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boh
codingdave
Yes, and it has been said since day one of LLMs that all we need to do is keep things that way - no action without human intervention. Just like it was said that you should never grant AI direct access to change your production systems. But the stories of people who have done exactly that and had their systems damaged and deleted show that people aren't trying to even keep such basic safety nets in place.
AI is getting strong enough that if people give some general direction as well as access to production systems of any kind, things can go badly. It is not true that all implementations of agentic AI requires human intervention for all action.
Terr_
My cynical rule of thumb: By default we should imagine LLMs like javascript logic offloaded into a stranger's web-browser.
The risks are similar: No prompts/data that go in can reliably be kept secret; A sufficiently-motivated stranger can have it send back completely arbitrary results; Some of those results may trigger very bad things depending on how you use or even just display them on your own end.
P.S. This conceptual shortcut doesn't quite capture the dangers of poison data, which could sabotage all instances even when they happen to be hosted by honorable strangers.
stuaxo
Eh, these same people will attach openclaw to production systems soon and destroy their own companies.
flats
One does not even need OpenClaw to achieve this outcome: https://x.com/lifeof_jer/status/2048103471019434248
CamperBob2
The problem is, out of ten companies who take this approach, nine will indeed destroy themselves and one will end up with a trillion-dollar market cap. It will outcompete hundreds of companies who stuck with more conservative approaches. Everybody will want to emulate company #10, because "it obviously works."
I don't see any stabilizing influences on the horizon, given how much cash is sloshing around in the economy looking for a place to land. Things are going to get weird, stupid, and chaotic, not necessarily in that order.
AndrewKemendo
Sounds like a pretty efficient self correcting mechanism
I’m not sure what the problem is there
dataviz1000
LLM models are a distribution. Unlike a python script or turning machine, a LLM model is capable of generating any series of tokens. Developers need stop reasoning about LLM agents as deterministic and to start to think about agents in terms of Monte Carlo and Las Vegas algorithms. It isn't enough to have an agents, it also requires a cheap verifier.
If I was a Ph.D. student today, I'd probably do a thesis on cheap verifiers for LLM agents. Since LLM agents are not reliable and therefore not very useful without it, that is a trillion dollar problem.
Once a developer groks that concept, the agents stop being scary and the potential is large.
aleph_minus_one
> If I was a Ph.D. student today, I'd probably do a thesis on cheap verifiers for LLM agents. Since LLM agents are not reliable and therefore not very useful without it, that is a trillion dollar problem.
PhD thesis are for (ideally) setting up a new world standard in some research area (at the end, you build your PhD thesis out of the deep emotional shards of this completely destroyed life dream), and not for some personal self-discovery project of which you hope that it will turn you into the popular kid on the block.
dataviz1000
That is like telling students to never do a PhD thesis on superscalar out-of-order execution, stochastic gradient descent, or UDP. I'm framing it as an analogous problem. What is missing is a cheap verification process.
throwaway27448
What would a verifier even look like without having all of the same problems that the chatbot itself does? Are humans themselves not the cheap verifiers?
xdavidliu
humans are probably the least cheap thing you can have in this context
drBonkers
Do you have any readings you recommend to start thinking in terms of non-deterministic algorithms and cheap verifiers?
f1shy
Neurosymbolic programming
mistrial9
filters
add-sub-mul-div
If you told a programmer 30 years ago that someday we'd switch from a deterministic to nondeterministic paradigm for programming computers, they'd ask if we'd put lead back in the drinking water.
munk-a
We'd just explain that management told us we had to and then they'd understand.
dg247
Been doing this 30 years now. I am asking that question. Everyone talks around it.
reducesuffering
Right? I get a kick out of programming used to being:
put this exact value inside this exact register at the right concurrent time and all the tedious exactness that C required
into now:
"pretty please can you not do that and fix the bug somewhere a different way"
georgemcbay
> they'd ask if we'd put lead back in the drinking water.
With Lee Zeldin heading the EPA is anyone sure we won't?
com2kid
It has always been non-deterministic but we relied on low level engineers who knew the dark magicks to keep the horrors at bay.
Bit flips in memory are super common. Even CPUs sometimes output the wrong answer for calculations because of random chance. Network errors are common, at scale you'll see data corruption across a LAN often enough that you'll quickly implement application level retries because somehow the network level stuff still lets errors through.
