OpenAI is working with the US military now
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
> But OpenAI maintained a ban on using its tech to develop weapons, destroy property or harm people, Makanju said.
At face value, seems like a good thing.
Edit to add: Personally, I think it would be hilarious if grammar comes back in terms of a "Survival 101 in the face of AI" course.
LLM chatbots pose no existential risk, because they are not autonomous. However, give a model an OODA loop and planning, and it could become an existential threat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
The problem with military applications, is that having an OODA loop which is potent enough to defeat a human being is basically required. Once multiple factions have such AIs, then those AIs will be in a mutual arms race and become ever more potent. Planning capabilities will also improve in such an arms race.
Before you know it, it'll be "wipe out the humans to achieve peace in our time."
If the AI arms race is very rapid and the improvement curve is steep enough, then humans might become as irrelevant as black powder arms on the modern battlefield. (And everywhere else)
"Don't build weapons" => What's a weapon?
"There's a difference between being peaceful and harmless".
The most obvious example would be Ukraine having given up their nuclear weapons following the fall of the USSR. It hasn't exactly worked out well for them.
edit: formatting
I'm with you. I think weapons are important. I don't like double-speak, though.
Each step in isolation is logical and helpful and the end result makes a useful tool into an implement for killing people.
> The ChatGPT maker is developing tools with the US Defense Department on open-source cybersecurity software — collaborating with DARPA for its AI Cyber Challenge announced last year — and has had initial talks with the US government about methods to assist with preventing veteran suicide, Anna Makanju, the company’s vice president of global affairs, said in an interview at Bloomberg House at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday.
So they're working with the Defense Department because it's a DARPA competition that ultimately benefits the Department of Veteran Affairs.
This headline may need a change dang.
I personally can’t see it being an effective or efficient use of taxpayer dollars.
I do think there’s some nuance to that research though - just the act of typing out thoughts alone to a neutral party seems like it would be helpful, regardless of what’s said in response.
However, speaking personally - if I were suicidal, called an emergency line, and got connected to a computer instead of a person: that would feel like a brushoff and make things much, much worse.
My belief is that chatbots can be great for general mental health maintenance but are likely a massive liability for an acutely distressed population in the general case. I have zero faith in the US govt.’s implementation to respect that subtlety.
It's not going to stop there. They went full 180 degrees and now care about the money above all else. I don't trust them and hope more competition gets in the arena.
This is probably going to be a pretty disappointing century for you.
As someone else pointed out above - this is going to be a surprising century for y'all promurica folks. Or for the the posterity, at least. Won't even be China to be blamed. Might not even be a state. Not seeing where this train is headed (and not just with the AI) - this is the biggest issue with the overall comprehension of the larger picture. But opening your eyes and learning to make sense of the world around isn't something you can learn by being lectured on HN, unfortunately.
It's a soothing feeling to have, though - this belief you're on the "good guys" team. Comfy. Also helps when you're arguing, doesn't it? OR when your passport allows you to travel to more places. Very nice indeed, but not a single a thought is usually given as to why, say, the latter, is the case. "Ignorance is our only ammunition".
DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT hate America. It's given this world a lot of good things and personally affected my life through art, books, movies, music, language and other things. I used to visit, but I think I could've never enjoyed living there. I used to think it's the American movies that perpetrate lies about how life really is, but then when you see it, you realize the lies is anywhere but in the movies (even the bad ones). Lies not by the people... Just lies. Fake. Vanity. Madness. And the only true thing I found in America was my one and only love. For which I'm forever grateful.
The previous - and very possibly future - President openly espoused Putin-friendly propaganda and threatened to leave NATO. European dependence on American power worked for many decades, but may leave them in a very tough situation now.
If Trump really is Putin-friendly, then Putin made a massive mistake by delaying his major military actions in Ukraine until Biden was in office.
I have no real proof of this but I suspect if Putin did delay his actions until Trump was out of office, it was because Trump was such a wild card that Putin might think that he could try to nuke the Kremlin if he didn't like what was going on in ukraine.
