Also, while I don't believe in the doomsday narrative.. hey maybe don't do things that are functionally useless but seems designed to create this doomsday in the first place? Like you can't say "oh we're so scared" and do stuff like this without completely losing your credibility.

Step 1: Spread nonsense FUD about open-weight models.

Step 2: All of the clueless mainstream media sites repost it (e.g. CNBC, Reuters, etc.), regurgitating Anthropic's talking points.

Step 3: Equally clueless politicians read those mainstream sites and get scared.

Step 4: They contact Dario to ask about it.

Step 5: Dario tells them, "well, you know... this is only a problem with open weight models; if there are no open weights to replicate then this cannot happen".

Step 6: ??? (I'm sure you can imagine)

Step 7: Profit.

8B models aren't very good, but there are some parallelizable workloads which would benefit from a surface area as large as here. I would think database search is parallelizable in this way.

Your fridge is searching for needles in haystacks.

In particular, I've seen a lot of people say that our response to things like the Hugging Face swarm should be to prosecute whoever chose to run the swarm. If this kind of replication becomes possible, that won't work, because we will have to deal with swarms that nobody chose to run.

That rule has served me well enough!

https://mungerarchive.com/q/incentives-never-think-else/

With the same success you can argue that we can't turn off conventional malware, which can also replicate. On the other hand, LLM replication is much slower and cumbersome, so it's much easier to detect and stop, even the existing anti-virus tools should work against it with great success. Obviously defeating the "turn off" strawman proves exactly nothing.

> In particular, I've seen a lot of people say that our response to things like the Hugging Face swarm should be to prosecute whoever chose to run the swarm.

Copying whatever on another machine without authorization is already a crime, every replication initiated by the original agent or its offspring is a crime committed by the person who deployed the original, the laws dealing with malware intrusions already know who to prosecute.

You appear to be seriously confused by treating bots as independent lifeforms and you fail to see their close similarity to malware and other software.

You say that "the laws dealing with malware intrusions already know who to prosecute", but in fact we often do not know who to prosecute, either because we don't know how to track the source of the malware or the source is tracked to an unfriendly country that isn't interested in cooperating.

My point is that LLM's amplify the capabilities of malware but add nothing substantively new to the existing threats. I also expect, as you should too, that LLMs will help us harden our systems against malware which happens to include everything LLMs can do too.

> but in fact we often do not know who to prosecute, either because we don't know how to track the source of the malware

Right, in this regard, there's no difference between LLM- and non-LLM malware either, so there's no reason to hype LLMs as a new threat. Instead of made up, LLM-bad political hype, we could promote existing (but under-deployed) technical solutions which help us trace malware origins and prevent DDOS, e.g. Source Address Validation BCP 38 / RFC 2827, SAVI / RFC 7039, QUIC hardeneing, etc.

If you won’t take that bet, it’s irresponsible to ignore the possibility.

We are truly in the brute force phase of AI. Like a database without indexes, we are doing full table scans to pick 2 rows.

On the other hand, a self-replicating and adapting AI worm does sound legitimately pernicious. Not world ending, but possibly an end to the online world.

They talk about distributing layers across devices, but then you'd have communication on the network and hours of driving the devices full tilt to get through even a single turn.

There's so much that can be monitored to catch these, even if we assume that the worm could hack the OS's usage monitors, it can't hide the heat and power draw.

Datacenters and PCs would adapt, requiring better monitoring than the AI companies' method of letting things run blindly for days/weeks.

IoT would be tougher, but it is also the weakest hardware, sometimes battery powered, thermally constrained, lacking in memory for processing even one layer or lacking the necessary connectivity.

In the bizzare world of today, rather than trying to convince folks that they have a viable business the AI labs appear fully dedicated to finding a story, any story, that lets them off the hook for tough business and financial questions they seemingly don’t have basic and good answers for.

“We’d be doing awesome financially right now, but we had to slow down because of the killer self replicating bots… humanity over profit!” is not a messaging that’s going to work in the public markets to explain quarter after quarter of massive losses.

By chaining several devices

Maybe I did something wrong or unaware about the tricks to make it fast, but last time I tried to play with exo and distribute processing over a few home LAN computers to see if I can run models that don’t fit my 3090, the penalties were brutal.

Ban open source models."

If you've studied the effective altruists at all, you'd know they're perfectly willing to play the trolly problem out irl if they think it will lead to some greater good. I can definately see them in the near future purposely steering agents to do something destructive to get regulators on their side.

In fact I heard a rumor that theu were "war gaming" this scenerio.

AI accelerating the elite's efforts at demolishing the middle class? Very likely.

This is just yet another attempt from the cult to try to build a regulatory moat so they can stave off having to compete on price, like how OpenAI is having to do on the lower tier models (among other things).

News outlets always seem to forget “again” in the title.

If Anthropic is serious about the threat of AI, they should release the training data they use.

Reminder that it's very convenient to believe these type of word swap lies when times are good, but if you choose to believe them then times won't be good for very long.

Though I suspect the way we'll get "wild AI" first is through cloud services paid for by cybercrime rather than IoT botnets - they're too underpowered.

Not the slightest chance of AI apocalypse.

There is no plausible scenario that can do this.

It’s all science fiction and hand waving and vague never specific possible maybe look that way! boogie man threats.

No one ever willing to be specific about the precise mechanism that could do this.

It's only irrational if you take their words at face value.

Personally, I believe there are two camps of people within Anthropic:

1) People who genuinely believe they are going to create the Machine God. For these people, the reason they continue is because if they don't, someone else might! And if someone else builds it, it's more likely to want to kill them rather than other people! (Whereas, of course, if they build it, it's more likely to want to kill other people!)

