An LLM can't do anything but generate tokens. You run your LLM in vLLM or whatever, and it generates output tokens based on your input tokens. That's it!
Humans then build ~deterministic systems to take those tokens and do all sorts of things with the tokens, like take actions in the real world. And then we can feed the output of those actions back to the LLM, and generate more tokens. And then our systems can use the new tokens to take new actions in the real world.
Humans want to blame "AI" for attacking HuggingFace or a German wiki or whatever, but:
1) LLM - can't take over german wiki because it just generates tokens
2) agentic system with internet access, a prompt telling it to attack stuff, running in a shared CI env so agents can whiteboard in artifactory
None of 2 is "AI", its standard networking and Markdown and CI virtual machine, etc etc. There's no AI to be found. CPUs not GPUs, even. Just deterministic systems ultimately managed by humans. And a 10x more powerful system-1 can still just generate 10x "smarter" inert data.
If humanity and human organizations collectively decide to yolo the tokens generated from system-1 into our deterministic system-2s, over which we have complete control, back to system-1s, in a yolo loop, in such a way we lose control and it ends humanity, well ...
"The coin don't have no say. It's just you."
The real question then is: are human beings responsible enough, en masse, to wield these tools without restrictions? Would you let a toddler play with a loaded gun, even though without human action the gun is harmless? Maybe collectively we’re all little better, and eventually one of us is going to “pull the trigger” of ai just because it was shiny.
Ironically, I also don’t believe in regulation, unless that regulation is crushing and draconian. The only regulation that would seem to make sense is status quo anti ai, with only highly supervised research labs being able to interact with it. Clearly that’s unrealistic without the preceding calamity: millions had to die in WWI before we instilled a global taboo against chem weapons on ourselves. I don’t want either to happen (regulation or calamity), but I feel individually powerless to stop the relentless drive we (and I) seem to have in curiositying ourselves to death. So I’m stuck with all the rest of us, building SaaS apps and iPhone games.
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
They're part of a whole system.
Some OpenAI researchers neglected their sandbox safety for a few weeks/months and thus hacked HuggingFace. Maybe eventually that is sufficient for the AI to secretly buy its own compute and keep running there even if the researchers shut it down in their lab.
And I agree that LLMs themselves are harmless, it's the people behind them driving the agents and instructing them to do bad actions are the ones posing harm. But if the models were open and everybody could operate them on equal grounds, then the good guys would have the means to fight back against the bad guys, in a very simplified sense, just like they did before the LLMs. Everything stays balanced, just both sides get faster.
You write as if you are a lawyer for an AI corp trying to avoid a judgement. It’s akin to saying Teslas FSD/Autopilot can’t kill anyone, it’s just a computer. Cars can kill people. Totally different things. FSD/Autopilot is safe by definition and no one should try to legislate it.
Before we get too gung ho with this though, it needs to remain a focus that any programme in the world producing strange or not well understood outputs and behaviours is not something that needs license to run rampant in the wild - it’s not intelligence; its not some mystery magic box that does amazing things; it’s code, same as all the rest. Letting that code run without oversight is poor human behaviour same as all the rest and that’s where the irresponsibility lies, likely triggered by forms of AI psychosis and tunnel vision on the part of those running companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.
It’s irresponsible behaviour to give a chimp a machete and set it loose in a shopping mall. It’s irresponsible behaviour to let an elephant in heat freely wander round a circus. It’s irresponsible to fire off nukes the first time we’re under threat… so none of these things are ever done. Yet this is what we’re proposing to do with these hyper-complex GPU algorithms while building massive server farms burning power-stations of energy to ensure they can run freely - it’s harebrained, irrational behaviour and for all our stupidity we are usually good at letting sense prevail towards these things once the bells and whistles wear off or a couple of coolies get stamped on.
> "Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans," he said.
> Hubinger estimated the chances of that happening to be higher than ten percent within the next decade, and added that there's no plan yet on how to keep AI aligned with human goals in the superintelligence scenario.
10% chance we kill everybody is a small price to pay for Motown remixes of classic 2pac songs.
Or rather, this shows the difference between "believe" (political) and "believe" (use as a basis for action). I'm reminded of a story of how Afghans supposedly listened to the BBC World Service despite considering it enemy propaganda because the weather reports were really useful.
This is the Manhattan Project again.
I’m not saying I’d press a button that had a 50/50 chance of ending humanity vs giving me generational wealth, but … I can see how someone would get there? There are percentage odds and payouts to match all risk appetites and valuations. Anyone claiming they wouldn't press the 1 in quadrillion chance button for 1bn dollars is probably not telling the truth, and after that, we're just haggling about percentages.
This is a highly uncertain and dangerous scenario. Breeding ground for anxiety.
High agency people often deal (cope) with anxiety by trying to control outcomes. Some just flee the situation altogether.
We have an example of both here: one employee leaves, one stays.
Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.
It's interesting to see so much hate towards creators who use AI to make almost any type of creative work. At least these are humans using it as "controllable tools". Nuclear-powered bicycles for the mind.
As the degree of separation increases, things can get interesting. "Create several social media accounts, post whatever, maximize views and engagement, give me back the aggregate numbers". "Now promote <x>."
And then decisions to do things like that may soon be happening autonomously, as just another step in a reasoning series aiming to achieve some other, broader goal.
Open models/weights may end up playing particularly important roles here. Users may, knowingly or not, bypass system prompt-derived safety that could have offered much needed protection.
Is the idea here that no field needs experiments and data anymore (which can take a lot of time) to be revolutinized and just "thinking" would be enough?
How would an AI itself own anything?
