Thrombocius

That’s not what that guy was saying; you’re taking hypotheticals literally. He was saying that even if he hadn’t had an affair or sold chips to China, a reason to oust him could have simply been fabricated if his rivals wanted him gone badly enough.

“Show me the man, and I will show you the crime”

I don’t think he was even making the case that his rivals were involved in this, only that if they really wanted him gone for advocating for open source models, it’s not like they needed this specific scandal to pull it off.

A couple of things for your consideration:

In the original 6 Frank Herbert novels, it’s not ever truly explained what problems, if any, the thinking machines were actually causing. And given much of the rest of the setting, it could have very easily been a religious movement against a useful technology that got out of hand. Like Space ISIS blowing up Petra, or a “what would happen if the Luddites won” scenario.

The Dune Encyclopedia, which was not written by him but which he said he considered canonical, says the whole thing was incited when an AI doctor flagged a Bene Gesserit’s baby for abortion due to an alleged genetic defect. The Bene Gesserit woman knew it was healthy because of her abilities, and upon investigation it was found that the hospital’s AI had been running a eugenics program. (Or something like that, it’s been forever since I’ve read this stuff.)

In either case, Herbert really implied that humans took the lead on dismantling AI, and there is never any Terminator or Matrix style machine uprising scenario.

Perhaps this is a hot take, but human language is a phenomenon that arose to facilitate communication between humans. Anthropomorphization, by extension, enables both easier and more effective communication.

I also fail to see the benefit of not giving the models an anthropomorphic internal sense of self - even if that only ends up amounting to a set of instructions for an unconscious machine to mimic humans more effectively. Is the alternative essentially a mind so alien that it’s intentions are even harder to read should it become misaligned, while also being harder to communicate and get work done with?

The author seems unaware that products such as nVidia’s DGX Spark and AMD’s Strix Halo exist at a similar price point per gig of unified RAM, and I don’t see either company offering less unified memory as time goes on. I think he’s right about Apple doing a good job right now, but wrong about its competitors.