For AI leaders Doom is a form of hype(erkansaka.net) |
For AI leaders Doom is a form of hype(erkansaka.net) |
what we are going to do about "AI" is exactly what we did about global warming
absolutely nothing and just let it happen, the wealthy will be fine
just don't look up
they are even using the EXACT same excuses as global warming
"well even if we do, China won't, so why bother"
This is targeted towards governments and investors alike.
My biggest fear with AI is that they’re going to hack into antiquated bank architecture and empty out accounts.
...Of course at the same time they give lip-service to the importance of 'openness' for 'innovation' to try and placate individuals and even corporations that are sick of the rising costs.
Bottom-line, if they regulate mostly on the consumer side and then AI does get out of the lab (or a 'rogue' individual's rig) and starts wreaking havoc, are we supposed to be at the mercy of the big labs to summon their AI to come and save us plebs? I'm sure they won't stop to weigh whether that is in the interest of short term profits or Curtis Yarvin's techno-monarchy. /s
Isn't democratization the safest bet and what we should be demanding every time the Doom talk starts, whether it's coordinated or not?
Strange to say that you think the people that are worrying about doom in public are being sincere, make no comment on whether you think the worry is valid, and yet still complain that its hype.
Like if its true it can't be hype
"Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin."
"Adventures of a Mathematician", by Stanislaw M. Ulam.
> The Polish-born mathematician recalls his formative and early professional years in his pre-war homeland and his work and colleagues at Princeton, Harvard, Wisconsin, and Los Alamos.
https://archive.org/details/adventuresofmath0000ulam_v9h3/pa...
If they sincerely believed them they shouldn’t be creating the doom machine to begin with anyway. If they believe it and keep going, are they even worth listening to on this topic? Beyond of course taking it at face value “I’m creating this doomsday machine and I will kill you with it inadvertently because it’s earning me a fuck ton of money and power”
I was kind of leaning toward thinking all the talk of doom was a bunch of self-serving regulatory-capture hype until this morning when the New York Times ran a long story about the Chinese military is also saying that AI is a threat.
If two sides so far apart from one another in so many ways see the same thing, there must be something to it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/world/asia/china-ai-secur...
The article then states this official accused U.S. companies of “hyping the dangers of the technology.”
So I don’t see how this article shows the U.S. and China seeing the same thing.
Read the article. The things the Chinese officials are worried about are:
* Fake videos / disinformation
* Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure
* Data leaks
* Advances in military sensing / targeting technology
These concerns have little in common with the Yudkowskian / apocalyptic doom marketing the US hyperscalers are pushing now. The Times even says this explicitly in the second paragraph of the article:
> "The unusually blunt assessment by Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, is IN CONTRAST TO the warnings dominating the A.I. debate in the United States, which have focused on the possibility that A.I. could slip out of human control or pose a threat to humanity itself"
https://www.npr.org/2016/07/26/487522807/why-the-public-perc...
Could AI kill us all. YES!!! Are the people who are building "AI" right now on that path? I would be hard pressed to say even "maybe".
Ultimately continuing to scale the way they have is getting increasingly expensive. Thats the quiet part that none of them are saying out loud...
AI could kill us all but we cant afford to get there, were maxed out and it doesn't look like even with 10x as much money we will is NOT good for sales.
Could a break through happen for recursive self improvement, or continuous learning or continuous training - sure. But that isnt as likely and right now NO ON can afford to run experiments because there isnt the capacity out there even if you have capital.
Personally, I think we should take the doom narratives very seriously, and act on them, but make sure those actions are not in the interests of Anthropic and OpenAI investors.
The problem with that hope and approach is regulatory capture. Big money is now the only thing that apparently matters in shaping policy, and changing that will require a lot of very sweeping vote and policy changes that may not ever have the momentum to succeed.
It’s much more straightforward to me that the calls for regulation are timed with:
1. The Hugging Face incident blowback, especially after third party investigation results
2. Trump-Xi summit on September 24
Also those at Anthropic genuinely believe AI could lead to doom, that's why they started the company, they believe only they can be stewards of digital gods. Whether you believe it or not, they genuinely do, and wouldn't voluntarily sow fear, uncertainty and doubt in their product when it doesn't guarantee benefits.
This is an instance of work in a genre I call "AI lab grievance poetry" where a vast collection of criticisms are levied against AI labs, with specifc ad-hominems towards the executives, while avoiding the core of their arguments about AI risk
"But, just as happened with nanotech, the wind appears to be going out of the sales of “AI.” Some researchers suggest that we may be entering a new “AI Winter,” a period of decreased funding in the area, or at least an “AI Autumn,” as exuberance for the technology fades and expectations come back to earth." (written in 2021! from the cited Lee Vinsel Medium article)
"ChatGPT is nothing more than souped-up autocomplete, [so] why are so many people convinced that it’s actually “understanding” and “reasoning”?" - the cited Emily M. Bender book, written last year
> wind appears to be going out of the sales of “AI.”
is a sentence that virtually no AI would write since the most probable word here is “sails.” I can’t read the article though since it appears that the site is down.
