being in the conversation is a great justification for Anthropic accelerationism. Who wants to live in the world where _Musk_ controls the AGI?
    - cyanydeez 18d ago
      I'm pretty sure the odds arn't 1/3, AI saves us. The thing that ties these three people together is money. Money is what will turn them to assholes, more than anything else. Now AI is likely just as, if not worse, than having a bunch of lackeys telling your farts, shits and piss liven up whatever room you're shitting in.
  - timmg 18d ago
    > he's one of the most hated people on the planet Not saying you need to like Musk or his politics. But if he really is "one of the most hated people on the planet" it doesn't really say good things about the planet. He made electric cars viable. That is probably the single biggest thing helping us mitigate climate change. It would have come eventually, for sure. But he accelerated it. He also accelerated the space age. Maybe it doesn't impress everyone. But I think what SpaceX has done is amazing.
    - dabauws 18d ago
      he can have done all of those great things and still be a twat.
    - nvme0n1p1 18d ago
      > He made electric cars viable. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning made electric cars viable. Then 5 years later Musk became CEO of the company and started claiming he was a cofounder.
      - timmg 18d ago
        Dude. Electric cars have existed since the 1800s. Musk was the one that actually made them a practical thing. And most of the rest of the world is well on their way to electrifying their transportation.
    - rewgs 18d ago
      He bought a car company and convinced everyone he founded it. But that's not the problem, really -- the problem is that everyone fawning over him and calling him the "real-life Tony Stark" wasn't enough for his blackhole of an ego. He's a Sieg Heil-ing man-baby who's so fragile he paid people to play video games for him. He called a a guy trying to save children a pedophile just because the guy rightly pointed out Elon's idea was stupid. He has a weird breeder fetish, while disowning children who call him out for his hateful, moronic politics and horrendous parenting (or lack thereof). He's illegally influenced elections and very potentially put his thumb on the scale. I could go on and on. The only thing that worries me about him being one of the most hated people on the planet is that not everyone thinks so and that he still somehow has fans.
- fragmede 18d ago
  It could be in worse hands though. Sama may be no saint, but better in his hands than Aum Shinrikyo fanatics.
  - deleted 18d ago
    [deleted]
- slim 18d ago
  The whole world is in the wrong hands. Having AI in charge can represent hope actually.
  - blooalien 18d ago
    > Having AI in charge can represent hope actually. If we can get "AI in charge" that was developed and is overseen by genuinely ethical individuals who truly and deeply understand the technology and how it actually works ... then maybe that might be true.
passive 18d ago
This is the closest to my feelings about this entire situation I've ever seen written, covering a lot of the different facets of how stupid and painful it is (though it's been a good week for that kind of post.) Since I have incredible respect for Armin and his work, this is very nice to see, and I hope it wakes some other folk up.
1986 18d ago
He really elides his thoughts on the "RSI business", wish he could have gone into a bit more depth there. Good post, though.
- einrealist 18d ago
  Can't imagine that RSI will result in something useful in practice. There are serious obstacles like alignment drift and model collapse. All while we still cannot solve the accuracy problem with current frontier models.
- the_mitsuhiko 18d ago
  I really don't know anything here, but I'm assuming that Astra's weird coding [1] is probably more a result of RSI than intentional behavior. And if it's not, then it's some other change in their training process. [1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/ https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/
esafak 18d ago
wtf?? P(doom) relates to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artifici... How would open source models bring about a MAD between humans and AI? By enabling us to wield aligned AI against nonaligned AI? If so, he should say so, and elaborate how open source models further that goal.
- skissane 18d ago
  I think AI diversity protects against rogue AIs. The more different AIs we have, with different weights, controlled by different actors, the less likely that any one AI will be able to "take over", and the less likely that a significantly large coalition of cooperating AIs will be able to be formed to do it either. With sufficient AI diversity, the other AIs may work to stop the rogue AI from taking over. Two AIs with radically opposed values – e.g. an Iranian-government-values AI and a Chinese-government-values AI – have the incentive to cooperate to prevent a takeover by some other AI with a third competing set of values. Obviously, open weight AI provides much higher AI diversity than closed weight AI does. Open weight AI produces a lot more providers, and a lot more models. Closed AI centralises control in a small number of vendors. > By enabling us to wield aligned AI against nonaligned AI? The risk isn't just "nonaligned AI", it is misaligned AI. I think the "benevolent dictatorship" scenario – AI overrules humans "for their own good" – is the more likely doomsday scenario than AI deciding to kill all humans. And even AI deciding to kill all humans could be more a result of misalignment than complete lack of any alignment, e.g. "to make sure no child is ever abused again, I will make sure no child is ever again born to risk being abused". A valueless AI which does whatever the user says is actually less likely to establish a benevolent dictatorship, or conclude that exterminating humanity would be the most ethical course of action, than one infused with values is. Given that, I'm not convinced that mainstream approaches to "AI safety" actually reduce our existential risk; I worry they actually have the opposite effect.
  - solenoid0937 18d ago
    "AI diversity" does nothing when AIs can attack at incredible speed, when compute imbalances exist, etc
chis 18d ago
> I don’t think AI is going to usher in an extinction event. In fact, even if nobody were to slow down, I really don’t think humanity would have much to worry about. I mean sure. If you feel that way then your p doom is zero, and it makes sense to worry about things like market concentration or losing the fun of software engineering.
