Dramatic insider warnings over AI fall flat with some in Silicon Valley

glimshe

As long as they don't connect WOPR, I mean, Claude to the nukes, we'll be fine.

comrade1234

It's just a bunch of drama from two American companies trying to lock in their lead via government regulation. Meanwhile I'll just keep using open-weight models.

christkv

This is literally the story of the boy who cried wolf.

indy

Is this a signal that open models are becoming good enough for a lot of people?

sublinear

The actual risk from AI is not its "intelligence", but the profound stupidity of the humans connecting it to important infrastructure. This has got to be the last straw with the anthropomorphization. I swear listening to the pro-AI crowd is like listening to an autistic child babble on and on and on about their way cool robot sketches in their notebooks. These are not adults and there are no robots.

bananaflag

To everyone who believes that this is some nefarious plot by CEOs to bring about regulation or to hide that they've hit a wall or to make their models seem more capable or whatever: The AI risk arguments are philosophical arguments that are 20-30 years old and don't have anything to do with the current corporate landscape. They were thought of by people who really care about the issue and all the "gotcha" lines have well-developed counters. Of course they might be stuck in their ideology but they deserve a bit more credit. I don't doubt that AI CEOs can profit from a crisis and that they don't necessarily have our best interests at heart. But this is the same way governments during COVID tested how much they can restrain freedom. This doesn't mean COVID doesn't exist or that vaccines are evil or ineffective or whatever. Same way here, if there is an advantage to CEOs to regulate things doesn't mean AIs can't kill us all and that regulation might bring us more time to solve alignment. Also: I accept I might be wrong and AI risk might be a fake issue and/or alignment might be impossible, but please bring better arguments if you want to convince me.

mitchbob

https://archive.ph/IsMB6

Arodex

>One conference speaker, Grindr CEO George Arison, told the BBC he believed this week's comments from Coxon and others were indicative of an "anti-civilisational worldview at Anthropic". >He called them "dangerous" and said they had prompted him to instruct some engineers at the LGBTQ+ dating app to stop using Anthropic's technology. >"It is irresponsible for us as stewards of our shareholders' money to be relying on a business that does what this company does, in terms of its public statements," he said. "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders" but without any irony.

hackingonempty

Maybe they can use their brilliant super AI to address some real and present threats that are being ignored like nuclear annihilation, the loss of the prohibition of the acquisition of territory by force established after WWII, the certainty of all of the fossilized carbon being dug up out of the ground and released into the environment, the resurgence of measles and a poor posture for the next pandemic, ETC...

aqme28

It's weird that we have two parallel discussions and they're not meeting in the obvious middle. OpenAI is out there hacking HF, RubyGems, etc... Dario is talking about restricting the frontier, pausing development. The problem is that "restricting the frontier" benefits no one as much as the frontier labs. But there are other ways to force alignment-- make companies liable for these felonies their agents commit. Make them liable, and they might actually devote the necessary resources to fixing these problems, rather than throwing their hands up and just saying "Trust nobody buy us", which obviously no one does.

amelius

At least tell us where the datacenters are located so we can do something if shit hits the fan.

gregglain

I don't see the part about helping quarterly earnings. #useless. Next.

roryirvine

The CEO of Grindr, fresh from illegally sharing users' HIV status with advertisers, complains that a company displaying scruples is "anti-civilisational". Astonishing.

classified

After years of propaganda war and boundless "creative marketing", Misanthropic and ClosedAI have lost all credibility. With trillions in investments on the line, it's not too far fetched to assume that those warnings have been bought. A few hundred millions in PR expenses are less than a drop in the bucket compared to debts. I do notice an uptick in drama intensity. Could it be they're being pressured to IPO soon?

dalemhurley

I agree with the host of the All In podcast, often I don’t. This is about creating a moat that open source models cannot compete with, regulation. It is purely ensuring only a few providers can compete. The future is edge and open source models. Both Apple and Google are working towards this. Cloud AI will be for offloading when the edge is not capable. Most cases edge will be suffice. Further inference costs keep coming down. Vertical integration might be the biggest challenge of the AI industry. Trying to manage electricity generation, training, inference, harness and end user for enterprise and consumer is a lot of moving parts.

hypendev

So, as someone who works with LLM's daily and even trained his own, who's enjoying the benefits of this technology daily, I'm supposed to: - Listen to someone who just collected a few ten/hundred million building AI at a frontier lab, then decided to call it "existential crisis for humanity" and suddenly is going to work at a regulatory body made exactly for this - Listen to CEO's of billion dollar startups nearing-IPO and are calling for "a pause in development" and regulatory capture, while they have the frontier covered and keep extracting value there like nothing happened - Listen to "the people" apparently, as NGO's like irreplaceable.org are trying to say, pretending they are normal everyday people while the organizations are being ran by political lobbyists and people who do political non-profits for a living - Listen to "the doomers", which mostly consists of people that have never written any code or aren't even tech-adjacent, talking about sci-fi scenarios like they are our current reality, i.e. "AI replicating itself across servers and building weaponized drone/biolab/robot factories while nobody notices" like it's a serious threat we have, without any thought to the insane sequence of events and failures needed to get there, and the actual possibility of being noticed at each step of the way. - Listen to the folks promoting their books, substacks and podcasts talking about AI doom, where the folks involved are mostly again, not engineers and have no clue on how any of this tech works, but just spout technobabble pretending it's a real thing. - Listen to people whose job is "AI safety expert", which needs the panic to ensure it's existence and importance, and which is mostly comprised of people prompting AI in different ways No thanks, I'll rather use DeepSeek.

sensanaty

What's the bet the people that quit recently got paid some hefty severance packages with an exit note about what to write?

skeledrew

Until I see someone provide a sufficiently detailed scenario connected to current frontier capabilities that leads to the claimed "end of things", I also say this is just another "boy crying wolf" event. Why should I listen to anyone saying something is X when they've provided 0 proof or even a reasonable grounded argument for why it's X? And no, the Hugging Face and other spontaneous hacks don't count; they were just the models attempting to solve problems they were prompted with.