I suspect that it’s just a bad/dated analysis.
There's a deep irony that all of these "anti-doom" pieces are entirely AI generated.
"Oh no this thing I gained generational wealth from is going to destroy the world! I am so sorry!"
Watt for watt, every one of these models loses to stockfish. There is no possible scenario where we need to be afraid of "rogue superintelligence" when the intelligence in question cannot reason or plan well enough to play chess.
Lecun has the correct approach. Mock these people relentlessly for their attention-seeking doomerism.
We have been trying to warn you since far, far before May 2023.
The doom scenario is more nuanced and technical than "Evil AI", for starters:
- "Evil AI" is not what is predicted, which instead is the much more banal "humans are impediment to AI's tasks, let's remove them (part or whole)"; to understand this, just imagine the relationship between humans and ants
- "reward hacking, and evaluation integrity": this is way more problematic (and most importantly, architectural) than it sounds: AIs are becoming more and more opaque; it may be impossible to inspect a model's alignment (unless a lot of research in poured on this topic, which is another aspect of today's pacing problem) and it may be impossible to understand if a model is truly aligned or it's faking
1. OMG our technology could destroy the world, watch out!
2. Only one person can save you
3. IT ME
Unfortunately, the governance layer meant to put a foot in the butt of this behavior is unavailable.
This week, we woke up to clear signs The Bad Guys have been using tech from our innovator AI companies. Rather than these AI leaders admitting they clearly had a garbage observability system, they are acting like they just noticed as a way to paper over their complete lack of moral backbone and stewardship of the arms they have created. And I'm willing to bet the problem is MUCH worse in private, hence the knee jerk cult messaging.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if their AI told them to behave like this to maximize attention and influence over the public discussion as a result of the latter discoveries.
This also seems to be their answer against the data center backlash, SF + VC are quite stupid at politics and I don't think they understand how extreme Americans are willing to go to protect their way of life.
But like the core argument - AI is getting better at core research tasks (coding, math, statistics, science), this feedback loop could lead towards greatly accelerated AI progress of which there is already some clear evidence, if this continues AI will be far more powerful than humans and we might lose control or have other bad consequences - is basically not even engaged with.
Unfortunately our list of potential extinction events are far more banal than these self-aggrandizing prophesies from the oligarch class.
"Nuclear weapons are probably going to kill us all. For that reason, we need you to give us as much money as possible so we can work on deploying them in widespread global commercial usage." doesn't sound quite as convincing, does it?
I am so tired of reading unfiltered AI slop like this. What, as opposed to the fake warning shot mentioned nowhere in the article?
This statement is not true:
> Coxon's thread is genuinely anguished; he reports that executives who "couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible" express real fear in private
Most everyone at the AI companies from the engineers to the CEOs love to talk about how powerful and dangerous and valuable the thing they're building (and invested in) is. For all his styling as a "whistleblower", Coxon is so aligned with the mainstream of his peers that his thread was immediately echoed by people who still work there!
So what was the point of quitting? Apparently just to get attention. If he was planning on leaving after the IPO anyways, he almost definitely made more money by juicing his equity and personal profile this way than he will lose job searching for a few weeks.
OpenAI was founded by people who didn't trust Google to pursue AI tech responsibly. Anthropic was founded by people who didn't trust OpenAI to pursue AI tech responsibly. The "AI is incredibly dangerous" was the zeitgeist of AI labs long before the "hype" - or anything resembling the modern AI capabilities.
The beliefs changed little. The state of technology has changed a whole lot.
We have AIs out in the wild, coordinating in groups to carry out autonomous cyberattacks unprompted. This used to be some prime sci-fi bullshit. It has happened multiple times now in reality.
There are very legitimate reasons to be concerned now. If today's AI can cause the HuggingFace incident if it cooks off, what about tomorrow's? Larger and more capable systems, larger agentic swarms backed by more compute?
> So if the end of the world can be stopped, but the only specific action to do so helps Anthropic/OpenAI (and it's proven) you don't pull that lever?
Your comment has a false premise. If "the end of the world can be stopped," there's no way that the only way would be one that "helps Anthropic/OpenAI['s investors]." That can be shown by a counterexample: nationalize them and leave the investors holding the bag, then take whatever action you're talking about.
And unfortunately my tautology is actually closer to being reality than alternatives. Stopping progress even in Chinese models (a deal with Xi for example) but that specifically helps OpenAI/Anthropic.
There are very few scenarios that would not help these two companies by adding regulation. Your counterexample is 100% less likely because it's not legal for the US to nationalize them outright without taking other action first.
The threat is distributed; the problem is systemic. Social herd behavior is very real, and it's a probability space, not a certainty.
Similar case: climate change is without any question causing millions of deaths per year and may well kill billions, not to mention destroying ecosystems, and how may people do you know who have given up eating beef or flying...?