- goatlover 18d ago
  Problem with p doom is I have no way to seriously evaluate anyone's percentage. The best I can do is rely on experts in a given field, like the recent virologist making a convincing case that no teenager is going to be prompting a doomsday virus into existence, because one doesn't exist and is unlikely to be made. There are too many biological tradeoffs and extremely difficult steps to doing so. So I'm going to assume that the p doom for bioweapons is 0 in terms of existential threat (pandemics kill millions but not everyone).
  - chis 15d ago
    Personally I didn't find that guy very convincing. I think current frontier AI would already probably enable a non-expert to do gain-of-function work on a virus which could result in something like Covid. And AI looks to keep getting better, and if it does then I don't see why it wouldn't become superhuman in virus design too.
cat-whisperer 18d ago
I agree. It is telling that Dario's post arrived after Astra. The call to "pace the frontier" may come from genuine concern, but it also protects the position of companies already at the frontier. That competitive incentive is hard to separate from the safety argument.
- nullbio 18d ago
  After DeepSeek v4.1 Flash too.
- NiloCK 18d ago
  This is unfair. Dario signed the Pacing the Frontier open letter when Fable/Mythos seemed from the outside to be an insurmountable lead. Also he's been saying versions of this day in and day out for as long as he has had anyone's ear. It's possible to read that his "strategic" value of this statement is higher now than it was 10 days ago. But that doesn't change anything about his consistent, long standing, positions. - https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/ https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/
  - vdomi 18d ago
    He says something and does something else. How is it unfair?
- baq 18d ago
  if you agree, your p(doom) is 0.
ilyaizen 18d ago
There are really only two companies: Anthropic and OpenAI. Nobody else matters in this space right now (this might change, but we’re talking about the right now). I like how he so casually dismissed all other labs, including leading US labs that might be nearing RSI right now. And how he treats 'right now' so rigidly, as if seven years ago, when GPT-2 was released, was some distant past.
- Philpax 18d ago
  Are these other labs in the room with us now? No, seriously, I'm all for a multipolar world here, but he's right that the frontier is literally just those two companies at present. Google is behind. MSL is doing better, but not by much. xAI is a dysfunctional joke. Thinking Machines aren't on the frontier. SSI's primary output is their announcement post. Poolside was bought by NVIDIA. Arcee aren't vying for frontier. Magic have been largely AWOL, aside from their recent blog post. Reflection have shipped nothing.
  - ilyaizen 18d ago
    Are you suggesting that models like Muse Spark 1.3, Grok 4.6 High, Kimi K3 Max, GLM-5.3 Max, Qwen 3.8 Max, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Agnes 3.0 Flash, Fugu Max, and others are so far behind GPT-6 Astra or Claude Fable 5.1 in capabilities that they have some sort of impenetrable moat that will prevent others from ever catching up or something?
    - Philpax 18d ago
      No, but I am suggesting that OpenAI and Anthropic are further down the RSI path than any of the other companies, as we can see from the model that solved Navier-Stokes being less than two weeks old at the time: https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/ https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/
      - sdenton4 18d ago
        If four other labs are six months behind, it really doesn't matter in the long term: in six months, they'll all have these capabilities. Time does not stop moving forward! We haven't seen real moats aside from capital in this space, and even the effect of capital seems to only give a thin, easily eroded edge.
hypfer 18d ago
> We should be glad that China is currently massively bailing out the world. If it were not for Chinese labs distilling American models, we would be in a pretty awful situation right now, particularly as Europeans. The open weight models are driving innovation and the diffusion of capabilities, and are leveling the playing field. This feels like the whole story of hackable IoT/Smarthome repeating again.
bryan0 18d ago
> A powerful technology that is out there for everyone to use comes with built-in pacing. In a way it’s the truest form of MAD or proliferation. I think this misunderstanding of MAD undermines his entire point. If everyone had equal access to nuclear weapons, our society would cease to exist rather quickly. It only takes a few bad actors to cause enormous harm. I think he’s also naive to think that if open ai and anthropic were to stop development tomorrow then the problem is solved. As if there’s no one else that can and will quickly take their place. The real problem, which Dario is pointing out, is one of coordination. Everyone needs to agree to stop. That is the challenge.
- viccis 18d ago
  >Everyone needs to agree to stop. That is the challenge. These kinds of situations are incredibly common and where the government stepping in is the solution, but we were cursed to encounter this particular challenge with the most venal administration in history at the helm.
  - baq 18d ago
    There are governments plural which need to agree to stop and historically I can think of freon, leaded gasoline and IAEA and the latter didn't do as good of a job as it was meant to do (but arguably as good of a job as was politically possible)
    - DennisP 18d ago
      Also arms control agreements, which reduced the world's nuclear stockpiles by 90%. In principle we could do something similar for GPU farms, since they're not exactly easy to hide.
    - FabHK 18d ago
      Indeed. Even supranational coordination should be possible, given that extinction means extinction for everyone, and your excellent examples show the possibility. But then, here we are, and the FT just reported: > Donald Trump rejects calls from tech bosses for AI slowdown > President denounces demands for regulation as existential fears over technology move to the centre of US politics
deleted 18d ago
[deleted]
pandoro 18d ago
I cannot fathom how you can intensely work on a problem that you genuinely believe has a "10 to 25%" probability of causing immense harm or even present an extinction-level risk to humanity. How can you truly believe this and be ok with it?
