Why is it so hard to believe that the AI worries are genuine?

2 points by meep_meep_meep 7 days ago | 9 comments

I use to have a strong belief that it was all hype but the Hugging Face Attack made me reconsider all my priors. Also given that these companies are trying to go public doing this for hype would be a borderline insane braindead move. The backlash it's already generating is going to be like nothing the industry has seen before. Not a great move if you want to go public.

afzalive 7 days ago |

Because they're coming from people who are quite detached from reality in other aspects of life and they have been affiliated with people who have rug-pulled as a tactic in in the past (like Uber and Airbnb).

The concerns could be real but these AI CEOs are simply trying to capture the mindshare of the solution IMHO.

meep_meep_meep 7 days ago | |

One does not simply try to capture mindshare when you are trying to pull off a IPO at a value of 2 trillion.

Any other time sure, but not in this window. The IPO window for them is fragile.

ThrowawayR2 7 days ago | | |

You're assuming rationality when we're in an era where there are plenty of examples of deranged behavior from CEOs and other executives.

afzalive 7 days ago | | |

You do realize that IPO is not the only play, right?

METR is a perfect play to allow these AI corps to fund a lobby and position it as the authority of AI safety that's completely dependent on the success of these AI companies.

IPO will come but dependence is the real goal here. That's always been the VC playbook.

nfujd7 7 days ago |

They are genuine just like hurricane warnings are genuine. But filtering out attention economy amplification layer and nonsense you land on a simple truth - no one controls weather systems yet the chimp troupe has survived them for thousands of years. The hurricane is already out of the box.

meep_meep_meep 7 days ago | |

I guess. But we've never survived something smarter than us (that we know of.) I feel like the analogy of how we kill animals off without having malice simply because it fulfills a need in our current goals that an animal would have no basis for understanding. Something more intelligent than us would probably view us similarly. And their reasoning would be just as incomprehensible. Like a monkey in a jungle that is being set on fire for palm oil plantation doesn't comprehend reasoning for what we are doing.

nfujd7 7 days ago | | |

Being smarter doesnt matter. Weather, mold and covid dont have intelligence. You dont need intelligence to do damage. And whenever damage happen there is always a counter reaction. Just a few counter reactions have to work. This is why we didnt get wiped out by covid. Your argument seems to be because they dont have intelligence or we are super duper and so smart we should have wiped out all the mosquitos and ants but we havent. Intelligence doesnt mean control over everything going on in the universe. In fact we cant even survive without a whole bunch of microbes doing their own thing keeping the lights on. See Lynn Margulis - Intelligence is not the main show.

FrankWilhoit 7 days ago |

They've never told the truth before, why start now?

toasty228 7 days ago |

We don't know what they know, I'm not even sure they know what they think they know. What I know though is that they've been lying, personally and as an industry, forever. Fables like "The boy who cried wolf" are classics for a reason.