I have also been able to lean towards a side in inevitable v/s responsible.

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?

"Inevitable" means "same technological progress would be achieved anyway, even if these people have made less damaging choices".

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

I am not sure what gripe you have with the labs, but I think if you are worried about AI then you got shockingly lucky with the lab leadership. My biggest gripe has been the campaign of negativity against ai.

>campaign of negativity against ai.

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

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> if you are worried about AI then you got shockingly lucky with the lab leadership.

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.

Other than Musk, the other two seem to me overall quite good stewards. Could have been much worse, and indeed hard to find someone better. How do you think someone could have been a better steward? There are 8 billion people in the world, almost all of them believe in absurd and mutually incompatible imaginary tales, its a very hard thing to create an information agent that doesn't offend a big fraction of the world.

I think it's pretty trivial to imagine ways in which they could've done better. For example, if you genuinely believe some tech has a 10% chance to destroy everyone alive, stop fucking developing it. There is no scenario where it is remotely acceptable to pursue such a risky goal. Amodei is either too stupid to see that, in which case he can't be trusted with anything sharper than a butter knife, or he's too evil to care about the risk, in which case he can't be trusted with anything at all. Or, more likely, he's lying to hype up his company, in which case he's a fraudster.

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.

If you impute its bog standard marketing/hyping, its the least evil and most mundane possible things you can expect in owners of such powerful tech. Your imagination is weak. Imagine if the owner was a Christian nationalist or Muslim fundamentalist as some examples.

It's hard not to be when people at those labs talk about the probability of AI killing us all, and if it doesn't do that, then the massive disruption to the labor market that's coming. Combine that with the techno feudalist ideology of leadership.

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.

We didn't get a say in whether we should bet our entire economy on building out infrastructure for half a dozen guys to get rich from. No say in the way they are backdooring around the hamstrung EPA to install greenhouse gas machines to power these things. I think the pushback makes sense.

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.

> Why are they trying to build something to replace humanity?

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

Why do you want to block people who are open to the idea of becoming transhuman/hybrids? Let it play out and see whose society turns out better.

Do that without dragging the rest of us into it then. I will continue to vote to block and advocate against such a thing on a societal level. It should not be thrust upon humanity without our consent.

Why the fuck should your fucking opinion matter to what I or someone else does in their private property? Why don't you subject your own private property to a vote for everything? You are evil and want to destroy communities because you didn't ask the community before changing a light in your room.

> Also, I don't want super intelligence.

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

I don't think you're anywhere close to a voting majority. Rather quite a small minority of the human population would want such a thing is my guess. It may seem otherwise in your bubble though.

Why would you believe that?

“I am become death, the destroyer of copyright”

-G. Hinton

Both nuclear bombs and AI are not inevitable. Technology depends not just on knowledge, but on infrastructure. Building and maintaining nuclear bombs requires enormous amounts of resources, and it's a conscious decision to continue spending those resources to maintain nuclear capability. Similarly, developing AI requires enormous resources, as you can see from the massive investments in hardware and data centers. If the economic foundation for it doesn't exist, you're not going to get more powerful AI.

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.

Does developing AI _require_ enormous resources, or is it using enormous resources right now because the people with the capital are throwing it at the AI companies hoping for a massive payout in the future?

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.

> Both nuclear bombs and AI are not inevitable.

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.

The Oppenheimer comparison is very apt I think. Even if the science was inevitable, the decision to use the output (twice) in arguably unnecessary circumstances was not

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