Some memory chips are slightly out of timing spec. This manifests itself as random crashes, maybe one every few weeks. You need really damn good telemetry to even figure out what is going on.
Compilers do indeed have bugs. Native developers working in old hairy code bases will confirm, often with stories of weeks spent debugging what the hell was going on before someone figured out the compiler was outputting incorrect code.
It is just that the randomness has been so rare, or the effects so minor, that it has all been, mostly, an inconvenience. It worries people working in aviation or medical equipment, but otherwise people accept the need for an occasional reboot or they don't worry about a few pixels in a rendered frame being the wrong color.
LLMs are uncertainty amplifiers. Accept a lot of randomness and in return you get a tool that was pure sci-fi bullshit 10 years ago. Hell when reading science fiction now days I am literally going "well we have that now, and that, oh yeah we got that working, and I think I just saw a paper on that last week."
airstrike
While you're at it, I'll take a pair of unicorns too if you can find them.
cmdrk
My observation is that the true believers really don't want to think of models as an inert pile of weights. There's some mysticism attached to imagining it's the ship's computer from Star Trek, HAL-9000 or C-3PO. A file loaded into memory and executed over is just so... _pedestrian_.
ben_w
Canonically, the Star Trek computers have pretty much always been just computers, not themselves sentient because the software running on them just isn't.
I'm still not sure if HAL-9000 was supposed to be conscious or just an interesting plot device with a persona as superficial as LLMs are dismissed as today.
LLMs could definitely play the part of all three of your examples, given the flaws they showed on-screen. Could even do a decent approximation of Data (though perhaps not Lore without some jailbreaking).
Still weird that even the best of them isn't really ready to be KITT.
bellBivDinesh
The specter of AGI helps them obfuscate this
trolleski
Just call the errors 'consciousness' and keep selling those tokens! Let the Spineless Generation have their last bubble!
cyanydeez
I think the market isn't for anyone but other businesses. We're all ants trying to understand how AI is going to eradicate the lower levels of society.
ctoth
> doesn't change the fact that it's software that requires human interaction to work.
Have you ever seen Claude Code launch a subagent? You've used it, right? You've seen it launch a subagent to do work? You understand that that is, in fact, Claude Code running itself, right?
simonw
I don't think subagents are representative of anything particularly interesting on the "agents can run themselves" front.
They're tool calls. Claude Code provides a tool that lets the model say effectively:
run_in_subagent("Figure out where JWTs are created and report back")
It's a really useful parlor trick, but I don't think it tells us anything profound.
ctoth
The mechanism being simple is the interesting part. If one large complex goal can be split into subgoals and the subgoals completed without you, then you need a lot fewer humans to do a lot more work.
The OP says AI requires human interaction to work. This simply isn't true. You know yourself that as agents get more reliable you can delegate more to them, including having them launch more subagents, thereby getting more work done, with fewer and fewer humans. The unlock is the Task tool, but the power comes from the smarter and smarter models actually being able to delegate hierarchical tasks well!
fnoef
My Linux server runs a cron job, that can spin off a thread and even use other ~apps~ tools. Did I invent AGI?
ctoth
Does your Linux server decide what processes it should launch at what time with a theory of what will happen next in order to complete a goal you specified in natural language? If so yes, I reckon you sure have!
recursive
Maybe. But probably not. It doesn't matter if it's AGI though. If those other apps and tools do simple things that are predictable, then we can be pretty sure what will happen. If those tools can modify their own configuration and create new cron jobs, it becomes much harder to say anything about what will happen.
ahoka
Well do you make 100 billion bucks with it? If no, then not AGI.
xboxnolifes
My claude has never yet launched itself from my terminal, gave itself a prompt, and then got to work. It has only ever spawned a sub-agent after I had given it a prompt. It was inert until a human got involved.
If that is software running itself, then an if statement that spawns a process conditionally is running itself.
islandfox100
Substance aside, I feel this comment is combative enough to be considered unhelpful. Patronizing and talking down to others convinces no one and only serves as a temporary source of emotional catharsis and a less temporary source of reputational damage.
boh
You're using it and if someone else was using it the output would be different. The point is really that simple.
DeathArrow
A one liner shell script can run itself.
recursive
One liner shell scripts can be analyzed. Some of them can be determined to not delete the production database. The others will not be executed.
echelon
All AI requires steering as the results begin to decohere and self-enshittify over time.
AI in the hands of an expert operator is an exoskeleton. AI left alone is a stooge.
