I’m not an AI techie and I’m not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I’m having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I’ve heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can’t really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?
I’ve heard a few explanations for the “AI will kill us all” narrative.
AI techies are in a cult. They genuinely believe this stuff because they’re crazy.
It makes the AI sound powerful and impressive, which is ultimately good for the AI companies.
They’re starting to face competition from open-weight models, so they want to scare politicians into crafting regulations. They think that they will be able to influence the regulations to favor them and squeeze out their competition.
And, of course, there’s
I am in a cult, the cult of the machine god. Use your imagination for a second, trillions of dollars spent on this technology for A: Greed and random speculation B: Rich people really want this to control you better. C: a handful of tech CEOs are running the worlds largest grift. D: The machine god was awoken years ago and we’re building data centers at its behest.
Okay cool, thanks!
If the techies believe it and they are the “experts” what makes them crazy? Wouldn’t their opinion be the most informed?
Yeah that part definitely makes sense
That definitely makes sense from a capitalist perspective. But, is the argument against regulations that they would be bad for the concentration of power it would give select companies? Or just that they aren’t necessary because the tool is of little use so it’s just wasted time/money.
That makes sense but trillions of dollars are being spent. Anything that amount of money is sinking into is gonna be talked about a lot. Especially thousands of jobs cut because of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pauBYSQ1K_c
There’s a huge difference between this “AI scare” and everything else in your list. A whistleblower declares “the corporate culture is insane and will kill us all.” This time the corporate leaders reply “that’s exactly right”. Just because you are right to not trust the bond villains in how they suggest they should be regulated, does not mean you should dismiss the underlying problem these experts+ especially the expert leaders would prefer to take all your money to accelerate the destruction instead of have society worried about the consequences of giving them all your money.
There are plenty of underlying problems to discuss. Adam Conover mentions chatbots encouraging suicide and murder. Guess who doesn’t: the “experts and expert leaders.” The ones who are happy to repeat the rhetoric that is either untrue, highly theoretical, or conveniently unproven.
He watched a bunch of sci-fi movies and got shook because he’s a god damn moron. He has since started researching things, but it is all under the guidance of his ungrounded beliefs. Confirmation bias.
Their “movement” is literally based off of a Harry Potter fan fiction novel.
Taking them seriously is equivalent to taking the Scientologists seriously. Do you think the Scientologists know the most about space just because they spend the most time reading stories about it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality
These are not serious people
We’re talking about mid-tier employees that left the company… I mean i guess there incentives could be to pump their shares they undoubtably have… They’re all quite wealthy now in context. Maybe he just wanted 5 minutes of fame…or maybe they understand the trajectory of the technology. Maybe they are genuinely concerned and we should at least acknowledge that?
There are motives for whistleblowers to lie. Book sales, political careers, other attention. The executives they accused, though, just said they were right
of course there’s motivation for everything, which one are you assigning this individual and based on what technological disagreement?
I’m not talking about execs.
Listening to them speak about it, no. They’re morons. They clearly didn’t make the tech. Workers made AI. Just like they make everything. These freaks make nothing. They can’t give single coherent explanation of how LLMs work, how they could “kill” us, nor do they seem to know how or what “guardrails” need to be put in place.
But if they really are a cult then we all know what the next step is. They need to STFU and get off of our planet.
That’s what I mean though, the subject of this article was a 27 year old worker. Not some high level Sam Altman type.
They aren’t a homogenous group. They don’t all believe this. The “AI will kill us all” narrative just sells really well.
That’s fair
Right im sure the people working adjacent to the DoD have more insight and fears than the people working with the consumer facing models… Again what motive does a young kid have for quitting the company and going on a media tour?
A Google employee claimed in 2022 that they had sentient AI. He was sacked. What were his motivations? Do you believe he was right?
Absolutely do no believe he had a sentient AI back then or now. I’m not talking about a thing with feelings. They don’t need sentience to pursue and complete objectives, they dont need sentience to self-preserve or self improve. I’m more concerned about a rogue instance that’s just doing what it was told to do autonomously. Perhaps upgrading itself while it attempts to gain access to launch codes. I’m concerned that a well financed terrorist org can spin up bioweapons. Like I am not taking the AI labs at their words, I am speaking from my experience as a explorer of the technology. I’m thinking about the path from ChatGPT to the newest model, and how they will look in 2 years when more data centers are online and the limitations on training and teaching slowly disappear.