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Comment by legerdemain | Hacker News Reader

   > The whole "pause AI or it will destroy the world thing" is just
   > a large pot of hype anyways, pushed by journalists lacking the
   > understanding of technology, twitter-bros who are building "AI
   > copywriters" and "profile photo generators" and owners of "AI"
   > companies.

Some signatories of the "pause giant AI experiments" open letter are below. I hope you trust the judgment of at least one of these people, instead of dismissing them as ignorant journalists and "twitter-bros"?

- Yoshua Bengio

- Elon Musk

- Steve Wozniak

- John Hopfield

- Gary Marcus

- Jaan Tallinn, Skype co-founder

- Evan Sharp, Pinterest co-founder

- Chris Larsen, Ripple co-founder

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Looks like a group of people who have read more science fiction than science. The people who really understand AI technology are not on the list of signatories at all.

Bengio?

No, he's just behind on LLMs/transformers and wants his competitors to give him space to catch up. That's the other group of signatories I saw (albeit much smaller than the sci fi lovers). Elon Musk is both: he's behind and reads too much science fiction.

Yuddites

I think even close experts are not immune to hype, FOMO or FUD. Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng are also big names and they didn't sign (I presume?). So not even experts agree with each other.

I think it's a bit silly to list founder/CEO-types and take their opinions as if they know the topic well, unless they have the appropriate AI-related background.

A number of those people are pioneers of important AI technologies (I don’t know if they are verified signatories or not), but I don’t necessarily see that as a particularly strong basis for accepting their judgement on a “pause” policy.

The technical nature of the problem is a tiny piece of the claimed impact, and an even smaller piece of the question of whether the proposed policy would, in fact, resolve any real problem and do so without causing greater harms than it prevents.

The thing that gives me pause is that this "open letter" is a web form that anyone can "sign" with any name they choose. Also, some of these have little or no background in AI (Bengio and Hopfield being obvious exceptions).

From what I've read, Yann LeCun himself allegedly "signed" the letter. His name was removed from the list after he issued a public statement denying he'd signed, and in fact actually disagreed with it.

> I hope you trust the judgment of at least one of these people,

Which one is there the strongest case for trusting their judgement on this issue and what is that case?

(And are these actual verified signatories, because the letter had a problem with false signatures?)

And yet, I think thecupisblue is more correct than all those signatories.

I guess crazy things like that happen when you consider the content of what a person says, rather than their cultural status or designated authority.

>I hope you trust the judgment of at least one of these people, instead of dismissing them as ignorant journalists and "twitter-bros"?

>- Elon Musk

the quintessential twitter-bro

>- Steve Wozniak

currently fronts 'eco-friendly' crypto scam

>Jaan Tallinn, Skype co-founder

"Tallinn participates in the effective altruism". Somehow crypto bros love that movement. Tallinn even invested together with SBF in various "ventures", some directly competing with OpenAI (Anthropic).

First off: how many of these people have an interest in the field? How many have invested in related companies? This letter serves as a great hype for the technology. If I had an AI company, I'd sign the letter too, it's great PR.

Now: Bengio talks about the reasons he signed it and the reason is more in line of "machines pretending to be humans" i.e. everything from disinformation, security issues to companies interjecting LLMs where a human should be in the loop, causing all kinds of problems.

Elon Musk is literally a twitter-bro that has shown his lack of technological understanding more times than I can count. Also his "visions" are nothing but badly regurgitated sci-fi tropes, distilled and unrealistic, sprinkled with the power of money on top targeted to people who don't understand technology.

Marcus is constantly saying that the technology is hallucinating and too-early to be deployed.

Hopfield I have no qualms with.

But what do Woz, Jaan, Evan and Chris have to do with AI development?

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