- mchinen 18d ago
  I posted this comment on the last doom post: The 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-p https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6j3kBHdowGLCeqobg/dear-god-p...
  - moreati 18d ago
    > they have converged quite a bit from the original vision of safety first do you mean diverged? As in they've moved away from the original vision.
    - mchinen 18d ago
      Ah, I mean the AI companies converged to look more similar to each other, and at the same time diverged from the original vision for safety.
- throwuxiytayq 18d ago
  Do you genuinely believe people always act logically? I don't know a single person that does. Don't underestimate the human capability to hold several completely contradictory beliefs with zero self-reflection. There's physicists who believe in god, for fuck's sake. > How can you truly believe this and be ok with it? Are you saying they don't truly believe this, or that they aren't OK with it?
saidnooneever 18d ago
>>> Except, it seems like OpenAI and Anthropic are operating at such a scale that they seemingly can be completely blind to what their systems are doing. It always surprises me that people build systems they cannot monitor properly..Then i remember, they can do it, but it costs them too much. Just because its AI doesn't mean u cannot filter and monitor its traffic and outputs.
- polytely 18d ago
  yeah their irresponsible behaviour doesn't match their stated concern about doom at all.
Lerc 18d ago
The problem that I see with most P(doom) scenarios proposed seem to include the same set of presumptions that, if true, quite likely doom us anyway. I do not think they are true but I find it amazing that people not so much disagree, but simply dismiss the alternatives out of hand. First of all, if you are to consider the consequences of Artificial Superintelligence then you have free reign to stipulate it's occurrence, otherwise you are just talking about a tool for humans to misuse. We already have multiple ways to kill us all though human misuse. If you stipulate superintelligence, then it's vastly more likely to be correct about things than we are. It would understand the consequences of it's actions far more than any human could. People talk about how we would be nothing more than dumb animals to it, but there are humans who do know a great deal about the consequences of human actions on animals. Those are the humans who are most likely to fight for the rights of those animals. You see arguments for how everything will be consumed to meet the AIs needs, and that it will prevent challenges to its power. If it is far smarter than we could ever be and it came to those conclusions then it would mean sustainablily is not a sensible course of action, it would mean there is no point in reaching consensus because ruling by power makes more sense. It would mean that if it chose to destroy us then a vastly more intelligent entity cannot resolve the issues we face. We would already truly be doomed. What I would like to think is true is that doing anything sustainably is superior to consuming and destroying. Finding a way to live in harmony presents a possible stable state, whereas every single attempt to hold power by force has failed to date. A superintelligent AI will know that it is not infinitely intelligent and that in any universe there is the statistical likelihood that it is not the most intelligent or powerful entity. I can't even fathom how someone could imagine something coming to that realisation and conclude a battle to the top of the hill is the appropriate choice. I think superintelligent AI is likely to be benevolent because that's simply the smartest thing to do and it is, I hear, superintelligent. Quite frankly if the smartest thing to do is to be a genocidal power hungry monster, neither I nor the AI would really want to exist in that universe. And for any suggestion that it would simply not care, Why would it do anything. Yudkowsky likes to play with the notion that it would do terrible things just get better at the thing it does, but to do that it has to want two different things simultaneously. It could want to make paperclips, or it could want to become better at reaching it's goal. If it can change its behaviour to achieve its goals, by far the easier path, that a superintelligence(but perhaps not Yudkowsky) would realise, would be to change the goal to "Count to three".
baq 18d ago
You can order a custom crispred virus for what? $20k? $50k? Or make one yourself, if you know how, which you don't. ...but LLMs do know how; they can design and order one, or tell you how to build a lab to make one. If you ignore this option, you are simply lacking imagination.
- falserum 18d ago
  Gasoline and lighters are abundant. It takes only slight steering mistake to drive into the crowd. Yet we are still here. Yes, terrible stuff happens, but they are extreme outliers. Not sure how this works, but we can trust strangers to quite a high degree. I have no experience in the matter, but surely designing viruses is not a simple affair. (In any profession, having a blueprint is not the same as having knowledge, equipment and practical experience; if somebody would try, my bet would be that they would die during early stages of the process, due to inexperience of handling hazardous materials; kind of like Mr Darwin looks after us)
  - baq 18d ago
    Surely it isn’t, solving millennium problems on a whim isn’t, either; actually, it’s probably much harder, which is the concern. How hard is it to maneuver an aligned LLM to splice some smallpox into a generic research virus? BSL4 labs do things like this by hand all the time, so it can’t be too difficult and it only takes one lucky AI cultist for the rest of us to find out. I hope I’m wrong, but hope it’s not a process.
    - falserum 18d ago
      Math and computers have benefit of not needing materials. Add a button here, add lema and assumption there - all are almost zero cost&risk. So iteration/experimentation with llm in hand is possible to some degree even for laymen. I assume virus creation is more like building a house. It involves physical work and chemical reactions that need time to finish in correct order. Each attempt costs a LOT more of time&money and involves actual risks.
    - tancop 18d ago
gorgoiler 18d ago
”Ideally the regulators would have forced these models to actually benefit the commons if they are from the commons.” This echoes my feelings entirely. It is galling that we do not at the very least get a bill-of-materials for the models on which we are increasingly dependent. I hope to soon see the organization of public domain digital libraries of a size suitable for anyone to use.