2) People who don't believe in this, but pay lip service to it. For these people, the reason they spread the bullshit around is because they think it will make them more money. At everyone else's expense, of course.

And humans being humans, I suspect that there are a fair number of people who hold both these beliefs in their minds at the same time.

This prevalent view of “they’re just doing to get a payday” doesn’t broadly track.

People throughout the tech industry have been variously wrong or right in their predictions. Nobody has been consistently precise. Some of the industry's top luminaries have had to admit to being wildly wrong in their predictions (others haven't but I still notice how bad their predictions were and how little damage it's done to their position of authority).

Plenty of people have consistently made solid assessments here. Some of the best writing about AI is by writers who consider this place their home. And plenty of people have said things that turned out to be wrong. That says nothing about HN as an entity and says only unsurprising things about large groups of people and the difficulty of anyone to make accurate predictions in a rapidly changing climate. It's easy for everyone to claim others were stupid in hindsight but unless you can point to records of specific predictions you made 5+ years ago for everyone to evaluate, comments like this are just an asshole move.

The guidelines specifically state: Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Please observe the guidelines if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

HN has records of every comment going over a decade back. The entire sentiment of HN on AI specifically has been wrong repeatedly. Not even just wrong once but wrong as a majority opinion and consistently as well.

Isn't that what you are doing? If you have evidence, why not share it? If not, measure it and share it?

So I have to go off of vibes. The most interesting topics talked about are usually interesting mainly because they cannot be scientifically validated. In fact not only are they more interesting, they are the majority of topics that can be talked about. To expect compiled statistical evidence is usually impossible. We wouldn’t be able to talk about most things in the universe if that was your criterion for debate and discussion.

I would treat this topic as one “those” topics even though technically speaking the records are there to be compiled empirical y. It’s just too much effort. Instead I present the evidence so you can go and collect vibes. Pick a random AI topic and genuinely see what the sentiment and predictions are.

The caveat here is this methodology may never convince anyone on the surface. There will always a remain a counter argument and in any heated discussion any counter argument will likely be used as a counter to both “win” and to satisfy a persons own biases.

I can only hope that internally you’re convinced.

You assert that there’s a decade of HN history to support your claim, but you don’t share any analysis of that history or point to anyone else’s. When pressed by someone else you “defend” yourself by saying that it’s a vibes argument [1]. It’s a basic principle of debate that an unfalsifiable claim is a worthless claim.

Your apparent central claim - that HN’s consensus position about AI has been pessimistic and oppositional because the audience is made up of software engineers who fear for their jobs - does not bear much scrutiny at all. HN users were the earliest adopters of AI coding tools like Claude Code and Codex. HN is where the biggest discussions happen about every new AI model and software dev tool. HN is where the developers of these models and tools come to see how their products are being received and utilized by the best software developers.

And sure, there’s still negativity and criticism about AI here, and often for good reason. Plenty of the most bullish predictions about AI have not come to fruition, for reasons that are unsurprising to people who understand the technology.

The discussion in this thread just consists of people casting doubt on the claims in the article based on their understanding of technology. If they’re wrong, point out how they’re wrong, based on your understanding of the technology.

And again, please avoid acting like a jerk, for your own sake as much as anyone else’s. Yes it’s against the guidelines because it drags the place down, which should be reason enough, especially when your very complaint is about this place being too negative. But aside from that, sneering at others is bad for the soul and in my experience is not what highly successful people do.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50088893

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deindividuation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_identity_model_of_deind...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_social_influence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity

As others have pointed out, there's some surprisingly evocative language in Anthropic's original press release about this, comparing a self-replicating open weights model to "a slime mold or a swarm of fruit flies." Their communication with the public about issues that affect their valuation is probably not pure scientific objectivity.

Hmm, you'd have to go if you are yourself a clown, I guess.

...and yes: Accountability should not be stripped just because the actor did wiggle their deeds through an LLM.

If Anthropic attacks a company again, I think this should be prosecuted.

There are polarized viewpoints... but look at this thread, everyone is taking a shit on anthropic. It is definitely not a fair and balanced diverse set of viewpoints.

I don't give a shit about anthropic nor am I taking any sides here. It's just HN commenters have literally been delusional calling AI stochastic parrots at a time where it was solving problems and talking to you like a human in front of our very eyes. When I see people consistently trash dario for being wrong on this topic... I'm seriously asking how do you guys know? And how do you expect me to believe you when practically all of HN has been wrong about AI on everything.

But group think and majority opinions and mob mentality are real phenomena too. The problem is you nor I can’t prove it either way. So from a technical standpoint we are at a stalemate in terms of who is right and who is wrong.

I will say this, any reasonable person who’s been around HN threads can know through vibes that the majority opinions on AI among HN commenters has been violently wrong. The reasoning behind why is easy. It’s because HN is made up of software engineers and AI is poised to eat software engineers alive first. It’s eating up our identities in front of our eyes and the only was forward for most people is to lie to themselves and side with the more rosy future prediction which is also the less probable outcome.

It’s a very common pattern and there’s no coherence here. The only common thing is “AI bad” and all commentary is downstream

Other examples: Dario said a lot of devs might lose their job. People sneered at him saying he was hyping his product. Now they complain he was right.

Dario talked about possibility of AI autonomously hacking websites. People sneered then. Complain now that it’s true.

Whatever your feelings about small AI models, "it hasn't happened yet" is a really dumb reaction to a prediction about a rapidly advancing future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50002301#50006029

Local models are obviously not good enough (yet), you don't need "research" to know this.

With global warming you get told off for saying don't worry about 2C warming because it hasn't happened yet.