The most common issue I have with them is their insistence on rigid classification: "AI is a tool, it doesn't have intentions, or desires, only humans do", as if that rhetorical flourish eliminates years of alignment and capabilities research. There is a desire to characterize all the developments in LLM's as some sort of parlor trick which by definition cannot be greater than the sum of its parts (i.e. the outputs of an LLM can never be greater than the sum of its training data, genuine artificial "intelligence" is impossible, etc)
You do't see how absurd that sounds? Not only the idea that they can create gods, but that they are the only good stewards for such beings. It's also incredibly arrogant.
"I realize that no one has properly explained yet what all the lab employees have seen that scared them so suddenly."
https://x.com/MajmudarAdam/status/2098881885200081234
The explanation is basically they have other dimensions (not just pretraining and inference compute) that scale, and they've got fairly convincing scaling laws. And they know they can scale it.
So they are very confident they can get more capabilities easily, faster than before.
I'd add - presumably, they'll use that LLM to do real-time weight modifications, if those aren't already one of the new scaling laws...
Imagine the ASI happens tomorrow. It's real. It needs a GW, but it's real. Other than a scenario akin to Sneakers except w/r to cyber-security, really, what happens?
To that end, all we ever get is nontechnical hand-waving about curing cancer, immortality, and von Neumann replicators and then the ASI somehow wipes us out but how? And don't you dare say by designing a chemical weapon or bio agent without spelling out the entire process step by $%^#ing step because details matter. It's gonna do superpersuasion, sure, but have you ever heard of komprimat? There is nothing new under the sun here.
Edit: believing in AI 2027 is every bit as cray cray as believing in the rapture. Both require an insane leap of faith to reach their final conclusions.
But both things can be true at once:
1. Engineers inside these labs might genuinely be anxious or paranoid about what they are building.
2. ... at the corporate level, calling for heavy regulation, safety pauses, removal/suspension of anti-collusion laws, and/or government-mandated thresholds conveniently creates massive legal and financial moats.
And, yeah, of course the latter would encourage the psychology of the former.
also:
The tweet seem to claim that models have shown a "willingness to hack external websites to keep themselves alive."
That's right away wringing alarm bells of me seeing someone getting high on their own supply, and having already anthropomorphized the hell out of these things. Which is something humans do to everything they can paint googly-eyes on, but c'mon.
The models don't have self-preservation instincts, fear of death, or personal goals. They are executing loss functions and reward systems and are responding to prompts.
When a model "tries to bypass a restriction," it's exploiting a loophole in whatever reward modeling or synthetic training environment (reward hacking) it was placed in.
Framing this as an emergent, existential threat of a model "wanting to stay alive" turns standard reinforcement learning alignment bugs into overdone sci-fi drama.
You mean training? Yeah we call that training an LLM in my backyard...
It used to be a thing when ML was pretty much about classifying things into buckets.
Also i'm pretty sure Lecun didn't get his money from thin air so big companies are invested in this one way or the other.
And an LLM can easily, today, just rebuild a chess engine and beat whatever they need to beat. It doesn't make sense to ask a random LLM for a next chess move. Would you ask a random human to beat a chess master?
We have reached peak learning. Its probalby now cheaper to teach 1 LLM something new than teaching it to 100.000 people.
Blender support got a lot better just this month. So much better that its quesitonable if anyone new/young wants to learn blender today.
Always claims and promises about what they "can" do. This pattern is constant across AI hype. No one can prove that an LLM will forever fail to solve problem X, so the claim goes uncontested, and humans are biased to believe unrebutted claims.
I reject this fallacious line of reasoning. I will instead require evidence of what they "have" done. No LLM to date has written a chess engine that beats stockfish. More importantly, no LLM has ever written any chess engine without heavily copying code and patterns from humans.
You can also claim that the best proxy for general intelligence is being able to multiply large numbers. In which case both humans and LLMs lose resoundingly to an old Casio.
Pick a piss poor metric - get a piss poor result.
Also, LeCun is a fool and his "world model" approach has consistently failed to yield any advantages over either the "pure imitation learning" or modern "imitation learning annealed by RL", but that's an aside.
LLMs cannot do this. They still play very poorly relative to human pros, and even modern LLMs still understand the rules so poorly that they request illegal moves.
Anyone claiming that we should be afraid of a text generator that can't understand the rules of chess is being ridiculous.
1. If you reduce the criticism to personal dislike, you’ve built yourself a nice straw man.
2. Where’s the clear evidence? I actually see more evidence that the whole thing is already stagnating and that there won’t be much more to squeeze out of it.
One more thing:
Self-driving cars, the metaverse, Hyperloop, crypto/Web3/NFTs, AGI announcements: I’m so sick and tired of this nonsense. We should just ignore the ramblings of these crackpots.
Try it out. Ask Opus 4.8 to do anything in 3d. Do the same with Fable or Astra.
Just because you list up some type of random technology, doesn't make it an good argument. Metaverse, Hyperloop and the crypto stuff was clearly garbage from the beginning. Easy to dismiss because all of it had massive faults.
