I'm not being facetious, and I didn't see that interview with Sam, but I agree with his opinion as you've just described it.

I personally think there's also significant risks, but I agree. This will be copied by many large corporations and countries. It's better that it's done by some folks that are competent and kinda give a damn, because there are lots of people who could build it that aren't and don't. If these guys can suck enough monetary air out of the room, they might slow down the copycats a bit. This is nowhere near as difficult as NBC or even the other instruments of modern war.

That doesn't mean there can't be regulation. You can regulate guns, precursors, and shipping of biologics, but you're not going to stop home-brew... and when it comes to making money, you're not going to stop cocaine manufacture, because it's too profitable.

Let's hope we figure out what the really dangerous parts are quickly and manage them before they get out of hand. Imagine if these LLM and image generators had be available to geopolitical adversaries a few years ago without the public being primed. Politics could still be much worse.

>if they don’t build it first someone else somewhere else will and is that really what you want!?

Most likely the runner-up would be open source so yes.

There are already 3 or 4 runners-up and they're all big tech companies.

Lang-chain is the pre-eminent runner up and it's open source and was here a month ago.

Why would the runner-up be open source and not Google or Facebook? Or Alibaba? Open source doesn’t necessarily result in faster development or more-funded development.

Lets start doing human clones and hardcore gene editing then, by the same line of thinking. /s

I'm actually on the side of continuing to develop AI and shush the naysayers, but "we should do it cause otherwise someone else will" is reasoning that gets people to do very nasty things.

The reason we don't do human genetic engineering is the moral hazard of creating people who will suffer their entire lives intentionally (also the round trip time on an experiment is about 100 years).

You can iterate on an AI much faster.

Rouhd trip time is about 21 years, not about 100 years, if we allow natural reproduction of GMO/cloned humans.

Establishing that your genetic modification system doesn't result in everyone getting cancer and dying past age 25 is quite the problem before you roll it out to the next generation.