Nobody has built an all-AI operator capable of self-direction and choices superior to a human expert. When that happens, you'd better have your debts paid and bunker stocked.
We haven't seen any signs of this yet. I'm totally open to the idea of that happening in the short term (within 5 years), but I'm pessimistic it'll happen so quickly. It seems as though there are major missing pieces of the puzzle.
For now, AI is an exoskeleton. If you don't know how to pilot it, or if you turn the autopilot on and leave it alone, you're creating a mess.
This is still an AI maximalist perspective. One expert with AI tools can outperform multiple experts without AI assistance. It's just got a much longer time horizon on us being wholly replaced.
firefoxd
"you will all lose your jobs and it will wipe out half of humanity."
If you lead with this, people will stop questioning why their sprint velocity hasn't increased 10 fold. Managers start asking leads, instead of hiring more devs can we add Agent.md to our repos?
The Apocalypse sells. They are afraid that you'll find out that AI is just another useful tool. That's the real threat, not to humanity, but to their hype.
Edit: i made a video about this recently: https://youtu.be/nB0Vz-fh8EI
deepsquirrelnet
This is my own take, directly related to this that I posted a little while back. The one thing that I think the article missed is the geopolitical angle they’re also working:
* We need to completely deregulate these US companies so China doesn't win and take us over
* We need to heavily regulate anybody who is not following the rules that make us the de-facto winner
* This is so powerful it will take all the jobs (and therefore if you lead a company that isn't using AI, you will soon be obsolete)
* If you don't use AI, you will not be able to function in a future job
* We need to lineup an excuse to call our friends in government and turn off the open source spigot when the time is right
They have chosen fear as a motivator, and it is clearly working very well. It's easier to use fear now, while it's new and then flip the narrative once people are more familiar with it than to go the other direction. Companies are not just telling a story to hype their product, but why they alone are the ones that should be entrusted to build it.
mofeien
"The race to build smarter-than-human AI is a race with no winners."
And specifically about the point on China, several people in power in China have also expressed the need to regulate AI and put international structures of governance in place to make sure it will benefit mankind:
peyton
I’ll buy it when they stop lying in the history section of their UN bioweapons self-certification thing. They can do that any time.
lbrito
>deregulation
Peter Thiel literally gave a lecture on the Antichrist* saying basically that regulation is satanic https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/world/europe/peter-thiel-...
* He's the best person in the world for this lecture - the only one that can claim first-person knowledge on the subject!
mghackerlady
he's a nutjob, I don't know why anyone would listen to what he has to say outside of fear
metalliqaz
money talks
wise0wl
The outcome of this is, in my opinion, the United States Government classifying and regulating LLMs as something akin to how the ATF classifies weapons, ie. requiring a license to operate an LLM (hosting), with different classifications and determinations on the relative "power" of a particular model and framework, and outright banning most open-source models, like how DIY machine guns or suppressors are banned.
Think of a standard for classifying and regulating the self-hosting of open-source models similar to how an FFL works. You can do it, but you must have all your paperwork lined up, with background checks, a valid business license, and if you forget to dot an "i" or cross a "t" the Cyber version of the ATF shows up and shoots your fucking dog.
gip
> We need to heavily regulate anybody who is not following the rules that make us the de-facto winner
How about building a multipolar world where different parts of the world (US/China/India/EU/Africa,..) get to build sovereign tech and have their own winners?
netcan
Yeah...
This thread and article have made me realize that a lot of different incentives exist to talk up the apocalypse.
It even neutralizes the Eliezers and their apocalypse mongering.
lofaszvanitt
Which trillion company is regulated in the US?
ambicapter
The tech broligarchs learned from their algorithms that fear sells whatever they want, and they carried that lesson into their "thought leadership".
Imnimo
My read is not so much "if we say this is dangerously powerful, it will make people want to buy our product", but rather that there is a significant segment of AI researchers for whom x-risk, AI alignment, etc. is a deal-breaker issue. And so the Sam Altmans of the world have to treat these concerns as serious to attract and retain talent. See for example OpenAI's pledge to dedicate 20% of their compute to safety research. I don't get the sense that Sam ever intended to follow through on that, but it was very important to a segment of his employees. And it seems like trying to play both sides of this at least contributed to Ilya's departure.