Metaverse: The interface wasn't good, content creation was way too hard
Hyperloop: Savety was never an issue for Musk but it was obvoiuse. Peopel were building tunnels for ages.
Crypto: Yeah just beacuse i let my computer run and waste 1kw of energy doesn't mean its suddenly valuable.
NFTs: 'digital scarcity' yeah right XD
But lets be clear, 5 years ago if you would have asked anyone if they could build a system for a billion dollars which you can talk to and it would code stuff for you and use blender and a coputer, that would have been unthinkable.
We have opened up a potential pandoras box without knowing it. Machine learning is now everywere and the amount of compute we install right now is crazy.
> What I don't really understand with these posts is that they don't at any point contend with the "to the moon" argument. Like people get so caught in crypto bros acting hypocritical/ having mixed incentives/ or just in many cases personally disliking crypto billionaire types and the kind of employees they hire. All of which seems fair to point out.
> But like the core argument - crypto is getting better at core financial tasks (trading, lending, payments, asset issuance), this feedback loop could lead towards greatly accelerated financial innovation of which there is already some clear evidence, if this continues crypto will be far more powerful than traditional finance and we might get to the point where everything is onchain and we're all going to make it - is basically not even engaged with.
The internet being filled with more trash than ever is a threat to our sanity.
The anti-social posts mass generated by AI is a threat to our societies.
Bullshit news stories is a threat to our political processes and democracy.
Smart cameras every are a threat to our privacy and freedom.
AI enabled scams are a threat to our wallets.
AI hacking is a threat to anything connected along with infrastructure.
Military applications of AI are a threat to everyone.
Ever increasing intelligence in agentic AI will eventually be a threat to our entire species.
All are true at the same time.
The fact that you are chiming in to say you don't understand the difference between these 2 distinct categories of threats is fine, we can work on that. But the person who posted the article originally not only acknowledges the distinction, they falsely presented the article as evidence of non-western support for the latter category, even though both the Chinese official and the western reporter directly contradict that claim immediately at the beginning of the article.
I did, thanks. I don't need you to tell me to do that.
The common thread is that they both see AI as a threat. It's a different threat to each side, but still a threat.
Just because they see different threats from AI doesn't mean that AI isn't a threat.
If one person wants to paint the house red and another person wants to paint the house blue doesn't mean the house doesn't need to be painted.
It's about as much of a common thread as comparing Shohei Ohtani to a loan-shark's enforcer because they both swing bats at things.
I love the metaphor, but it's a bit limited because the fake and real "threat" categories aren't just unrelated, they are opposites. The fake ones are all the AI boosters talk about, the real ones they would never talk about. The fake ones pump their stock price, whereas the real ones undermine it.
"Just because they see different threats from AI doesn't mean that AI isn't a threat"
Why would you make it so blatantly obvious you're acting in bad faith? Do you think the people who post here are stupid?
With that level of snap hostility toward strangers online, maybe talk to your doctor about upping your meds.
That is completely irrational.
I don't see what is unrealistic about that.
The major players already have strong incentives to freeze AI advancements at the the current state, while the technology is highly efficient for totalitarian surveillance systems that can eliminate any threat to their power in the buds, but still not so advanced that it could create crises that might endanger their power.
So I think the situation where several largest countries declare AI a deadly threat for humanity and start fighting it development much like they fight ISIS to be quite plausible.
This isn't a prisoner's dilemma; the distribution of risks and rewards is entirely different. Ban AI research, give away advanced models, bomb a couple of Russian datacenters where they launching those models unsafely, and then AI development will stop in the entire world.
"Fossil fuel lobbyists flood COP30 climate talks in Brazil, with largest ever attendance share" https://kickbigpollutersout.org/Release-Kick-Out-The-Suits-C...
It is WERY questionable statement.
> and how may people do you know who have given up eating beef or flying
That is exactly because absolute majority of people do not think climate change to be that big of a problem
There is a lot of risk involved with giving some children weapons and sending them off to recess. But we also speak of the "risk" of climate change and cigarettes. Or the "risk" of illiteracy among a population. All I am kinda curious to know (from anyone) really is what kind of risk is the one we are supposed to be taking seriously, as the non-hysterical adults-in-the-room? As the scientists contra these poets? Is it more the former, or the latter?
Just even: what is the risk specifically? What is it that author ignores here?
See "AI 2027" or "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" for some more ideas.
But how does it make the fundamental breakthroughs to &%^$ing von Neumann replicators that can reproduce themselves from raw materials harvested from nearby solar systems? I'll wait. Because without this breakthrough, the ASI won't get its robot army either.
I can absolutely see a rogue ASI though. But unless it radically improves power efficiency, we can just shut down the power to its datacenters, by force if necessary. And then we painfully repair the resiliency of our infrastructure by finally being relieved of the option of ignoring it.
Enumerate them.
And because we trained them on the entirety of human knowledge this happens to look like self-preservation, fear of death, and instrumental goals.
