AI Safety Is Not a Corporate Plot

thingsilearned

Really well put. I hope this article can finally put to bed this very frustrating dismissal. Many debates about AI are complicated and hard to resolve, but this one isn’t: all of these stories are clearly false. Some evidence: The AI experts who aren’t affiliated with big companies are just as concerned as the ones who are. The AI company leaders giving these warnings were giving the exact same warnings before they had AI companies - and in many cases, before they worked in the industry, or before the industry existed. If these corporate plots were real, they would be incredibly dumb.

swid

There is more than one kind of corporate plot though. The article defends against the kind where some people inside a cooperation have some idea to make more money with unsavory methods, in an imagined backroom I suppose, and then use corporate resources to pursue that plan to achieve their goals. In this case, we have a bunch of people who believe something. Some of them get jobs in that field. They notice their belief could be beneficial to their company (and make them more money), and so using corporate resources to amplify this viewpoint is well justified spend to help them achieve their goals. In my view, there is little difference in the outcome between the two and probably the line is very blurry... do people in the 2nd case sometimes say the quiet part outloud? Do people in the first often believe they are only doing what is right and rational without finances considered? Often these posts come straight from the top of AI companies with specific policy goals in mind. What good will come from understanding Amodei / Altman's "true" motives anyway?

amadeuspagel

"AI Safety" is too broad to be a corporate plot, but there are some demands that people make in the name of AI safety that are obviously in the interest of frontier labs, like for example for NVidia to be banned from selling to China.