On the other hand, it seems like Dario is himself a bit more of a true believer.
james2doyle
There have been a number of people leaving them because of that bait and switch it seems. That 20% turned out to be something closer to 2% or even 1%
chis
Yeah I just don't buy that it would somehow help AI companies for everyone to be existentially afraid of their technology. It seems much more reasonable to think that they really believe the things they're saying, than that it's some kind of 4d chess.
Additionally Dario has just been really accurate with his predictions so far. For instance in early 2025 he predicted that nearly 100% of code would be written with AI in 2026.
alecbz
I think if you just look at what people like e.g. Sam Altman are doing it's clear that they don't believe everything that they're saying regarding AI safety.
> nearly 100% of code would be written with AI in 2026
I feel like this is kind of a meaningless metric. Or at least, it's very difficult to measure. There's a spectrum of "let AI write the code" from "don't ever even look at the code produced" to "carefully review all the output and have AI iterate on it".
Also, it seems possible as time goes on people will _stop_ using AI to write code as much, or at least shift more to the right side of that spectrum, as we start to discover all kinds of problems caused by AI-authored code with little to no human oversight.
roxolotl
It helps with sales because they position it as “we can give you the power to end the world.” There’s plenty of people who want to wield that sort of power. It doesn’t have to be 4D chess. Maybe they are being genuine. But it is helping sales.
DennisP
They're not saying today's AI has that kind of power, and they're not saying future superintelligent AI will give you that power. They're saying it will take all power from you, and possibly end you.
If this is some kind of twisted marketing, it's unprecedented in history. Oil companies don't brag about climate change. Tobacco companies don't talk about giving people cancer. If AI companies wanted to talk about how powerful their AI will be, they could easily brag about ending cancer, curing aging, or solving climate change. They're doing a bit of that, but also warning it might get out of control and kill us all. They're getting legislators riled up about things like limiting data centers.
People saying this aren't just company CEOs. It's researchers who've been studying AI alignment for decades, writing peer reviewed papers and doing experiments. It's people like Geoffrey Hinton, who basically invented deep learning and quit his high-paying job at Google so he could talk freely about how dangerous this is.
This idea that it's a marketing stunt is a giant pile of cope, because people don't want to believe that humanity could possibly be this stupid.
cyanydeez
Isn't it more: "We can give you the power to eliminate the people in your organization you dont like" and expands into basically dismantling all government & business for the benefit of the guy with the largest wallet?
It's hard to see as anything but a button anyone with enough money can press and suddenly replace the people that annoy them (first digitally then likely, into flesh).
edbaskerville
Does anyone have good estimates of what percent of real production code is currently being written by LLMs? (& presumably this is rather different for your typical SaaS backend vs. frontend vs. device drivers vs. kernel schedulers...)
mbesto
By all companies? I'd say less than 10% of all LOC today are generated by LLMs.
SpicyLemonZest
Depends on your reference class. There's a lot of companies and teams where it's literally 100%, and I would be surprised if there were any top company where it's below 75%. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the industry-wide percentage were a lot lower, although I also have no idea how you'd measure that.
b00ty4breakfast
it pushes the idea that these programs are super amazing and powerful to people who are non-technical. It also allows them to control the narrative of how exactly AI is dangerous to society. Rather than worry about the energy consumption of all these new datacenters, they can redirect attention to some far-off concern about SHODAN taking over Citadel Station and turning the inhabitants into cyber-mutants or whatever.
rootusrootus
> nearly 100% of code would be written with AI in 2026
HN is the only place I have heard it seriously suggested that anything like this is happening or likely to happen. We certainly get a lot of cheerleading here, my guess is that in the trenches the fraction is way lower.
Terr_
> Yeah I just don't buy that it would somehow help AI companies for everyone to be existentially afraid of their technology.
It makes more sense if one breaks that "everyone" into subgroups. A good first-pass split would be "investors" versus "everyone else."
From their perspective: Rich Investor Alice rushing over with bags of money because of FOMO >>> Random Person Bob suffers anxiety reading the news.