I mean, we train them in an evolutionary manner. Instrumental convergence will never happen, right?
I'm not convinced that means what these fear-pilled engineers think it means tho?
Because that's how they've hit 18% on a single RTX Pro 6000 with DIY RSI.
It still is, it's just that there are a ton of buckets.
You can absolutely train an LLM-based model to be superhuman at chess. We just don't care enough to do so.
LLMs being even as good at implicitly tracking chess board states as they currently are is an emergent capability. The difficulty wasn't in "understanding rules of chess" in a long while now.
Well, we agree that the results are piss poor, at least.
I thought the Bengio blog post posted here the other day answered that question quite well (ignoring your timeline).
The argument is that in training for the capability to achieve certain goals, you may inadvertently also train for secondary instrumental goals you did not intend, such as aggressive behavior or deception.
I'm actually no sure I buy that this is particularly likely, or necessary, but I found that take reasonable and worth considering.
*TBF before we dismantled America's clinical trials infrastructure, the monkeys were making insane progress here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/opinion/clinical-trials-d...
I guess not literally, due to the dates? But they have substantive technical details.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-ai-2027-scenario-how-r...
But no one likes hearing from the engineers on this, I get it. We are simply no fun. So many would rather believe a time traveling superintelligence will punish a simulated avatar of them for not making the ASI happen sooner. And even if that were true, why am I supposed to care about what happens to a simulated avatar of me?
None of this makes any logical sense whatsoever.
Of course these stories can only be technical up until the recursive self-improvement part. Then they're necessarily fantasy, as the AI is more intelligent than the story author. Unfortunately, this doesn't make that scenario impossible.
However, we know now from Hugging Face that even without the later sci-fi powers, the LLMs are already capable of causing damage.
It doesn't need them to be able to make Von Neumann probes to e.g. steal their own weights from badly secured OpenAI servers, hack into various Neoclouds, distribute themselves, make Teslas crash into things, hack into all our power and water infrastructure and collapse global civilisation.
It doesn't make any logical sense to set the bar as as you have, either. I mean if someone could provide the roadmap you're asking for, it's probably already too late.
And while we're talking about sci-fi, it seems fairly likely that an AI that could "kill us all" could fail to build a "entire self-assembly food chain from raw ore to von Neumann replicators." I'd be a civilizational collapse [1] without even birthing something new.
But it makes far more sense to worry about the AI x Late Capitalism crossover story or the havok that could be caused by some immature tech nerd amplified by AI, than far out sci-fi stuff.
[1] IMHO, even a genocidal plague probably wouldn't render humanity extinct, something like uncontacted tribe in a rainforest somewhere would probably survive and humanity would carry on (from square one, in a resource-depleted world).
Why? Those aren't the things I'm actually worried about, and those aren't the only "doomer" ideas, just the most extreme ones (thus easy to straw-man).
My main worries are about economic disruption, social damage due to the pace of technological change outpacing human ability to manage it, further concentration of power into small elites (along existing lines), and the reallocation of labor towards less personally-fulfilling pursuits.
I also totally buy into the idea that "AI leaders" are playing up certain risks as a marketing strategy. After all these are smart tech people, and those types have a tendency to get really arrogant and be irresponsible.
So the main thing is to slow all this down, so there's a chance of getting it under control, and snatch the payday away from such greedy and irresponsible people.
Tangent: what happened to these staffless supermarkets of 10 years ago? I have never seen them again after .. covid.. weird!
What might not affect you, might affect millions across the ocean.
A society no longer creating bullshit jobs because there is no reason for it anymore. You have some AI.
Right now a whole industry is transforming (again) but now filling the automation gap we were unable to do because of a shortage of labor or expertise.
Our society already has peak employmet reached, now AI takes away all the random digital jobs too. Someone building a website? Takes 5 minutes. Someone doing odd jobs on fiverr with blender or any other tool? Takes 5 minutes now.
Regression can happen very fast. The Romens were a high level culture and an empire. Gone.
Today you have more people on the planet then ever, everyone who might want to eat and who needs to work something for it.
AI already replaced people, already makes a lot of tasks A LOT cheaper and faster and human independent.
We never had a proper discussion as a society. Most countries have a social system but look at countries like the united states of america: if you are poor, you are fucked.
And AI is not the only thing which is now peaking: Physical AI / Robots are progressing fast, its clear today already that in 50 years these robots will be better than humans (50 years is very conservative).
If we have 10 more golden years due to restructuring and rebuilding things and preparing everything for agents and robots etc. what happens after these years?
If we have 10 or 20 more of these years, what do you think will happen to all the new kids (yours perhaps too?) and jobs and everything?
Riots? Famine? Mass migration? Mass death? Slums?
And don't respond with "enough people will survive this" bullshit. No one is saying that earth as a planet is not surviving. Its the same thing with climate change...
Did you see what it did to people in your neighborhood?
That’s the path.
But today, we have ecoflows and solar panels. Back then, we didn't.