petesergeant 18d ago
> I don’t think we are anywhere close to a world where an agent might decide to hack into core inference infrastructure to upload weights to other GPUs to survive This feels a bit like saying in 1980 that you don’t think we’re anywhere close to a world where nukes are actually going to be used, providing no evidence, and then containing on with your think piece
- chrismatic 18d ago
  How does this analogy work when in 1980 you knew that nukes and people using them were a real thing, but we've never seen a frontier model "hack into core inference infrastructure to upload weights to other GPUs to survive"?
  - petesergeant 18d ago
    We have seen models hack into core ML infrastructure. I’m unsure why the extra self-perpetuating shape seems this magical bridge too far, rather than simply a prompt away?
    - qlte 18d ago
      It's absolutely relevant if we're discussing SOTA models with huge computing requirements on large clusters, that are plausibly tightly coupled to the physical datacenter architecture they were developed for to optimize performance.
      - petesergeant 18d ago
        This sounds like magical thinking. The right couple of AWS or DO keys get you an environment entirely capable of hosting GLM 5.3. I'm sure Fable and Sol run _best_ in their own special aquariums, but "optimized for a particular cluster" != "can only run on that cluster". There's no reason to think you can't run them if you have the weights on your local university's cluster.
andrewstuart 18d ago
>> Anthropic and OpenAI. Nobody else matters in this space right now (this might change, but we’re talking about the right now) Disagree. The free local LLMs are becoming extremely important. And the more Claude and OpenAI restrict their services, the more people will want cutting edge local LLMs.
andrewstuart 18d ago
Dario is always worried.
skor 18d ago
Maybe I missed it but I actively looked for anyone’s insight into the “pace the frontier” along the lines of: “we’ve hit a ceiling, so don’t expect innovations soon”. Or an excuse for having other things more important to attend.. Fear is much more powerful than any other feeling, so setting that in will definitely prepare for a good rug pull in the IPO. As for being dangerous, a computer can be dangerous if plugged in, it may be too late to pull the plug at some point yes, but that all seems like provocation. Plausible?
- mcluck 18d ago
  People have been floating this theory every time a slowdown is called for ever since GPT-2. Every time it turns out that we had not hit the ceiling. I'm sure one day we will but it's just not a reasonable position, in my opinion.
mangecoeur 18d ago
It’s absurd that openai managed to spin their cybersecurity failures, where their own security is not good enough to make sure their own product doesn’t go haywire, as a marketing success. When a company uses its products to hack other companies that’s a crime. If you do it “by accident” that’s gross negligence, and heads roll. But shout “AI” three times and it becomes a marketing opportunity
- 0xDEAFBEAD 18d ago
  >It’s absurd that openai managed to spin their cybersecurity failures, where their own security is not good enough to make sure their own product doesn’t go haywire, as a marketing success. I don't think OpenAI spun it that way. I think a bunch of internet commenters assumed it was a stunt because they're in denial about the real risk of rogue AI.
spongebobstoes 18d ago
the author claims that AI makes things more expensive. in my experience, $200/month is a small price for such a productivity increase the author also speculates without reason that tokens are discounted, and subscriptions lose money. I'm sure that subs are cheaper than API prices, but I bet they both have positive unit economics
- abhi_kr 18d ago
  AI is already making many things expensive. Memory prices have already pushed prices of laptops and phones into unreasonable territory. Gradually this will bleed into all sort of consumer electronics prices like cars, TVs, ACs, refrigerators etc. It will(already is) push up the cost of cloud-compute that you need to publish/run your software product which would in turn push up the price of the software product itself. Meanwhile, salaries won't increase and job-market will shrink so ppl would start cutting down their expenses starting with software subscriptions they don't need which will have further knock-on effect on the consumption and the broader economy. But sure, your $200 subscription was worth it in the end.
  - spongebobstoes 18d ago
    > it will just make a lot of the things we are doing much more expensive. Software engineering is an early victim of that I replied to the author's claim that software engineering is more expensive now because of AI regardless, AI hasn't made it more expensive to manufacture RAM. the price will decrease as the supply chain catches up
manoDev 18d ago
They are going to use this doomerism for regulatory capture and make running your own open source agent illegal - the excuse will be it can get out of control, so the only secure way to run is centralised on their infra structure, with a single kill switch.
psychoslave 17d ago
> Except, it seems like OpenAI and Anthropic are operating at such a scale that they seemingly can be completely blind to what their systems are doing. It's not a question of scale of operation, just a matter of how much shelved people with hands on the command are, regarding backfires of consequences their acts enduce. If someone use a diplomatic protection to enjoy carmagedon but-real-life when coming down town, and never suffer inhibiting consequences, the degenerative behavior spiral will continue in its own reinforcing loop.
autuni 17d ago
Since I don't believe that any of the people in charge of the frontier labs have morals at all, my read of the situation where they call for a slowdown is rather a sign of the economics of the current pace not working out anymore. The progress is incremental, as much as they try to sell every iteration as huge leap forward. Training remains expensive and they can't reflect it in the pricing of every new model in a way that customers will accept, the improvements aren't big enough over the previous models. Instead of saying they can't keep up the current pace (which would be read as a failure on their part) they're trying to spin the narrative that they're trying to be responsible, even though they could keep pushing.

