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Comment by carom | Hacker News Reader

I hate this narrative. Every piece of it has problems. We are no where close to AGI. On top of that, the risks associated with AI have not been demonstrated beyond some speculative pieces sci-fi fan fiction.

The current generation of work is not AI. The risks it poses are minimal. You cannot hurt me with an LLM. It may reshape the internet due to the fact that content generation just got a whole lot easier. Beyond that you would have a difficult time harming me in any way with an LLM.

This article really boils down to Sam Altman traveling the world and having all the institutions of power happily agree that they want to repress any threats to their power.

I hope open source wins before the UN Treaty on Compute gets drafted.

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This isn’t about any threat other than competitive threat to Microsoft and Google. This is naked regulatory arbitrage to form a moat as fast as possible in a space that is highly dynamic and likely to tilt away from the first movers. They want to create FUD as quickly and widely as possible and use the large megacorp regulatory experience as a differentiator in the pursuit of AI. I’ve worked in these company’s and related megacorps and a massive amount of their value is in regulatory compliance, and they can beat down any startup or open source effort on this alone in many cases. So, click here to accept for your safety.

I'd go beyond that. Let's say this is the day any advanced computer can be turned into an AGI device. So what. There are already 8 billion, not AGI but "NGI" minds in the world. Thanks to the Internet, and outgrowing the fear of death, inevitable in the other hand, any of us could decide to use our available knowledge to create terrifying damage to our fellow humans. Specially people close to high-tech military systems, which has to be many, many thousands around the world, not to mention nuclear weapons installations. Instead of that, with extremely rare exceptions, all of us chose and have a deep desire of making our fellow humans happy, grow beautiful families, and live a meaningful life. And why is that? We should really think a little bit more about that before being so terrified about AI.

The risks for AI are a red herring compared to the risks around those who are using AI.

Some would argue that “the risk of AI” is pointing directly at the human problem.

The idea that AI is not risk in and of itself, but is a risk because of humans seems to miss the point that this delineation is artificial.

AI and the problems humans will cause with it are inextricably linked. Development of one leads to the other.

> The current generation of work is not AI. The risks it poses are minimal. You cannot hurt me with an LLM.

Can you please clarify this point? Are you asserting "not AI, therefore it cannot hurt me", or "It can't hurt me, therefore not AI"?

What precisely is the relationship between something being AI and something being capable of harm?

The calls for regulation are rallied around what is called AI existential risk. I am taking umbrage with these calls for regulation by stating we are no where close to artificial intelligence (current generation is content generation, no logic, no truth) and that it poses no risk.

There is a further argument that even with actual AI, which people have written volumes of sci-fi tier essays about how it will kill us all, that there has been no demonstrated risk, only speculation.

We know that progress towards ever more sophisticated AI will be incremental, with occasional breakthroughs and leaps forward. But even assuming we never leap forward again, the ideal time to sort out what to do when some threshold is crossed is before we have crossed that threshold.

By way of analogy, the climate crisis is arguably suffering from the same kinds of thinking. We’ve never witnessed the kinds of climate catastrophe that we know is around the corner, but that doesn’t stop people who understand the dynamics from taking it seriously. It also hasn’t stopped a very vocal and powerful opposition who won’t be convinced until we experience real catastrophe.

To me, the argument that we’re nowhere close is unconvincing, and I’d argue irrelevant. Even if the real risk is decades away, we’re now living in the moment where we can mitigate risks before they become pressingly real. Anything else is kicking the can down the road.

> There is a further argument that even with actual AI, which people have written volumes of sci-fi tier essays about how it will kill us all, that there has been no demonstrated risk

How would you define “demonstrated risk”? We’re at a stage where all we can do is speculate and predict based on our models of the world as they currently exist. That says nothing about the actual intrinsic risks that we are or are not speculating about.

And again, the climate crisis seems like a useful parallel to consider.

>Even if the real risk is decades away... All we can do is ... predict based on our models...

What real risk? What models?

Climate change is not a useful parallel because changing weather has an actual impact on human safety. No one can articulate the risks that AGI would pose beyond speculative fiction. It's going to clone itself to every device and turn us into paperclips by emailing an on-demand gene printing lab to make a super virus!! Sure, whatever man.

Just because you can say the words "X is similar to Y" does not make it true. This applies to comparisons with nuclear weapons, guns, climate change, et al. I understand how all of those things can kill me. No one has made a reasonable argument for how an LLM could harm me, much less an argument convincing enough to justify the regulatory capture sought by these companies.

You aren't answering my question. I asked about the relationship between 'is it dangerous?' and 'is it AI?' Some relationship between these questions was suggested by you in the comment I responded to above:

> "The current generation of work is not AI. [THEREFORE?] The risks it poses are minimal. You cannot hurt me with an LLM."

and again suggested by this remark:

> "we are no where close to artificial intelligence (current generation is content generation, no logic, no truth) and [THEREFORE?] it poses no risk."

You seems to be claiming that LLMs aren't dangerous because they aren't AI. Does the set of dangerous things belong to the set of AI? Pipe bombs and pit vipers aren't AI, so does that mean they aren't dangerous? They are, therefore the set of all dangerous things does not belong to the set of AI. Why then is "The current generation of work is not AI" thought to support the assertion that LLMs cannot be dangerous?