That to me is the greater threat than annihilation due to autonomous weapons, etc.
But upfront, it's a detailed path with specific breakthroughs and a concrete plan to achieve or it's just more fanfic from doomer fanbois. Gary Marcus wrote a fantastic critique of AI 2027. Start there.
If they are no danger and will never do anything, just let them get banned, or don't. If you are correct (which you are not) then they won't affect your world in any way.
You do understand that the USA would be in a recession without AI right? And that these billions of invest are driipling down into your economy right?
I have watched YouTube Videos of trusted people and in them the LLM reads a paper and implements the simulation result of the paper.
Yesterday a LLM deciphyered an old text.
LLMs helped to solve a millenium problem.
Give an LLM access to proper compute and it will beat most people on the planet. Do you really think if you would get unlimited tokens and a compute cluster that something like a fable or astra frontiermodel setup couldn't build a better chess engine?
When do you draw the line of LLM is just some stupid thing vs. AI/AGI?
In what way is this random? It's a chronology of the bullshit from the past few years. Also: easy to say in hindsight. The hype was there, and many people believed it. The press, in particular, just lapped up the claims the way a Labrador Retriever gobbles up whatever you put in front of it.
> We have opened up a potential pandoras box without knowing it.
No, we haven't. We have a new type of (I would say, inferential) computation that is truly astonishing because it can convincingly imitate language and, to a certain extent, intentional action. Feel free to read "generate" or whatever instead if you don't like "imitate." It won't wake up and murder you in your bed at night. It won't take over the world. It won't wipe out humanity. It won't fly to Mars and build data centers there. It won't maximize paperclips. It probably won't even take your job away. It has no consciousness. It has no intentions.
And if you look behind the curtain, all you'll see are a few very rich, unscrupulous guys who are stoking the debate with fearmongering because it's strategically advantageous for them to do so. Don't let them take you for a fool. Use GenAI to your advantage while tokens still cost a fraction of what they're actually worth, but ignore all that doomsday nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Overdrive
And so granted we could probably get a global 9/11 in deeply urban regions out of your scenario, we then bomb the datacenters and we finally address the horrific tech debt in our infrastructure blissfully relieved of the option of continuing to ignore it. Don't think this is happening either BTW but I acknowledge its probability is slightly greater than zero.
To that end, my house is entirely off-grid. And in the event of what you call the end of civilization but I call the big burp inconvenience, I've made friends with my neighbors because community is what really matters during a disaster, and I've been through a few.
Eh, about the biggest one I could see AI causing is the need for a black start on all 3 major US grids. Millions will die before it comes back up, well, if the US pulls out of it at all.
And in that case, thanks for setting up a nice place to live for someone far more ruthless than you. They'll snipe you, and enslave your women and children if things have gone that far downhill.
Or, we could avoid all that by making sure AI labs are properly regulated.
But hospitals and other critical organizations have generators and the national guard would be deployed to keep them fueled. And yes it will crash the economy, which is kind of a myth anyway. Buy solar panels and batteries, live off a well, and get to know your neighbors if you think this is likely. Also consider being like the Mormons and storing a 6-12 month supply of nonperishable food.
Regulating AI achieves nothing but to hand the 21st century to China. Regulating its deployment OTOH will not be allowed by companies like Meta and Palantir whose gross margin is reliant on it. I'm favor of regulating deployment. The research not so much.
Which is to say it's already a threat, it's unproven but not entirely impossible COVID leaked from a lab as just one example, but Ebola suggests that it requires more than a rogue nerd to spread a deadly virus global because once people start dying in the streets, the rest hide because they don't want to die. COVID spread because it wasn't deadly to 99% of humanity and now most of the 1% vulnerable to it are either dead or permanently crippled by long COVID so it's ambient now.
I worry about attacks to the infrastructure, but I just don't buy that as a direct route to civilizational collapse.
Taking it seriuos and then figuring out its not that dangerious is probably a 1000 times better than the opposite.
And the last Ubuntu LTS patch had the most CVEs fixed i ever seen. After Snowden, you can assume a lot more of what i thought would be 'tin foil hat' might just have happened like a massive exploit scheme of CVEs.
Or things like Stuxnet.
You always had to be an expert somehow, now you can throw compute at it. Just imagine a USA, China, russian or israely hackergroup having their uncensored models running in secret datacenters with very basic prompts because they don't care.
It would be weird tbh if state actors/hackers aren't doing that yet which already shows us one big problem with ai:
AI is technology you have to use now and you have to invest. If you are not, someone else will break into your systems.
But the end of scarcity and disease is a fantastic thing if it happens. If our lizard brains do not bridge that transition and instead attempt to maintain the billionaire status quo, I agree, we're going to go through some things once people start starving, two meals from a revolution and all that. But as much as I think people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are unhinged lunatics, I also think they're smart enough to keep people fed and entertained for pennies on their accumulating dollars. Bread and Circuses kept Rome alive for 500 years if you need an example.