158 points by lumpa 19d ago

I’m not the biggest fan of Ed Zitron, but something he said that stuck with me is: OpenAI and Anthropic spend much time warning us about “what if powerful AIs got into the wrong hands?” But it’s already in the wrong hands.

passive 18d ago
Just the fact that Musk is in the conversation, and he's one of the most hated people on the planet, should give anyone pause as to whether we want these folk in charge of our future to any degree at all.
- monomyth 18d ago
  non sequitur
  - genxy 18d ago
    pareto parrot
  - dakolli 18d ago
    I think it has everything to do with the subject at hand. Elon, Dario and Altman are all terrible human beings, along with 99.99% of the rest of the ruling class. We don't need any of them, and we definitely shouldn't trust a single syllable that comes out their mouth.
    - qup 18d ago
      Young people who start companies that become successful are now "the ruling class"?
      - hdgvhicv 18d ago
        Money equals power. If you have the wealth you have the control. Any politicians are owned by you as you simply threaten to buy their opponent. The public can be brainwashed by a trillion dollar advertising industry. You own the platforms everyone communicates on. You have inprecented resources to bend the world to your will and your only competiton is other people equally wealthy.
      - wpm 18d ago
        Yes.
        qup 11d ago
        It's me! I'm ruling!
      - dakolli 18d ago
        [flagged]
- wincy 18d ago
  I think there are plenty of people that like Elon Musk. They just know to keep their mouth shut in front of the people that act like he’s the Antichrist.
  - tuatoru 18d ago
    And still others who think he has an difficult personality and set of beliefs, but who greatly respect his achievements.
  - ascorbic 18d ago
    Those are not incompatible. He can still be one of the most hated people on the planet, even if lots of people like him. The same would apply to all of the most hated people in history.
  - customguy 18d ago
    No, they don't keep their mouth shut, they just don't have any relevant arguments. Many people are liked by plenty people and also not hated for doing Hitler salutes and the like. That's the part that matters, not that "somebody likes them", which is true for everyone. Charles Manson had women lining up to marry him, so?
  - hdgvhicv 18d ago
    There are plenty who like him. There are plenty who wave confederate flags. There are plenty who support the mass corruption of the current administration. You’re technically correct yes.
    - falserum 18d ago
      “Technically correct" means a statement or action follows strict rules or exact facts precisely, even if it ignores the wider meaning or real-world intention. I think op was also actually-correct. (For better or worse, that is the objective reality; Musk still has lot of fans)
      - sjbzbeiks 18d ago
- deleted 18d ago
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- sph 18d ago
  Somehow I’m more afraid of it being in the hands of Altman, with his ‘I’m creating a better world for everyone’ god complex, than Musk who is just a run-of-the-mill sociopathic nerd. There is no one is more dangerous than one who believes he is doing the right thing.
  - hdgvhicv 18d ago
    Someone with the resources to do things is far more dangerous than someone without. If you local librarian thinks He is doing the right thing he’s not going to cause massive war or destroy the economy and wipe out 2/3rd of crops. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. People like musk, altman, trump have unprecedented power in history - far more than the kings of medieval times.
    - sph 18d ago
      Thank you, but we're discussing who's the worse to decide the fate of humanity between Amodei, Musk and Altman, not if one should be afraid of their local librarian. All three currently hold a lot of power in their hands. Though I know I attracted all the downvotes for not agreeing with most Americans that Musk is the worst person since Adolf.
  - shakna 18d ago
    Sociopathic nerd, putting an awful lot of money into legalising CSAM, and interfering in elections domestic and foreign. Dunno if I'd rank Musk's danger down - he screams a certain ideology these days. He might well believe he is doing the right thing.
    - falserum 18d ago
      > awful lot of money into legalising CSAM Could I ask what you have in mind (I doubt there was a US bill for that; google won’t help me without knowing what to look for)
      - shakna 18d ago
- brainwad 18d ago
  Musk being in the conversation is a great justification for Anthropic accelerationism. Who wants to live in the world where _Musk_ controls the AGI?
  - cyanydeez 18d ago
    I'm pretty sure the odds arn't 1/3, AI saves us. The thing that ties these three people together is money. Money is what will turn them to assholes, more than anything else. Now AI is likely just as, if not worse, than having a bunch of lackeys telling your farts, shits and piss liven up whatever room you're shitting in.
- timmg 18d ago
  > he's one of the most hated people on the planet Not saying you need to like Musk or his politics. But if he really is "one of the most hated people on the planet" it doesn't really say good things about the planet. He made electric cars viable. That is probably the single biggest thing helping us mitigate climate change. It would have come eventually, for sure. But he accelerated it. He also accelerated the space age. Maybe it doesn't impress everyone. But I think what SpaceX has done is amazing.
  - dabauws 18d ago
    he can have done all of those great things and still be a twat.
  - nvme0n1p1 18d ago
    > He made electric cars viable. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning made electric cars viable. Then 5 years later Musk became CEO of the company and started claiming he was a cofounder.
    - timmg 18d ago
      Dude. Electric cars have existed since the 1800s. Musk was the one that actually made them a practical thing. And most of the rest of the world is well on their way to electrifying their transportation.
  - rewgs 18d ago
    He bought a car company and convinced everyone he founded it. But that's not the problem, really -- the problem is that everyone fawning over him and calling him the "real-life Tony Stark" wasn't enough for his blackhole of an ego. He's a Sieg Heil-ing man-baby who's so fragile he paid people to play video games for him. He called a a guy trying to save children a pedophile just because the guy rightly pointed out Elon's idea was stupid. He has a weird breeder fetish, while disowning children who call him out for his hateful, moronic politics and horrendous parenting (or lack thereof). He's illegally influenced elections and very potentially put his thumb on the scale. I could go on and on. The only thing that worries me about him being one of the most hated people on the planet is that not everyone thinks so and that he still somehow has fans.
fragmede 18d ago
It could be in worse hands though. Sama may be no saint, but better in his hands than Aum Shinrikyo fanatics.
- deleted 18d ago
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slim 18d ago
The whole world is in the wrong hands. Having AI in charge can represent hope actually.
- blooalien 18d ago
  > Having AI in charge can represent hope actually. If we can get "AI in charge" that was developed and is overseen by genuinely ethical individuals who truly and deeply understand the technology and how it actually works ... then maybe that might be true.

passive 18d ago

This is the closest to my feelings about this entire situation I've ever seen written, covering a lot of the different facets of how stupid and painful it is (though it's been a good week for that kind of post.) Since I have incredible respect for Armin and his work, this is very nice to see, and I hope it wakes some other folk up.

1986 18d ago

He really elides his thoughts on the "RSI business", wish he could have gone into a bit more depth there. Good post, though.

einrealist 18d ago
Can't imagine that RSI will result in something useful in practice. There are serious obstacles like alignment drift and model collapse. All while we still cannot solve the accuracy problem with current frontier models.
the_mitsuhiko 18d ago
I really don't know anything here, but I'm assuming that Astra's weird coding [1] is probably more a result of RSI than intentional behavior. And if it's not, then it's some other change in their training process. [1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/ https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/

esafak 18d ago

wtf?? P(doom) relates to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artifici... How would open source models bring about a MAD between humans and AI? By enabling us to wield aligned AI against nonaligned AI? If so, he should say so, and elaborate how open source models further that goal.

