Even better - it's a way to simultaneously market your AI as very powerful and to get governments to clamp down on your competitors.
Given that a significant number of people working in the field apparently disagree with you perhaps you could give some justification for your dismissal beyond the ad-hominem? And it's very blatantly not the case that the entire field is 'only really trying to make them bigger'. The news is currently full of stories about coming advancements from OpenAI which have nothing to do with scaling and that's just a single company.
Note that the "ad-hominem" pertains to only those who care about extinction risk, not AI developers in general.
> which have nothing to do with scaling
Except they are. There's no fundamental change in architecture, it's all transformers. OpenAI's "multi-modal" capabilities are not a redesign of their AI, it's systems bolted together.
Bolting a text-to-image generator & image-to-text describer to an LLM doesn't approach "General Intelligence", it's a system of three specific capabilities.
You could consider that new system "more general" than a lone LLM, but it only approaches General Intelligence in the same way that the series "1+1+1+1+..." approaches infinity. Is each individual step "closer to infinity"? Sure. Is it a useful way to achieve infinity? No, because you'll be stuck adding new steps forever the same as a conventional computer software.
> And it's very blatantly not the case that the entire field is 'only really trying to make them bigger'.
There are some, not many but I'll grant you some, researchers working on actually generalizing these systems.
Their funding is a rounding error to AI spending, their work isn't going to hit production for years. It's not an extinction risk.
I believe it does: if you're calling racism anything from Hitler to someone who wants to be punctual [1], the word loses it's meaning and people will start arguing about degrees instead of harmful behaviors.
[1] https://www.thompsoncoe.com/resources/myhrgenius/hr-tips/tip...
And I get it, the discussion is deeply alluring. There is a deep amount of nuance involved. Your point about punctuality is begging for a response about how "punctuality is racist" looks dumb on the surface but belies a deeper point about polychronic cultures that has a lot of legitimate merit to it.
I'll refrain from giving you that full ramble lest I betray my original point, if you or a lurker wants it toss a reply and we can have a go. But note that your link uses a baity headline to grab your attention for a more nuanced point.
Two points:
1. I think this is indeed a very valid and important topic, that humans would benefit from (being able to[1]) take seriously (something along these lines, I am approximating, of course).
2. Your concern, at least in part, seems to be ~racism, and presumably that racism is unjustified, that the perceived underlying problems are imaginary. But then you mentioned culture. Culture exists, and is not very far removed from race. To be clear(!): this is not a promotion of delusional behavior, like: racism, culturalism, anti-racism, anti-culturalism, etc, I'm more so pointing out that "right thinking" on these matters is not correct, and that even the good people have heads full of silly and dangerous ideas.
[1] Imho the real problem here is less that it isn't taken seriously than the much broader problem that humans seem essentially unable to control what they take seriously, or their "seriousness service". And this isn't the only service they essentially have no control over.
As someone who has never been in a meeting that started on time, usually due to white male managers who are bad at time management, I can understand this need to be tolerant of other cultures and their idiosyncrasies.
The very first line of the article you are referring to.
If you'd look at the original infographic, it's about which norms and values are considered "default" in the US, inherited from (white) European values.
With "Hard work" in specific:
> Protestwant Work Ethic
> * Hard work is the key to success
> * Work before play
> * "If you didn't meet your goals, you didn't work hard enough"
And I'm sorry but the notion that these are human-invented norms and values, not "laws of the universe", is pretty fucking milquetoast.
If you genuinely believe all failures at your job are the result of you not hustle-grinding hard enough, that not even a single element contributing to those failures has been out of your control, I have a bridge to sell you.
It's marketing. "Our AI is so powerful it's going to destroy the world" is just a way to market "Our AI is so powerful, give us money".
The only people who sincerely care about "extinction risk" are the weird cultists. In the real world there's essentially zero chance of LLMs/Current-GenAI scaling up into AGI, nevermind AGI that'd be an extinction risk. (Yes, that phrasing is cheeky. AGI is a different kind of AI, not just specialized models made bigger. But we're only really trying to make them bigger, and not build general intelligence from the ground up)
> I believe there is indeed risk using models that could be biased but I don't believe that is a new problem.
It's the same old problem with most software, and it's similarly ignored.
These models are biased, and attempts to control that bias are a shitshow. (As Google conveniently showed everyone)
The problem is twofold:
1. This bias has severe real world impact. https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-machin... This is an article from 2020. We still haven't fundamentally addressed problems like this. These tools are still used by law enforcement and businesses making life-impacting decisions.
2. There's a widespread sentiment that "computers can't be racist". Whenever the bias of these systems hits the news or otherwise gets attention, they're often colloquially described as "racist" (or "sexist", etc), which triggers a swift counter from many techbros going "Um akshually it's not racist, it's merely skin tone reflectivity/it's merely the data set/etc"^[1]
The argument effectively being, "It's not racism because it's not intended, it's merely sparkling discrimination". Yet, this is used as a thought terminating cliché. Nothing is done about the discrimination. Everyone just goes home. "It's not racist, we're not bad people, job done." Leaving the harm of the discrimination unsolved.
This is not without cause. The only way to really "un-bias" these systems effectively would be to extensively curate the dataset and admit that the systems are of very limited capability and should not be used in (non-research) production environments.
Both of these are "impossible". Curating the dataset for current generative-AI would take years and years. And admitting AI shouldn't be used for anything where the bias may have a material impact on the outcome kills the hype bubble. AI firms and developers don't want to address the problem, because the problem is really hard and annoying.
But despite these costs, we should still do it. Because it is the morally correct thing to do. And because regulators are going to tear every company involved a new one if they don't.
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[1]: A footnote to pre-empt something: I don't care what side of this argument you're on. Whether you believe "racism" must include an element of intent or can be done by machines and systems without intent, there is discrimination with material harm on real people. Whether you call that discrimination "racism" or "sparkling machine discrimination" does not matter. The harm matters, and must be stopped.