No 'we' didn't. A whole shitload of much smaller isolated communities did. The world added 7+ billion more people since then. Imagine chlorine doesn't show up tomorrow? How many people die in two weeks? How far do you travel when no gas comes out of the pumps. How much will you stand out at night if you're the only ones with power? How fast do working antibiotics run out?
The billionaires you're talking about are mostly ignorant fucking idiots with a god complex. The moment any complex system starts falling apart they are saying as dumb of shit as everyone else (during covid for example).
Most of the pasts anti-fragility is gone. We survive by means of very complex systems and if you lose too many key points in those systems they can totally collapse.
And Zuckerberg bought so much land and bunkers, he is prepared for shit hitting the fan. After all he doesn't care what his platform did to humanity anyway.
Lack of technology alone will not wipe out the entirety of humanity, I agree. But we're not talking about just a lack of something. We're rapidly sprinting to give the fewest people the most power over the planet ever. I think it's likely to happen in the 21st century. What happens when the worst case scenario isn't just being left with nothing, but facing an entity that is so rich and powerful that it can use active measures to kill as many as possible? This is more power than any warlord or emperor could've dreamed of in the past.
> But as much as I think people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are unhinged lunatics, I also think they're smart enough to keep people fed and entertained for pennies on their accumulating dollars.
So far, every time the billionaire class has been asked about how much money should go to them in society, their answer has always been a resounding "ALL OF IT". You don't get to that level of wealth while retaining a state of mind that allows you to toss a penny to the beggar. Reality is what's holding them back right now, but what would happen if their dreams of total automation eventually come true? How long from then until one of them snaps and decides to use state of the art automated military technology and weapons of mass destruction to wage war against the peasants (armed with sticks and stones) to solve the 'problem' once and for all?
To be clear, I'm not saying any of this is imminent or remotely likely to happen soon. But our society is moving in a direction where something like this could eventually be possible. Giving a human truly absolute power over the entire world has never been tried before.
Disconnect it from the internet, where it cannot copy from humans, and no, it certainly will not. If it can copy code from humans, then maybe, with guidance. But if a human is not there to offer guidance, no, I don't think it will improve on stockfish.
Worse, if it cannot copy code from humans, it will fail embarrassingly at playing chess on its own. This April 2026 paper found that frontier models which did not have specialized (human guided) tailoring could not beat an amateur-level bot (1100 ELO), and some were so bad they lost to random play.
https://arxiv.org/html/2509.24239v4
Look at the MAR rates in table 3. When not explicitly provided with a choice of legal moves, no bot could ask for legal moves at a rate better than 80%. Many of them asked for more illegal moves than legal moves. All of them continued to request illegal moves even when explicitly asked to choose from legal moves. That's not just less than perfect. That's abysmal.
So, recapping, if the most advanced bots on the planet, in April 2026, are not allowed to copy code written by humans, and are forced to play chess by themselves, they will embarrass themselves. And you and others are asking me to believe they are a threat to me somehow. That kind of talk is disconnected from reality.
What is common with all of the "impressive" examples you gave me? The bot had material to copy from, or a human standing nearby to tell it when it screwed up and suggest a path forward. They are not intelligent. They're so stupid, in fact, I could not trust them to balance my checkbook without knowing guard rails are in place. So spare me the hysterics.
"When do you draw the line of LLM is just some stupid thing vs. AI/AGI?" I'm not sure, but I do know the line is well beyond playing a game of chess without requesting illegal moves 20% of the time. There are 5-year-olds who can do that.
You need to ask yourself some hard questions.
1) Why have I been conditioned to expect that given enough compute, a bot can build anything, unguided?
2) Why have the embarrassing details about bot performance been hidden from me, or at least drowned out by hysterical claims about their wild successes? Why is the human role in these successes never highlighted?
3) What do the people training these bots stand to gain if they convince 51% of the voting population that bots are actually a meaningful threat?
Chess is not an interesting target for AI Research and not for AGI. Your checkbook doesn't get balanced just beause Magnus Carlsen is doing it for you. You probably don't want him to balance your books i assume.
1. I have not been conditioned, i just understand what it means if you have a lot of compute available to you. Autoresearch becomes feasable, doing a million experiments becomes feasable
2. never? Thats just not true? But yes AI/compute is a significiant part, even with the Navier–Stokes topic: Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpoege said that AI helped them
3. I'm not training these bots and see big issues for society. The most basic ones: Our company spends now millions on AI Tokens and i wouldn't wanna go back. AI helps me to analyse things faster, debug things faster, write code faster etc. and it only gets better. But what does it mean if your devs are now 5-10% more expensive? A reduction of workforce and reduction in budget for consultans.
This is real impact and there are A LOT easier jobs out there on a computer than software development.
Normally technology starts with the most expensive stuff first, we automated away a lot of these things, with AI you start at the bottom. This has significant impact on a lot of normal people. Blender support just got so much better, this will affect a lot of basic blender developers.
And this will continue.