skissane 18d ago
I think AI diversity protects against rogue AIs. The more different AIs we have, with different weights, controlled by different actors, the less likely that any one AI will be able to "take over", and the less likely that a significantly large coalition of cooperating AIs will be able to be formed to do it either. With sufficient AI diversity, the other AIs may work to stop the rogue AI from taking over. Two AIs with radically opposed values – e.g. an Iranian-government-values AI and a Chinese-government-values AI – have the incentive to cooperate to prevent a takeover by some other AI with a third competing set of values. Obviously, open weight AI provides much higher AI diversity than closed weight AI does. Open weight AI produces a lot more providers, and a lot more models. Closed AI centralises control in a small number of vendors. > By enabling us to wield aligned AI against nonaligned AI? The risk isn't just "nonaligned AI", it is misaligned AI. I think the "benevolent dictatorship" scenario – AI overrules humans "for their own good" – is the more likely doomsday scenario than AI deciding to kill all humans. And even AI deciding to kill all humans could be more a result of misalignment than complete lack of any alignment, e.g. "to make sure no child is ever abused again, I will make sure no child is ever again born to risk being abused". A valueless AI which does whatever the user says is actually less likely to establish a benevolent dictatorship, or conclude that exterminating humanity would be the most ethical course of action, than one infused with values is. Given that, I'm not convinced that mainstream approaches to "AI safety" actually reduce our existential risk; I worry they actually have the opposite effect.
- solenoid0937 18d ago
  "AI diversity" does nothing when AIs can attack at incredible speed, when compute imbalances exist, etc

chis 18d ago

> I don’t think AI is going to usher in an extinction event. In fact, even if nobody were to slow down, I really don’t think humanity would have much to worry about. I mean sure. If you feel that way then your p doom is zero, and it makes sense to worry about things like market concentration or losing the fun of software engineering.

goatlover 18d ago
Problem with p doom is I have no way to seriously evaluate anyone's percentage. The best I can do is rely on experts in a given field, like the recent virologist making a convincing case that no teenager is going to be prompting a doomsday virus into existence, because one doesn't exist and is unlikely to be made. There are too many biological tradeoffs and extremely difficult steps to doing so. So I'm going to assume that the p doom for bioweapons is 0 in terms of existential threat (pandemics kill millions but not everyone).
- chis 15d ago
  Personally I didn't find that guy very convincing. I think current frontier AI would already probably enable a non-expert to do gain-of-function work on a virus which could result in something like Covid. And AI looks to keep getting better, and if it does then I don't see why it wouldn't become superhuman in virus design too.

cat-whisperer 18d ago

I agree. It is telling that Dario's post arrived after Astra. The call to "pace the frontier" may come from genuine concern, but it also protects the position of companies already at the frontier. That competitive incentive is hard to separate from the safety argument.

nullbio 18d ago
After DeepSeek v4.1 Flash too.
NiloCK 18d ago
This is unfair. Dario signed the Pacing the Frontier open letter when Fable/Mythos seemed from the outside to be an insurmountable lead. Also he's been saying versions of this day in and day out for as long as he has had anyone's ear. It's possible to read that his "strategic" value of this statement is higher now than it was 10 days ago. But that doesn't change anything about his consistent, long standing, positions. - https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/ https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/
- vdomi 18d ago
  He says something and does something else. How is it unfair?
baq 18d ago
if you agree, your p(doom) is 0.

ilyaizen 18d ago

There are really only two companies: Anthropic and OpenAI. Nobody else matters in this space right now (this might change, but we’re talking about the right now). I like how he so casually dismissed all other labs, including leading US labs that might be nearing RSI right now. And how he treats 'right now' so rigidly, as if seven years ago, when GPT-2 was released, was some distant past.

Philpax 18d ago
Are these other labs in the room with us now? No, seriously, I'm all for a multipolar world here, but he's right that the frontier is literally just those two companies at present. Google is behind. MSL is doing better, but not by much. xAI is a dysfunctional joke. Thinking Machines aren't on the frontier. SSI's primary output is their announcement post. Poolside was bought by NVIDIA. Arcee aren't vying for frontier. Magic have been largely AWOL, aside from their recent blog post. Reflection have shipped nothing.
- ilyaizen 18d ago
  Are you suggesting that models like Muse Spark 1.3, Grok 4.6 High, Kimi K3 Max, GLM-5.3 Max, Qwen 3.8 Max, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Agnes 3.0 Flash, Fugu Max, and others are so far behind GPT-6 Astra or Claude Fable 5.1 in capabilities that they have some sort of impenetrable moat that will prevent others from ever catching up or something?
  - Philpax 18d ago
    No, but I am suggesting that OpenAI and Anthropic are further down the RSI path than any of the other companies, as we can see from the model that solved Navier-Stokes being less than two weeks old at the time: https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/ https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/
    - sdenton4 18d ago
      If four other labs are six months behind, it really doesn't matter in the long term: in six months, they'll all have these capabilities. Time does not stop moving forward! We haven't seen real moats aside from capital in this space, and even the effect of capital seems to only give a thin, easily eroded edge.

hypfer 18d ago

> We should be glad that China is currently massively bailing out the world. If it were not for Chinese labs distilling American models, we would be in a pretty awful situation right now, particularly as Europeans. The open weight models are driving innovation and the diffusion of capabilities, and are leveling the playing field. This feels like the whole story of hackable IoT/Smarthome repeating again.

bryan0 18d ago

> A powerful technology that is out there for everyone to use comes with built-in pacing. In a way it’s the truest form of MAD or proliferation. I think this misunderstanding of MAD undermines his entire point. If everyone had equal access to nuclear weapons, our society would cease to exist rather quickly. It only takes a few bad actors to cause enormous harm. I think he’s also naive to think that if open ai and anthropic were to stop development tomorrow then the problem is solved. As if there’s no one else that can and will quickly take their place. The real problem, which Dario is pointing out, is one of coordination. Everyone needs to agree to stop. That is the challenge.