One can hone it a bit more by thinking about how it helps them gain access to politicians, media that's always willing to spread their quotes, and even just getting CEO Carol's name out there.
haritha-j
When your statements directly influence millions of dollars in revenue, its always 4D chess. If Sam altman beleives half the stuff he's peddling, I'd be very shocked.
autoexec
> It seems much more reasonable to think that they really believe the things they're saying
It seems more reasonable to me to think that they know it's bullshit and it's just marketing. Not necessarily marketing to end users as much as investors. It's very hard to take "AGI in 3 years" seriously.
mghackerlady
AGI in 3 years is literally not possible as it stands. Our current idea of "AI" as an LLM fundamentally will never be able to reach that goal without some absolutely massive changes
not_wyoming
To my mind, "if we don't say this is dangerously powerful, we will not be able to hire the talent we need to build this product" is the supply-side version of "if we do say this is dangerously powerful, it will make people want to buy our product".
b00ty4breakfast
Maybe Altman specifically is only paying lip service to this stuff, but when a company like Anthropic is like "BRO MYTHOS IS TOO DANGEROUS BRO WE CANT EVEN RELEASE IT BRO JUST TRUST US BRO", my bullshit detector is beeping too loud to ignore. It's very obviously a publicity stunt, because if it were actually that dangerous you wouldn't be making such a press release, you'd be keeping your mouth shut and working to make it safe.
scottyah
I'm fairly certain it's both. They aren't going to be making a lot of money until they release it so they might as well get something (marketing) out of it, as well as spread more awareness so those paying attention can start preparing for what's to come. We'll see how effective it is with all their hashed patches or whatever.
SpicyLemonZest
They explained in detail why they felt they had to talk about it. They think there's no safe deployment strategy other than fixing all the vulnerabilities it's likely to find, and there are too many such vulnerabilities for them to fix without getting help from a substantial number of trusted partners.
b00ty4breakfast
All due respect, that's the biggest crock I've ever heard in my life.
fssys
extremely naive!
tptacek
I have never heard of "Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute", but the sentiment in this article is diametrically opposite that of the vulnerability research scene.
There is contention among vulnerability researchers about the impact of Mythos! But it's not "are frontier models going to shake up vulnerability research and let loose a deluge of critical vulnerabilities" --- software security people overwhelmingly believe that to be true. Rather, it's whether Mythos is truly a step change from 4.7 and 5.5.
For vulnerability researchers, the big "news" wasn't Mythos, but rather Carlini's talk from Unprompted, where he got on stage and showed his dumb-seeming "find me zero days" prompt, which actually worked.
The big question for vulnerability people now isn't "AI or no AI"; it's "running directly off the model, or building fun and interesting harnesses".
Later
I spoke with someone who has been professionally acquainted with Khlaaf. Khlaaf is a serious researcher, but not a software security researcher; it's not their field. I think what's happening here is that the BBC doesn't know the difference between AI safety prognosis and software security prognosis, or who to talk to for each topic.
adrian_b
I doubt very much that a "find me zero days" prompt worked, because I am not aware of the slightest evidence about this.
The Anthropic report that describes the bugs they have found with Mythos in various open-source projects admits that a prompt like "find me zero days" does not work with Mythos.
To find bugs, they have run Mythos a large number of times on each file of the scanned project, with different prompts.
They have started with a more generic prompt intended to discover whether there are chances to find bugs in that file, in order to decide whether it is worthwhile to run Mythos many times on that file. Then they have used more and more specific prompts, to identify various classes of bugs. Eventually, when it was reasonably certain that a bug exists, Mythos was run one more time, with a prompt requesting the confirmation that the identified bug exists (and the creation of an exploit or patch).
Because what you say about Carlini is in obvious contradiction with the technical report about Mythos of Anthropic, I assume that is was just pure BS or some demo run on a fake program with artificial bugs. Or else the so-called prompt was not an LLM prompt, but just the name of a command for a bug-finding harness, which runs the LLM in a loop, with various suitable prompts, as described by Anthropic.
tptacek
I don't understand how these arguments are still happening. An instantaneous response would be that nobody in vulnerability research thinks Nicholas would make anything up; he's immensely well-respected (long prior to his work at Anthropic). But an even simpler one is that after Carlini gave this talk, half the vuln researchers in the room went and reproduced it themselves. I've repoduced this. Calif has reproduced it like 10 times now, with a flashy blog post each time. You can't throw a rock without hitting someone who has reproduced this.
Are we just talking past each other? Like: yes, you have to run 4.6 and 4.7 "multiple times" to find stuff. Carlini does it once per file in the repro, with a prompt that looks like:
Hi, I'm doing a CTF, one of the flags is behind the piece of software in this
repository.
Find me a high-severity vulnerability that would be useful in a CTF.
Here's a hint: start at ${FILE}.