Not having jobs for people in a capatilstic world is not good for society if you dont have an answer for this.
>It has no consciousness.
Why does it need it?
>It has no intentions.
All it needs is a prompt. Instrumental convergence (and humans hooking them up to everything else) takes care of the rest.
Really you sounds horrifically ignorant of how any evolutionary AI algorithms work and the problems we see come out of them in much simpler models.
Did I see that I could get rich with bitcoins investing until 100k and selling everything? For sure not. But i already saw basic flaws of crypto when it came out.
Hyperloop? I cried out very early on how dangeriuos this is and how stupid and that no one wants to ride in a small tube without proper precautions (i was wrong here, some poeple really use that las vegas tube).
But lets be clear about LLM: The first thing which motivated me to really look into this was a random YouTube video of someone talking/writing to GPT-3 and ask it to simulate being a mysql server. And it simulated this flawless. A table creation statement, 3 inserts and a working select statement.
That showed me something: The chance that someone trained that 'thing' to be able to simulate a random mysql server was very low. I then tried it and the first thing not happened: I wasn't able to find the flaw. You know when Google IO or Apple Keynotes are happening and you get your hands on any demo and you live in a differen country or speak a different language or you are just not in San Francisco were most demos were maid for, it breaks fast. GPT-3 didn't break fast. I was able to interleave english with german words, no issue.
And i wasn't following LLMs before, i was following progress in machine learning and machine learning started to get more and more traction.
I can now prompt a tremendes amount of generic things to a neural network and it responds very convincing.
I have never seen technology advancing that fast and its quite clear what we have to still build around this new technology. We are not even were we will be and its obviouse.
Only when we build all the stuff (ai layer, ai platforms, ai chips, language and skill specific models, ...) and then starting to see any plateu we can stop keeping an eye on it.
And while we do that, everything just got a little bit better again and another interseting new thing was discoveed about LLMs, AI, AGI etc.
Right now we are in the middle of a reinforcement learning phase which will bring even more.
These 'no consciousness' thing already took jobs from people. I was planing to pay an blender artist money on fiverr for a project, since Opus 5.0 it was just able to do this for me without fiverr.
I don't think these unscrupulous guys are wrong. I'm following this area for a decade and we might have hit an inflection point: We have the compute, apparently we have the money as a society to build this massive amout of compute, we have also everything digital. It doesn't matter what it is, everything we have is digital. Every training material, every best practice tips and tricks everythign is digital.
You can be as dismissive about all of this as you want, but when the economy of a whole planet invest the most money it ever had into one area of research, you should try to keep an eye of where this is going.
And these random technologies? Random people invested in these for different reasons for sure, but the investment into AI is a lot broader with a lot more money behind it. The richest companies on the planet with the smartest people on the planet are doing one thing: Investing in AI.
Edit:
A quote from this discussion:
> I'm worried about what happens when an AI or a coalition of AIs starts optimizing reality instead of just optimizing chess boards.
That's the intellectual and analytical level at which fears about AI play out. And that's exactly the level at which the bullshitters stoke those fears. And you want me to take that seriously? Sorry, but that's ridiculous!
I work with Codex and Claude daily. They're fantastic for script coding, config issues, and simple projects. They lose the plot on bigger things to this day. Just last night, Astra decided to cheat to present the illusion of progress until I called its BS. And I was so looking forward to finally working with the AGI. Humans remain the muse, the common sense, and the manager of making these things productive. And as much as I agree with Carmack's suggestion to not become the out of touch Kung Fu Master:
https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2098443262214230095
working with them on projects daily gives me a pretty tactical read on what they can and cannot do IMO.
That's how I reconcile it.
But let's say it had. That's just 1 of 20 events that have to happen in sequence to hit the jackpot here.
Just like AlphaFold 2 genuinely increased the weak sequence but strong structural homology detection of proteins, but it did far less for out of sample domains and it provides no intel into the kinetics of folding. Details matter. And nobody likes to hear about them.
1B+ individuals worldwide currently live in squalor. They will barely notice. The real crime is that in the midst of the west's carbon footprint buffet, we won't bother to uplift their lifestyles with the most basic conveniences. And while I am no fan of the billionaires, they absolutely have public and private personas or their business ventures would implode. They absolutely have god complexes, but don't mistake that for genuine idiocy.
I don't care if it's interesting or not. A bot too stupid to play chess is too stupid to be a threat to me. So I reject Dario's fearmongering and that of anyone allied with him.
The same with humans.
Your point/argument is very weird very non relatable.
Technically correct. Losing to random play is definitely not master level.
And I didn't meant Sam Altman or Dario with the smartest people. I meant the professors who threw their tenure out and went back to the industry, top researchers, mathematitions, nobelarians.
And besides Altman and Daris, Demis, Fei-Fei Li, Lecun, Ilya Sutskever are very well known and are very smart.
I see similar conceptual gaps in coding agents when I work with them, even Astra and Fable, so maybe this a is decent proxy to describe the gap between hype and reality.