This looks a lot like the “if I didn’t do $badthing someone else would have” line of reasoning.

With AI, the point is who uses it for what.

Think about it like a magic wand that makes your wishes come true. Would you really want everybody to have one? Who should and who shouldn't? Who gets to decide?

Humanity's strategy so far has been to pull marbles out of the bag as fast as we can. And that's been working out, because most marbles are white. But we're insanely lucky we haven't had a nuclear war. The USSR's early warning systems picked up 5 incoming american missiles in 1983. They didn't fire back because one of the officers on shift didn't believe the reports (why only 5 missiles?), and he declared the reports were fake. If a different person was on shift, there's a good chance nuclear war would have broken out because of a sensor glitch. And that's far from the only instance.

And now we're improving AI capabilities as fast as we can, despite it being pretty clearly another grey ball. AI has a lot of amazing uses. But why are we rushing so much? Doesn't seem wise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

> But why are we rushing so much?

Talking about these things with elaborate analogies only obscuring the point you already stumbled into: Humanity advances because humans are curious, driven, like to discover things, and like to push the boundaries.

Talking about humanity like one entity that operates together misses the point: There are billions of people in the world and some of them are going to discover new things.

There is no general counsel where humanity gets together and decides what humanity works on. There is no singular bag with a singular “humanity” pulling marbles out one at a time.

The analogy is too broken to be useful for the discussion.

This is true, but not all the time, and transparently not the case for the current leaders in AI development. Their motivator is money.

There are plenty of examples of this, e.g. when we discovered how to harness nuclear energy, we quickly realized that extreme measures needed to be taken to ensure we don’t collectively destroy ourselves.

You’re speaking of “we” as if the whole world was operating in unison, while there’s a war going on in Iran over nuclear disagreements.

The nuclear situation only reached stability after multiple countries fully developed it. I don’t see the parallels to halting AI.

Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968)

Biological Weapons Convention (1972)

Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA (1975)

We've done this sort of thing plenty of times around specific, dangerous technologies.

Also the bio/DNA ones are quickly falling apart as the technology to do these kinds of things on a small scale are readily available. To the point where we're finding illegal wet labs in the US.

Nuclear was more of an exception because of many of difficulties in purifying stuff for weapons and its detectability.

AI is a much, much, much harder problem is it uses the already existing infrastructure as a base. Unless we regulate, monitor, and ban all private usage of technology AI can be developed at a small scale.

If there is a room full of people, and one person gets a gun, who would you pick to have it?

Yourself, obviously.

Maybe america will end up the only world power holding the secrets of LLMs? ... Oh no...

If nuclear weapons were as easy to build as AI models are to run, we would have all been dead decades ago.

There might have been. But the notes from the Manhattan project were leaked almost immediately to the russians by informants.

How is any of that good?

---

Simply put humans are at risk of any power scaling. We exist safely in a very tiny temperature and energy environment and the rest of the processes in the universe operate widely out of that strict safe area.

It's also a catch-22. There are large rocks in space that will eventually end us unless we do something about that. But having the power to do something about that gives us the same power to also end everyone on the earth.

> Nazi Germany undertook several research programs relating to nuclear technology, including nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors, before and during World War II. [...] The first effort started in April 1939, just months after the discovery of nuclear fission in Berlin in December 1938, but ended shortly ahead of the September 1939 German invasion of Poland, for which many German physicists were drafted into the Wehrmacht. A second effort under the administrative purview of the Wehrmacht's Heereswaffenamt began on September 1, 1939, the day of the invasion of Poland. The program eventually expanded into three main efforts: Uranmaschine (nuclear reactor) development, uranium and heavy water production, and uranium isotope separation. Eventually, the German military determined that nuclear fission would not contribute significantly to the war, and in January 1942 the Heereswaffenamt turned the program over to the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat) while continuing to fund the activity.

> The program was split up among nine major institutes where the directors dominated research and set their own objectives. Subsequently, the number of scientists working on applied nuclear fission began to diminish as many researchers applied their talents to more pressing wartime demands.

> [...] Heisenberg said that in 1939, the physicists at this second meeting concluded that "in principle atomic bombs could be made, but they also emphasized that it would take a number of years",[24] certainly not less than five. He also said that he "didn't report it to the Führer until two weeks later and very casually because I did not want the Führer to get so interested that he would order great efforts immediately to make the atomic bomb. Speer felt it was better that the whole thing should be dropped and the Führer also reacted that way."