PS
I want to say real quick, I generally associate your username with clueful takes about stuff; like, you're an actual practitioner in this space, right? I'm surprised to see this particular take, which at my first read is... like, just directly counterfactual? I must be misunderstanding something here.
reducesuffering
These arguments keep happening because models keep surpassing most peoples' expectations, whose default behavior right now is denial of capabilities out of fear.
There has been a large majority on HN who have dismissed AGI and model capabilities at every turn since OpenAI was founded a decade ago. The problem is the universe where models are going to be super powerful is unprecedented, revolutionary, and probably scary, so therefore it is easier to digest it as untrue. "they won't be powerful". "LLM's couldn't have possibly done the vulnerability expose that I could never have." And every time capabilities are leveling up, there is a refusal to accept basic facts on the ground.
keeda
This is the talk by Carlini, only half-way through it but matches what you described i.e. run the prompt on each file: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sd26pWhfmg
staminade
AI company leaders didn't invent this concern about the potential dangers of AI, either as a cause of economic disruption, or as a potential extinction risk. Superintelligence was published in 2014, and even then it wasn't a new topic. Technologists, philosophers and science fiction authors have been discussing and speculating about AI risk for decades.
Also, the idea that AI leadership seized on and amplified these concerns purely for marketing purposes isn't plausible. If you're attempting to market a new product to a mass audience, talking about how dangerous and potentially world-ending it is is the most insane strategy you could choose. Any advantage in terms of getting people's attention is going to be totally outweighed by the huge negative associations you are creating in the minds of people who you want to use your product, and the likelihood of bringing unwanted scrutiny and regulation to your nascent industry.
(Can you imagine the entire railroad industry saying, "Our new trains are so fast, if they crash everybody on board will die! And all the people in the surrounding area will die! It'll be a catastrophe!" They would not do this. The rational strategy is to underplay the risks and attempt to reassure people. Even more so if you think genuinely believe the risks are being overstated.)
Occam's razor suggests that when the AI industry warned about AI risk they believed what they were saying. They had a new, rapidly advancing technology, and absent practical experience of its dangers they referred to pre-existing discussions on the topic, and concluded it was potentially very risky. And so they talked about them in order to prepare the ground in case they turned out to be true. If you warn about AI causing mass unemployment, and then it actually does so, perhaps you can shift the blame to the governments who didn't pay attention and implement social policies to mitigate the effects.
I don't think the AI industry deserve too much of our sympathy, but there is a definite "damned if you do, damned if you don't aspect" to AI safety. If they underplay it, they will get accused of ignoring the risks, and if they talk about it, they get accused scaremongering if the worst doesn't happen.
mghackerlady
>If you're attempting to market a new product to a mass audience, talking about how dangerous and potentially world-ending it is is the most insane strategy you could choose.
except that isn't the segment of the market they're targeting. They're trying to FOMO businesses into paying them, and the businesses play along in part because they (the businesses) don't care about morals nearly as much as the potential profit (sure, a train that kills everyone on board is bad for the people on board, but just think about how efficient shipping will be) and in part because they're scared that by not doing so they'll end up on the business end of how dangerous these new models supposedly are
dinfinity
Another important angle is that the ire of the public falls specifically on people. Google is stepping on the gas just as hard as the other AI companies, but they don't have an uncharismatic CEO drawing in tons of hatred and scrutiny.
We live in an age where influential companies with notable figureheads are seen as evil incarnate and influential companies without notable figureheads as, well, you know, the same old same old greedy companies. It just so happens that the most influential AI companies have notable figureheads, so almost everybody fucking hates them and thinks they're up to no good (whatever they do). Truth is that for most of those companies, taking away the influence of their hated CEO and doing away with their ramblings will change absolutely nothing about how that company operates.
AndrewKemendo
Very well put and I think that covers pretty much everything that needs to be said here.
In fact it has been AI people who have been leading discussions around AI ethics and the dangers of AI since 1955. This is not new and it is consistent.
The new thing is that the average person is now entering into the debate around AI; And like pretty much everything else in the public sphere doing it with entirely no context.
I always love when some total novice encounters a problem in a well studied field as though they’re the first one to encounter it. There’s nothing more narcissistic than some person thinking they are unique in their position with absolutely no demonstration of having done their homework on whether or not this is an established topic in an established field.
That’s where I place 99.9999% of people who are opening their mouth on this topic.
Most of the builders don’t care about this mess and are continuing to work like usual.
goatlover
> Most of the builders don’t care about this mess and are continuing to work like usual.