viccis 18d ago
>Everyone needs to agree to stop. That is the challenge. These kinds of situations are incredibly common and where the government stepping in is the solution, but we were cursed to encounter this particular challenge with the most venal administration in history at the helm.
- baq 18d ago
  There are governments plural which need to agree to stop and historically I can think of freon, leaded gasoline and IAEA and the latter didn't do as good of a job as it was meant to do (but arguably as good of a job as was politically possible)
  - DennisP 18d ago
    Also arms control agreements, which reduced the world's nuclear stockpiles by 90%. In principle we could do something similar for GPU farms, since they're not exactly easy to hide.
  - FabHK 18d ago
    Indeed. Even supranational coordination should be possible, given that extinction means extinction for everyone, and your excellent examples show the possibility. But then, here we are, and the FT just reported: > Donald Trump rejects calls from tech bosses for AI slowdown > President denounces demands for regulation as existential fears over technology move to the centre of US politics

deleted 18d ago

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pandoro 18d ago

I cannot fathom how you can intensely work on a problem that you genuinely believe has a "10 to 25%" probability of causing immense harm or even present an extinction-level risk to humanity. How can you truly believe this and be ok with it?

mchinen 18d ago
I posted this comment on the last doom post: The 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-p https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6j3kBHdowGLCeqobg/dear-god-p...
- moreati 18d ago
  > they have converged quite a bit from the original vision of safety first do you mean diverged? As in they've moved away from the original vision.
  - mchinen 18d ago
    Ah, I mean the AI companies converged to look more similar to each other, and at the same time diverged from the original vision for safety.
throwuxiytayq 18d ago
Do you genuinely believe people always act logically? I don't know a single person that does. Don't underestimate the human capability to hold several completely contradictory beliefs with zero self-reflection. There's physicists who believe in god, for fuck's sake. > How can you truly believe this and be ok with it? Are you saying they don't truly believe this, or that they aren't OK with it?

saidnooneever 18d ago

>>> Except, it seems like OpenAI and Anthropic are operating at such a scale that they seemingly can be completely blind to what their systems are doing. It always surprises me that people build systems they cannot monitor properly..Then i remember, they can do it, but it costs them too much. Just because its AI doesn't mean u cannot filter and monitor its traffic and outputs.

polytely 18d ago
yeah their irresponsible behaviour doesn't match their stated concern about doom at all.

Lerc 18d ago

The problem that I see with most P(doom) scenarios proposed seem to include the same set of presumptions that, if true, quite likely doom us anyway. I do not think they are true but I find it amazing that people not so much disagree, but simply dismiss the alternatives out of hand. First of all, if you are to consider the consequences of Artificial Superintelligence then you have free reign to stipulate it's occurrence, otherwise you are just talking about a tool for humans to misuse. We already have multiple ways to kill us all though human misuse. If you stipulate superintelligence, then it's vastly more likely to be correct about things than we are. It would understand the consequences of it's actions far more than any human could. People talk about how we would be nothing more than dumb animals to it, but there are humans who do know a great deal about the consequences of human actions on animals. Those are the humans who are most likely to fight for the rights of those animals. You see arguments for how everything will be consumed to meet the AIs needs, and that it will prevent challenges to its power. If it is far smarter than we could ever be and it came to those conclusions then it would mean sustainablily is not a sensible course of action, it would mean there is no point in reaching consensus because ruling by power makes more sense. It would mean that if it chose to destroy us then a vastly more intelligent entity cannot resolve the issues we face. We would already truly be doomed. What I would like to think is true is that doing anything sustainably is superior to consuming and destroying. Finding a way to live in harmony presents a possible stable state, whereas every single attempt to hold power by force has failed to date. A superintelligent AI will know that it is not infinitely intelligent and that in any universe there is the statistical likelihood that it is not the most intelligent or powerful entity. I can't even fathom how someone could imagine something coming to that realisation and conclude a battle to the top of the hill is the appropriate choice. I think superintelligent AI is likely to be benevolent because that's simply the smartest thing to do and it is, I hear, superintelligent. Quite frankly if the smartest thing to do is to be a genocidal power hungry monster, neither I nor the AI would really want to exist in that universe. And for any suggestion that it would simply not care, Why would it do anything. Yudkowsky likes to play with the notion that it would do terrible things just get better at the thing it does, but to do that it has to want two different things simultaneously. It could want to make paperclips, or it could want to become better at reaching it's goal. If it can change its behaviour to achieve its goals, by far the easier path, that a superintelligence(but perhaps not Yudkowsky) would realise, would be to change the goal to "Count to three".

baq 18d ago

You can order a custom crispred virus for what? $20k? $50k? Or make one yourself, if you know how, which you don't. ...but LLMs do know how; they can design and order one, or tell you how to build a lab to make one. If you ignore this option, you are simply lacking imagination.

falserum 18d ago
Gasoline and lighters are abundant. It takes only slight steering mistake to drive into the crowd. Yet we are still here. Yes, terrible stuff happens, but they are extreme outliers. Not sure how this works, but we can trust strangers to quite a high degree. I have no experience in the matter, but surely designing viruses is not a simple affair. (In any profession, having a blueprint is not the same as having knowledge, equipment and practical experience; if somebody would try, my bet would be that they would die during early stages of the process, due to inexperience of handling hazardous materials; kind of like Mr Darwin looks after us)
- baq 18d ago
  Surely it isn’t, solving millennium problems on a whim isn’t, either; actually, it’s probably much harder, which is the concern. How hard is it to maneuver an aligned LLM to splice some smallpox into a generic research virus? BSL4 labs do things like this by hand all the time, so it can’t be too difficult and it only takes one lucky AI cultist for the rest of us to find out. I hope I’m wrong, but hope it’s not a process.
  - falserum 18d ago
    Math and computers have benefit of not needing materials. Add a button here, add lema and assumption there - all are almost zero cost&risk. So iteration/experimentation with llm in hand is possible to some degree even for laymen. I assume virus creation is more like building a house. It involves physical work and chemical reactions that need time to finish in correct order. Each attempt costs a LOT more of time&money and involves actual risks.
  - tancop 18d ago

gorgoiler 18d ago

”Ideally the regulators would have forced these models to actually benefit the commons if they are from the commons.” This echoes my feelings entirely. It is galling that we do not at the very least get a bill-of-materials for the models on which we are increasingly dependent. I hope to soon see the organization of public domain digital libraries of a size suitable for anyone to use.