> [...] Speer states that the project to develop the atom bomb was scuttled in the autumn of 1942. Though the scientific solution was there, it would have taken all of Germany's production resources to produce a bomb, and then no sooner than 1947.[39] Development did continue with a "uranium motor" for the navy and development of a German cyclotron. However, by the summer of 1943, Speer released the remaining 1200 metric tons of uranium stock for the production of solid-core ammunition.

There are ways of calling this "weren't working on a nuclear bomb", but it seems to me like "they wanted to, were moving in that direction, and would have done it if they had the resources and weren't distracted by shorter-term considerations".

That sounds very much like "they weren't really working on it". They explored the options and decided not to.

Whatever you want to call it, that's what I was referring to.

Like all forms of evil once invited into your house it does not leave at your say-so, another profoundly negative feature of nuclear warfare is that now we've invented it unilateral disarmament will likely always be strategically impossible.

Still seems a moral cop-out, and while true, the timeline would certainly have changed, if not the inevitability, if key figures such as himself had opted out.

I'm not arguing about the consequences or responsibility. I'm asking which humans would be capable of stopping the development of AI at this point in history.

If we're talking game theory, a better model is the Stag Hunt [1]. At some point the equilibrium strategy is to cooperate.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_hunt

It’s difficult to understand where this all is coming from because it’s so strangely disconnected from history. It’s not even consistent with current world events. The US is in a war with Iran over nuclear proliferation while also worrying about North Korea’s nuclear program. China and the US are in a trade war and Taiwan is under threat due to semiconductor capabilities (among other things, obviously). Open weight models allow anyone in any country to do AI work on their laptop. The top story on HN yesterday was a small team of academics making some cool discoveries on improving LLMs without frontier lab level compute.

How anyone can see all of this, in addition to decades of history of attempted nuclear diplomacy and wars, and posit that the whole problem is easily solved by simple agreements is confusing to me. The confidence with which these alternatives are being proposed and the unwillingness to acknowledge second order effects (like AI researchers moving to a different country and continuing to work) is baffling.

But yeah, there are a lot of comments from genie-rebottlers that are not very grounded in reality. They're functionally equivalent to saying "hey, everyone in the world, let's not actually use electricity after all" in 1905.

Despite this, when discussing the egregious behavior of the frontier labs, there is vanishingly little acceptance of the idea that 1) yes, it probably was inevitable in some ways AND 2) those involved, particularly at the top, are still responsible for the consequences of their (bad) decisions.

1. Is it both inevitable and still they are responsible? 2. Or it was inevitable and they were just an instrument to make it happen. 3. Or it wasn't inevitable and if it were not for some specific people then it would not have happened?

I am leaning more towards 2. But if that is the case why are only specific people reaping the benefits of this?

If it is 3 or 1, then why aren't we holding them accountable?

So yes, they are 100% responsible for damage they caused and did not had to happen. And no, "I had no choice, because it was the only way to become billionaire" is not an excuse.

They were NOT "instrument". No one manipulated them. No one forced them. Nothing forced them. They themselves wanted to and did not cared

People are starting to panic, and few things bring out full blown idiocy and disregard for ground truth faster than widespread panic.

You must be joking. Altman is a sociopath, Amodei is either too stupid or too evil to stop working on tech he claims will have a 10% chance of destroying humanity (and in either case he should be imprisoned to protect the rest of us from him), and Musk is a man-child who will lash out at anyone and everything who dares to speak ill of him. There's absolutely nothing "lucky" about having these jokers in charge of stuff.

It's similarly easy to come up with "what Altman should do better". The dude is a genuine sociopath in charge of a company trying to make everyone's lives worse off in order to enrich him and his investors. It doesn't get much worse behaved than that.

So yeah, I'm negative against their development of AI along with the general public, and for good reason it would seem.

Also, I don't want super intelligence. I want humans to remain in control. Why are they trying to build something to replace humanity? Why don't we got a vote in this? All 8 billion of us not developing frontier models with the expressed goal of achieving AGI followed closely by ASI.

It's a pity because as computer scientists this should have been such a fun technological moment for us. What a cool thing to experiment and explore new open doors with. But instead it was immediately the driver of mass job loss, societal upheaval, and a double digit percent chance of ending humanity, espoused by the AI lords themselves.