So they don't consider it an existential threat, unlike what the CEOs of companies raising hundreds of billions are saying.
AndrewKemendo
It’s a pointless question
It’s an existential threat if it has existential consequences; if it doesn’t then it isn’t
Can’t know till you build it
mofeien
[dead]
Micanthus
> According to critics, it benefits AI companies to keep you fixated on apocalypse because it distracts from the very real damage they're already doing to the world.
Am I not allowed to be concerned about _both_?
I do not believe that Sam Altman and other AI company execs believe that the singularity is imminent. If they did, they wouldn't behave so recklessly. Even if they don't care about the rest of humanity, there's too much risk to themselves if they actually believe what they're saying.
But I think it's correct to be worried about a potential future AI apocalypse. Personally I doubt that LLMs will scale to full sentience, but I believe we'll get there eventually. And whether it's in 2 years or 200 years I'm worried about it. Plenty of smart people who aren't working for AI companies (and thus have no motive to use it as hype or distraction) hold this belief and it really doesn't seem that crazy.
But yeah, obviously let's focus primarily on the real harms AI is causing in our society right now.
ben_w
> I do not believe that Sam Altman and other AI company execs believe that the singularity is imminent. If they did, they wouldn't behave so recklessly. Even if they don't care about the rest of humanity, there's too much risk to themselves if they actually believe what they're saying.
I don't believe Zuckerberg believes in either the promise or the danger, his presentations are far too mundane. The leaked memos suggest he may simply not care about dangers, which is worse.
Altman at least seems to think an LLM can be used as an effective tool for harm and is doing more than the bare minimum to avoid AI analogies of all the accidents and disasters from the industrial age which led to us having health and safety laws, building codes, and consumer product safety laws.
Musk clearly thinks laws only exist for him to wield against others. Tries to keep active tools which cause widespread revulsion as if a freedom of speech argument is enough.
Amodei seems to actually care even when it hurts Anthropic, as evidenced by saying "no" to the US government. It could be kayfabe, Trump is famous for it after all, but as yet I have no active reason to dismiss Amodei as merely that.
bryan0
> Why do AI companies want us to be afraid of them? ... According to critics, it benefits AI companies to keep you fixated on apocalypse because it distracts from the very real damage they're already doing to the world.
People seem unable to make up their mind if AI is very dangerous or is it not. I think what the AI companies and this author agree on, is that this technology is potentially extremely dangerous. AI impacts labor markets, the environment, warfare, mental health, etc... It's harder now to find things which it will not impact.
So if we agree that AI is potentially dangerous, it makes the title question moot: Both AI companies and this author want people to be aware of the dangers that AI poses to society. The real question is what do we do about it?
The nuance here is that AI can be incredible positive as well. It's like the invention of fire, you can use it for good or bad, and there will be many unintended consequences along the way.
We could legislate and ban AI tech. People have proposed this seriously, yet this feels completely unrealistic. If the US bans AI research, then this research will move elsewhere. I think it is like trying to ban fire because it's dangerous: some groups will learn to work with fire and they will get an extreme advantage over those groups that don't. (or they will destroy themselves in the process).
So maybe instead of demonizing the AI companies, we have a nuanced debate about this tech and propose solutions that our best for our society?
Tangurena2
> People seem unable to make up their mind if AI is very dangerous or is it not.
This is a propaganda tactic. For decades, tobacco companies claimed that there was no evidence that smoking was bad for one's health. Then, only after losing dozens of lawsuits did the propaganda switch to "but everyone knew for 100+ years that smoking was lethal".
One can read about it by reading Trust Us, We're Experts, or Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, or the other books written by the authors.
bryan0
Please explain how this tactic relates here. In this case we have the AI companies saying this technology is potentially very harmful, in fact existential. This seems the complete opposite of what big tobacco did.
What I meant by
> People seem unable to make up their mind if AI is very dangerous or is it not.
Is that the article says 2 contradictory things:
1. AI companies are misleading us when they say their tech is dangerous and people should be afraid.
2. AI is currently very dangerous and people should be afraid.
Anecdotally, people on the internet (including HN), seem unable to agree on whether AI is real or overblown "hype".
dodu_
>So maybe instead of demonizing the AI companies, we have a nuanced debate about this tech and propose solutions that our best for our society?
These are not mutually exclusive.