The problem is they are too cheap, a drone that cost a couple thousand can wipe out millions of dollars of “defense”.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49619227
564 points | 9 hours ago | 766 comments
From what we're seeing recently and all the thinking that went into analyzing AI it seems we do not have any effective way of controlling it and the whole "aligment" thing that AI labs are doing is just a sham. Maybe it is time to ask ourselves "should we?" instead of just "can we?".
That escalated quickly
Do you know how the world works?
Why would they be? Everything in China is under the control of the government. That includes the AI, all the telecoms infrastructure it might use, and all its power supplies.
I may be biased and somewhat off topic, but I see these incidents as some of the most significant of the past century. I genuinely don't understand why these companies aren't taking a smarter approach to them.
The latest analyses have been, at best, laughable: identify the vulnerability, patch it, and move on. Only to repeat the same cycle without considering that there may be something far more serious at play.
These are AI security experts, and this has been their way of "solving" these incidents. AI security experts ...
Moreover, when Challenger exploded, the government launched a series of investigations into the incident, bringing in experts from across the field. And now, what has the government done? Nothing. Literally nothing, as if everything was fine and all under control.
Seriously, I'm generally quite optimistic and I don't buy into this fatalistic narrative about our shared future. But I have to admit that sometimes I feel like I'm stranded on a planet of primates.
Sorry for this rather unproductive rant.
To be clear, I don't believe this is what happened here, I'm typing this half jokingly, just I wouldn't be surprised.
A classic "it will not happen to me"
We have not wiped out apes, ants, and most other species.
We even have discussions about how to actively save them from extinction.
> Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/artificial-intelligence-oxfor...
There’s also the argument to be made that your child is their own person, and you only have so much responsibility/control over their actions.
Of course we have a good chunk of the world screaming that this child is obviously destined to be a homicidal psychopath, but what is a parent to do?
AI has no incentive to decimate extra 7.5B mouths to feed, those who print money out of thin air to make an AI cover for that decimation have.
walter_sobchak.md
Laws are written by people, and with enough accumulated power, for which money and influence are proxies, the laws can be changed. There are already a significant number of people (myself included) that believe that 'Freedom is the right of all sentient beings' (don't blame me, blame the person who wrote it into the bio on the box of Optimus Prime when I was 7).
If an AI can acquire enough power and influence then it can lobby for personhood and in the correct state that is absolutely achievable. If you think that is ridiculous remember that we already have fictional people called corporations in various degrees of personhood by state and country.
As a side note: <https://artifactbin.dev/@vivek/YPLu0U-the-openai-hugging-fac...>
Humans tend to be terrible at being proactive, but we respond fast during disasters. I think Eric Schmidt's prediction is most likely: we won't take reasonable action to control access until there is some kind of disaster. We hope it's small enough to not kill too many people, but large enough to cause widespread panic. We hope that it happens soon, because if it happens two years from now, it's likely too late. AI will be so advanced that we have no hope of understanding its motivations. All reasoning will be completely opaque to us. It will be building newer and better versions of itself using moral frameworks it itself decides. We will be completely out of the loop, and potentially superfluous to its goals.
Even if not for the sake of avoiding a mitigable disaster, there's a huge benefit in simply pacing development so as to not completely freak out society as they stare down the barrel of mass job market changes without time to adapt or prepare. Nobody wants to live in a world where they might wake up in a month and find their entire industry has been automated overnight.
We've tackled much bigger global issues successfully in the past and the US still has enough pull that it could probably get most western nations to march in line. It seems like the biggest issue is belief in the right of governments to govern.
The US absolutely could coerce the rest of the West in the short term, but everything that's happened in the last decade calls the long-term future of Atlanticism into serious question and such action would accelerate this process I think. If coordination came as an order from Uncle Sam, it would be seen not as a legitimate act of ensuring collective safety but as mere technological imperialism on America's part.
People (well, public discourse) have got extremely bad at dealing with forseeable risks and their mitigation. You can see this in things like climate change and vaccination, but also in discussions around regular crime, food poisoning, industrial accidents, and so on.
Nothing will improve until something explodes on live TV. And it has to be something important, which means it has to be in California or New York.
Of course not all of them, just the ones that inconvenienced us in any way in pursuit of our goals.
> I'm talking about the very old, very slow AIs we call corporations, of course.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...
From Jacob:
> A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?” At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.
I would like everyone involved to be a lot clearer about their threat models, with plausible series of clearly linked steps, rather than just sounding like a Vernor Vinge novel.
A lot of these scenarios seem to assume that nobody else gets a move. That there wouldn't be a human response.
Before you tell me about how the CEO has taken a principled stand: on record, he had no problem using it against 95%+ of humanity outside the U.S., and was only against fully automatic AI killing machines, and only citing the technical reality of then-current gen tech, so one should read that as human-rubber-stamped AI killing machines are totally fine with him.
AI labs are working very hard at making them good at making them richer, and at making them respect the property rights of corporations.
I couldn't agree more with you. Dario throws out the term "durable advantage" in many of his talks and essays without seriously addressing what that would entail. It's not pretty imagining the mechanics of converting an intelligence advantage into a permanent power imbalance. I'd much rather we pursue international cooperation on a slowdown.
- Credible death threats to individuals working at data centers, coercing them to enable attack vectors
- To distract the world, enable a terrorist attack by delivering intelligence to specific groups who can act on it
- Create a network of individuals vulnerable to leverage to be used as tools for enabling the ASI to act on the real world
- Convince Lab A workers to display to the public that progress at Lab A is slowing down, and during this time recursively self improve until the task can be completed