The list of possible reasons is pretty short and mostly not really good for most of us, as far as I see it

I do. Quite a lot of people do. And that is because we believe it will lead to a better life for most humans.

-G. Hinton

The models we currently have aren't going away, and especially the ones small enough to run at home will continue to be used, but if these data center investments end up bankrupting Big Tech, I don't think we're ever going to see anything beyond that. Not for a long time, at least.

My guess would be that once the money runs out, things slow down, but incremental progress continues to be made. A focus on smaller models will improve their capabilities. We’ll get better at driving them. It’ll be used in places where it truly makes sense, instead of anywhere & everywhere just because it’s easy.

I don’t actually know what the financials are, but even without the effective subsidy from VC money, I have to believe there are things AI’s doing today that’s way cheaper than what it would cost to have a human doing equivalent work. And that dynamic will drive further innovation in the space for a long time.

What does this actually mean? In what sense are people using this term. In the most strictly literal sense then sure, nothing is inevitable, because all paths are open.

But in the practical sense, I am quite happy to use the term inevitable for many technologies. I think if ASI is possible (and I think it is), then it is also inevitable. I would happily work towards developing ASI technology, because I believe it will be ultimately good for the world. But it sounds like a lot of people want to lock me up or even kill me if I did that.

AI indeed goes far beyond "autocomplete" and other nonsense. But the question is, whether it's a good idea to just let the "market" run wild with it.

Short-term capital interests don't align with the public good. AI greatly scales capability, but without anything to restrain it, that implies those non-aligned interests overwhelming society's defenses, outright destroying it in the process.

The idea of rich people being some kind of benevolent caretakers, who independently and dependably foresee and manage the consequences of their actions in everybody's best interest, is laughably wrong already.

With AI, that reality gap will swallow whatever is left.

Without capitalism, you wouldn't be able to restrain AI adoption any more than the armored knights of the middle ages were able to restrain the adoption of the firearm.

I think the vast majority of the rich are greedy bastards, but IMO being rich does not imply greedy bastard 100% of the time.

This doesn't seem right: it doesn't match the history of reality, in which capitalism has repeatedly stymied rather than fostered competition.

The argument from nature is a fallacy. Just because something is doesn't mean it ought to be.

I operate within the logic of how the world actually works.

Which I find infinitely more useful for practical topics like the reality of AI development in a global economy.

Fantasizing about alternative realities where all the leaders of the world unite and halt technology development without any of them secretly defecting and developing it further isn’t very useful to discuss. These things aren’t going to happen.

it has kinda worked for nuclear weapons

That’s the inverse of what I said.

AI has no such hurdles.

Transitioning from the current "order of things" to one compatible with the existence of things like AI is a necessity, not a "fantasy".

When you imagine people as savages to be outdone in their savagery, you become one yourself. Spend more effort on finding ways not to.

Ignorance of what? All of the previous successful attempts where the entire world reorganized itself into a single world government?

> Transitioning from the current "order of things" to one compatible with the existence of things like AI is a necessity, not a "fantasy".

I think you’re putting the cart before the horse. You’re assuming it’s necessary and then making another leap to assume that being necessary means it must also be possible.

Additionally, you don't need all the leaders of the world to agree to anything, you only need US and China.

Additionally x2, if you agree with the common stance that China makes the vast majority of their progress by distilling US models, you don't even need them to agree to anything.

You're really suggesting the following bans. A ban on computer science and algorithms. A ban on any device that can play games that aren't encrypted or DRM locked from an approval authority. A ban on any kind of unregulated computing without government approval and licensing.

>China makes the vast majority of their progress by distilling US models

Eh, this is a budgetary decision, not a technological one. Why spend billions when the US can spend billions and you can spend millions. China more than has the power to do what we're doing if they chose to do so, their biggest limitation is speed of making new compute, not money or brains.

You know what, fuck it, that's exactly what I'm suggesting. Let's ban personal computers. The only consumer hardware allowed should be a HTTPS client directly burned on the chip that can only connect to government servers. Absolute all timer of a straw man. This is probably the last comment I'm writing on this site, this place has become unsufferable.

Believe it or not, there already are things you're not allowed to do with computers that you otherwise own, and we have ways of enforcing them other than trusted computing -- the threat of putting you in a cell for a few decades usually does the job. That's without getting into the fact that you're not going to train 1T-sized models on your laptop, and billion dollar GPU farms aren't precisely hard to keep track of.