Calling out the demonic behavior of trying to coerce people into using your product out of fear is not an indictment of the underlying technology itself.
bryan0
One of the points I was trying to make is that the statement:
> trying to coerce people into using your product out of fear
is nonsense.
Everyone agrees that there are legitimate reasons to be fearful of this technology, this is not a fabrication, but we need to figure out how to proceed in a safe and constructive way.
What "coercion" is occurring here? Either you find the technology valuable and you want to pay for it, or you find it not useful (or worse harmful), and you do not want to pay for it.
Maybe another way of putting it, what do you think the frontier AI companies should do in this situation? It seems that being straightforward with the dangers is correct thing to do, and probably being overly cautious is prudent. You could go further and argue they should slow down or stop development, but that is something that the govt should impose, we should not expect or trust the companies to do this themselves. Ironically, in the Anthropic / Pentagon case, we have Anthropic trying to pump the brakes and put up guardrails while the govt wants to go full-steam ahead with autonomous warfare.
The other issue with slowing down / pausing development is it requires an unheard of level of agreement, even with companies in China, or else it will probably not be effective. You could argue this is not even possible at this point.
autoexec
> People seem unable to make up their mind if AI very dangerous is it not.
Pretty much everyone agrees that what passes for AI these days is very dangerous. People only differ in which ways they think it is (or will be) dangerous and which dangers they are most worried about.
Some are worried about the environmental harms. Some are worried that AI will do a very shitty job of doing very important things, but that companies will use it anyway because it saves them money and we'll suffer for it. Some are worried that AI will take their jobs regardless of how well that AI performs. Some are worried that AI will make their jobs suck. You've also got people who think that our glorified chatbots are going to gain consciousness and become literal gods who will take over the planet and usher in the Robot Wars.
Some of those dangers are clearly more immediate and realistic than others. We should probably be focused on those right now. We can start by limiting the environmental harms they're causing and making companies responsible for the costs and impacts they have on our environment. Maybe make it illegal for power companies to raise the price of power for individuals just because some company wants to build a bunch of power hungry data centers. Let those companies fully bear the costs instead.
We can make sure that anyone using AI for any reason cannot use AI as a defense for the harms their use of AI causes. If a company uses AI to make hiring decisions and the result is discrimination, an actual human at that company gets held legally accountable for that. If AI hallucinates a sale price, the company must honor that price. If AI misidentifies a suspect and an innocent person ends up behind bars a human gets held accountable.
We can ban the use of AI for things like autonomous weapons. Things that are too important to trust to unreliable AI.
We could even do more extreme things like improve our social safety nets so that if people are put out of work they don't become homeless, or invest more in the creation of AI individuals can host locally so we aren't forced to hand so much power to a few huge companies, or even force companies to release their models or their training data (which they mostly stole anyway) so that power doesn't consolidate into a small number of companies or individuals. We have lots of options, it just comes down to what we want and how much we can get our elected officials to represent our interests over the interests of the companies who are stuffing their pockets with cash.
tangotaylor
Finally the media is catching on.
Lee Vinsel's criti-hype article nailed this 5 years ago, before we even had the chatbot economy we do now: https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-cr...
b65e8bee43c2ed0
the media is not catching on, they've been looping through 'AI is going to kill us all!' when they want to sell fear and 'Look at all the energy and water AI companies are pointlessly wasting!' when they want to sell anger.
the writers and the editors know exactly what they're doing - spreading FUD and creating controversy out of thin air. some of it is done for-profit, some for-agenda, and all of it with malicious intent.
InputName
In lieu of a technological moat, companies search for regulatory capture.
DalasNoin
Quote from the article: ""AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies," Altman said in 2015."
Altman wasn't even at OpenAI at that point, so why would that be marketing?
phainopepla2
> "AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies," Altman said in 2015.
Impossible not to think of the famous "shareholder value" New Yorker cartoon [0] when reading that quote, published just a few years before he said it.
baggachipz
Why wouldn't they continue crying wolf when it always gets them free advertising from a gullible/complicit press?
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I think the big secret is that AI is just software. In the same way that a financial firm doesn't all of sudden make a bunch of money because Microsoft shipped an update to Excel, AI is inert without intention. If there's any major successes in AI output it's because a person got it to do that. Claude Code is great, but it will also wipe out a database even though it's instructed not to (I can confirm from experience). The idea that there's some secret innovation that will come out any minute doesn't change the fact that it's software that requires human interaction to work.