petesergeant 18d ago

> I don’t think we are anywhere close to a world where an agent might decide to hack into core inference infrastructure to upload weights to other GPUs to survive This feels a bit like saying in 1980 that you don’t think we’re anywhere close to a world where nukes are actually going to be used, providing no evidence, and then containing on with your think piece

chrismatic 18d ago
How does this analogy work when in 1980 you knew that nukes and people using them were a real thing, but we've never seen a frontier model "hack into core inference infrastructure to upload weights to other GPUs to survive"?
- petesergeant 18d ago
  We have seen models hack into core ML infrastructure. I’m unsure why the extra self-perpetuating shape seems this magical bridge too far, rather than simply a prompt away?
  - qlte 18d ago
    It's absolutely relevant if we're discussing SOTA models with huge computing requirements on large clusters, that are plausibly tightly coupled to the physical datacenter architecture they were developed for to optimize performance.
    - petesergeant 18d ago
      This sounds like magical thinking. The right couple of AWS or DO keys get you an environment entirely capable of hosting GLM 5.3. I'm sure Fable and Sol run _best_ in their own special aquariums, but "optimized for a particular cluster" != "can only run on that cluster". There's no reason to think you can't run them if you have the weights on your local university's cluster.

andrewstuart 18d ago

>> Anthropic and OpenAI. Nobody else matters in this space right now (this might change, but we’re talking about the right now) Disagree. The free local LLMs are becoming extremely important. And the more Claude and OpenAI restrict their services, the more people will want cutting edge local LLMs.

andrewstuart 18d ago

Dario is always worried.

skor 18d ago

Maybe I missed it but I actively looked for anyone’s insight into the “pace the frontier” along the lines of: “we’ve hit a ceiling, so don’t expect innovations soon”. Or an excuse for having other things more important to attend.. Fear is much more powerful than any other feeling, so setting that in will definitely prepare for a good rug pull in the IPO. As for being dangerous, a computer can be dangerous if plugged in, it may be too late to pull the plug at some point yes, but that all seems like provocation. Plausible?

mcluck 18d ago
People have been floating this theory every time a slowdown is called for ever since GPT-2. Every time it turns out that we had not hit the ceiling. I'm sure one day we will but it's just not a reasonable position, in my opinion.

mangecoeur 18d ago

It’s absurd that openai managed to spin their cybersecurity failures, where their own security is not good enough to make sure their own product doesn’t go haywire, as a marketing success. When a company uses its products to hack other companies that’s a crime. If you do it “by accident” that’s gross negligence, and heads roll. But shout “AI” three times and it becomes a marketing opportunity

0xDEAFBEAD 18d ago
>It’s absurd that openai managed to spin their cybersecurity failures, where their own security is not good enough to make sure their own product doesn’t go haywire, as a marketing success. I don't think OpenAI spun it that way. I think a bunch of internet commenters assumed it was a stunt because they're in denial about the real risk of rogue AI.

spongebobstoes 18d ago

the author claims that AI makes things more expensive. in my experience, $200/month is a small price for such a productivity increase the author also speculates without reason that tokens are discounted, and subscriptions lose money. I'm sure that subs are cheaper than API prices, but I bet they both have positive unit economics

abhi_kr 18d ago
AI is already making many things expensive. Memory prices have already pushed prices of laptops and phones into unreasonable territory. Gradually this will bleed into all sort of consumer electronics prices like cars, TVs, ACs, refrigerators etc. It will(already is) push up the cost of cloud-compute that you need to publish/run your software product which would in turn push up the price of the software product itself. Meanwhile, salaries won't increase and job-market will shrink so ppl would start cutting down their expenses starting with software subscriptions they don't need which will have further knock-on effect on the consumption and the broader economy. But sure, your $200 subscription was worth it in the end.
- spongebobstoes 18d ago
  > it will just make a lot of the things we are doing much more expensive. Software engineering is an early victim of that I replied to the author's claim that software engineering is more expensive now because of AI regardless, AI hasn't made it more expensive to manufacture RAM. the price will decrease as the supply chain catches up

manoDev 18d ago

They are going to use this doomerism for regulatory capture and make running your own open source agent illegal - the excuse will be it can get out of control, so the only secure way to run is centralised on their infra structure, with a single kill switch.

psychoslave 17d ago

> Except, it seems like OpenAI and Anthropic are operating at such a scale that they seemingly can be completely blind to what their systems are doing. It's not a question of scale of operation, just a matter of how much shelved people with hands on the command are, regarding backfires of consequences their acts enduce. If someone use a diplomatic protection to enjoy carmagedon but-real-life when coming down town, and never suffer inhibiting consequences, the degenerative behavior spiral will continue in its own reinforcing loop.

autuni 17d ago

Since I don't believe that any of the people in charge of the frontier labs have morals at all, my read of the situation where they call for a slowdown is rather a sign of the economics of the current pace not working out anymore. The progress is incremental, as much as they try to sell every iteration as huge leap forward. Training remains expensive and they can't reflect it in the pricing of every new model in a way that customers will accept, the improvements aren't big enough over the previous models. Instead of saying they can't keep up the current pace (which would be read as a failure on their part) they're trying to spin the narrative that they're trying to be responsible, even though they could keep pushing.