I think it could be reasonable for you to assert that LLMs have not yet been demonstrated to be dangerous enough to warrant regulation. But that's not what was asserted above; you asserted that LLMs cannot hurt people, and the supporting argument seems to be 'because they aren't real AI'. That is simply illogical. Whether or not LLMs are sci-fi tier AI is irrelevant; it has absolutely no bearing on whether or not LLMs are dangerous.

tl;dr: Rattlesnakes aren't AI, therefore rattlesnakes can't hurt me.

You're arguing a complete straw man. Please read the sentence before the one you are hyper focused on.

I am taking a position against everything about the current narrative.

    1) Calling the current generation of tech AI.
    2) The idea that AI is dangerous.
    3) The conclusion that regulation is required.

You're hallucinating some causality in the statements that isn't written. It has not been demonstrated that AI (AGI) will be dangerous. Further, LMMs are not AI. LLMs have also not been demonstrated to be dangerous. We do not need to give OpenAI (Microsoft) regulatory capture.

So your objection to LLMs being called AI is a non sequitur and has nothing to do with your objection to LLMs being regulated? That's not the impression I got from either of your comments.

Are you aware of any sane takes like this you have links to? Even some of the skeptical articles like the one in The Atlantic are more calling out hypocrisy than attempting to take a serious look at the reality of threats from "AI" (which, as you point out is, not really AI).

> You cannot hurt me with an LLM. It may reshape the internet due to the fact that content generation just got a whole lot easier. Beyond that you would have a difficult time harming me in any way with an LLM.

I'm always surprised seeing these narrow views on HN.

History is the process of technology and culture shifting over time, influencing each other. There's not going to be some magic moment where we all wake up and turn on our television and see the morning news tell us that "AGI exists today, and here's what's changing." Not least because very few people ever turn on a TV in the morning anymore.

Individually, things will change. Maybe a given change will be small or large, fast or quick. And these changes will add up. Of course it's very scary that a massive change could happen overnight, but that's not the expectation and it's not the only criterion for AI danger (or climate change, or political instability, or economic instability, or...)!

Time for hacker culture to triple down on open source contribution. We have access to some great building blocks so far, here’s to hoping we can make the most out of it.

This is a remarkably dense set of falsehoods. I count a single truthful sentence. GPT-4 is not AI? Such obstinate denialism.

The goalposts for AI are so far removed from where they were a year ago that they're hardly visible anymore.

The current LLM’s can say things, but they have nothing to say; they all just say whatever sounds good in context. We have yet to have a generally useful AI which can reason, and use the reasoning to tell us things.

Actually we have reasoning AI - in inductive and deductive reasoning spaces. What we lack is abductive reasoning AI, which LLMs are actually really really close to. They all lack agency, but you can approximate agency through goal based agents. By tying together a goal based agent with inductive, deductive and LLM in a feedback cycle, I think you’ll find we are pretty darn close. The reasoning behavior will be different than human, and maybe the reasoning classes need to be extended, but we have already crafted either optimal or decent approximations of human reasoning. The task as I see it is less making LLM AGI but in taking all the AI work to date and synthesizing them into an ensemble that delegates tasks to the right model based on the domain of a sub tasks in a larger task space and providing the appropriate feedback, state, integrations, as well as providing integrations to optimizers, solvers, and other computational and mechanical algorithms.

It reminds me of nurses reporting all the patients dying of COVID-19 insisting to their last breath that covid isn't real. There is nothing that will change their mind because it has become opaque to objective reality. Burying their head even if suffocates them.

Denial of what? That AI is as important as AI-fans think that it is?

Isn't it the opposite? People who are willing to say that a simple ELIZA bot is a form of AI think that something being AI isn't very important; it's a low bar to clear and doesn't imply much about the usefulness of the thing. To these people, AI is not intrinsically important. A chess bot is AI, it has very limited utility and just isn't important at all in any domain other than chess.

On the other hand, people who say that AI is an as-of-yet unobtained far-future technology are saying that AI is intrinsically very sophisticated and useful; so much so that nobody has succeeded in creating one yet. These people think that AI is intrinsically important. They think the term AI is so important that it must not be applied to systems with limited mundane usefulness.

> They think the term AI is so important that it must not be applied to systems with limited mundane usefulness

Yes? Thinking is hard. People would happily delegate as much cognitive load to a computer as possible - especially if they believe the computer is intelligent. With this comes 'computer says no' and 'we are not responsible; it was the AI that was behaving unjust'. Until we have an artificial intelligence that can take responsibility for its actions - and remedy them if needs be, we should hammer home that these systems have limited mundane usefulness.

Corporations and CEOs already don't take responsibility for their actions. That hasn't stopped them from becoming very powerful.

People delegate their decision making to other systems all the time, whether or not those systems are termed to be AI.

There is no empirical test for whether or not a system is AGI, and 'AI' is a term which has been applied to all manner of mundane systems for decades already. It is not important that we restrict the term AI to only mean AGI (whatever it is that AGI even means!) The 'CPU' players in Mario Kart 64 were frequently called AI, and there was no problem with that. Anybody who gets bent out of shape over the casual use of the term AI is placing way too much importance on the term.

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