Don't Be Fooled by this Summer of AI Hype(technologyreview.com) |
Don't Be Fooled by this Summer of AI Hype(technologyreview.com) |
(And to be clear: I’m not talking about being skeptical of fantastic claims about things that have not happened- ie an AI takeover, runaway super-intelligence, etc.)
The article is also dismissive of the Hugging Face incident and other hacking incidents. This one is trickier, because we are more reliant on what the companies have released to piece together what happened. The METR report is probably the closest thing we have right now. Here again, I think the issue is that a lot of coverage blends the ethical issues (holding AI companies responsible for what their bots do) with capability issues (whether AI is or will be capable of developing novel and dangerous attacks).
(I intentionally ignore the tsunami of trash journalism and the likes)
Every technology has its negative parts, but breathlessly pointing out the negatives gets really old.
We can't have both! The models are both insanely powerful, AND very dangerous! Anyone who's used a frontier model for an hour should understand this.
It's a race, and a speculative one, so flexing _constantly_ to stay seemingly ahead is expected.
Your statement is very vague, but if you refer to the HuggingFace incident, a third party (METR) has been called to analyze it, and their report is public.
Are they really paying people to be fired and deliver stupid lines to justify the data center overcommitment I want a new timeline the Mayan calendar was never meant to be stretched this long past $30/plate food trucks in Haight Ashbury
That's exactly what happened when Google's AI "autonomously" hacked into companies coincidentally in the middle of tests of its cybersecurity abilities in a simulated highly controlled scenario on a totally isolated system that was just accidentally given unrestricted access to the open internet.
That's exactly what happened when AI was "threatening to blackmail" people. Internal tests, in roleplaying scenarios designed to push the model to do exactly wthat it did.
It's exactly what happened in the the Hugging Face incident. An internal test was conducted, AI was told to do tasks specifically to test AI's ability to take known vulnerabilities and turn them into working exploits, mostly using an internal research model which was not intended for production, but also another production model whose guardrails had been intentionally removed.
So yes, a company with billions and billions of dollars and years of research and investment into AI models likely will be able to use their AI in cyber attacks. I think pretty much everybody believed that was a risk.
What does that tell us about our risks in the real world right now? Well, it's extremely hard to say because we're still left trusting the AI company who is constantly lying about what their AI is to tell us what it was doing and how, and we're still unable to independently verify or replicate what happened, and there are no known examples of anyone who isn't an AI company doing anything like it. Certainty you or I or the vast majority of the population can't just browse to chatgpt.com and hack the planet.
Did AI do something that humans couldn't already do? No. Did they spontaneously "go rogue", or demonstrate "superintelligence" or "create AI civilizations"? No. Can we be sure they didn't just orchestrate the whole incident to push their "AI scary!" narrative? Nope. So we're pretty much left with what we already knew. All the largest risks are from AI companies themselves and governments building AI models. There isn't much any of us can do about that.
You have a keen and insightful understanding of honesty!
AI companies were quick to sign the "Statement on AI Extinction Risk" https://aistatement.com/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk...
"White-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person, most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTrBz6Z5c0E
AI companies aren't leaving a lot of AI-doomerism ground uncovered.
> When we perform risk/benefit analyses of language technology, we must keep in mind how the risks and benefits are distributed, because they do not accrue to the same people. On the one hand, it is well documented in the literature on environmental racism that the negative effects of climate change are reaching and impacting the world’s most marginalized communities first.
Please, please do the least bit of due diligence and understand the discourse before condescending to other people.
[1] https://cnr.ncsu.edu/news/2026/09/data-center-boom-water-res...