Disease killed more people on the frontlines in WW1 then weapons did, and it is the foolish military planner who doesn't try to avoid it (the Russian lines are currently dealing with an outbreak of Cholera in parts, which is another problem partly as a result of training quality - effective military's drill field hygiene practices because it's a direct contributor to combat effectiveness).
EDIT: i.e. when there's a novel respiratory virus about, nothing will destroy your military faster then massing for an invasion in one place.
I kinda suspect China is the same, but we’re yet to see, and hopefully never see any invasion of Taiwan..
I agree with your implication. The military forces of Russia are not paper tigers. Don't believe the hype. But at the same time, you don't want to fight proxy wars? Ok. Great. Then don't screw with other nations. If they hadn't messed with Ukraine, they wouldn't be fighting a proxy war.
The system works, again, because each of the major powers are comfortably confident in their ability to destroy the other 3. There is therefore, nothing to stop us from fighting a proxy war with Russia, because Russia will never use hard power to do anything about it. Unless Russia is suicidal, and they aren't, they will not escalate to a direct conflict with us.
If there's anything that their gloriously failed sneak attack on Ukraine has shown us, it's that yes, yes they are. Imagine if the most advanced weaponry they were facing wasn't small amounts of slow-coming ancient hand-me-downs employed by people who have barely even trained to use them . . . .
Ukraine would of course be toast without arms and intelligence from the West, but neither have any interest in starting or perpetuating the war. Russia's folly is convenient for the West though.
I don't think this is strictly true. Cutting Russia of from unimpeded Black Sea access and draining their resources in a (for America, cheap) proxy war are both in Western interests.
Before February 2022, I would have bet a big sum on Putin never authorizing a full-scale Ukraine invasion. There was just too much to lose and too little to gain theoretically…yet he did it anyways.
The US economy has more of a closed loop in that it consumes much of what it produces.
China on the other hand imports most essential commodities and pays for them with the proceeds of exports.
Yes, "simplifying" to the point of getting it completely backwards.
But you're right. We definitely don't live in a unipolar world. But that's a good thing. More people around the globe enjoy the benefits of peace when each of the major powers are all comfortably confident in their ability to annihilate the other 3.
There used to be coups all the time in Latin America. Not so much anymore. All of Asia is rising and enjoying the benefits of peace. And don't even get me started on how much better off Africans are with the ascendancy of China than they ever were under the US and Russia.
The world 70 years ago was a bleak place for the global south. War, famine and disease ruled the day. Today, in any dimension of human development along which a person would care to take a metric, most of the global south are far better off.
huh, why were there coups?
A strong US and EU in alliance would be dominant combination.
If the EU got their act together, and were able to wrest Africa from the US and China, they would be the dominant power on the globe. I don't even think they would need the US.
Dragging a bunch of people out of unemployment to go die in trenches or to build IFV's that get blown up 2 weeks later makes your GDP larger but your citizens poorer.
Regarding "unemployment" - they've got historically low unemployment and an acute labor shortage at the moment. Also very widely reported.
Russia has lost a significant portion of their export customers and is now losing a lot of productive capacity to keep the war going.
On the military side, their ICBMs can still destroy cities. But their ability to take out a carrier strike force no longer exists at a credible level: some of the key links in the kill chain barely exist any more. They have no real expeditionary capability and can't project power much beyond their immediate borders.
> their ability to take out a carrier strike force
A Project 22350 could absolutely disable a carrier strike group:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/05/europe/russia-warship-hyperso...
And that's ignoring their new sub lineup, which also field Zircon's among other systems.
> Their economy is growing
As the other commenters said, that's a war economy, plus some creative bookkeeping/regulation.
> and they are integrating with several other regional players.
The past few years have shown the CSTO¹, EEU², CIS³, etc. are a joke.
> They are energy and food self-sufficient
So are Canada, Brazil, Australia, Indonesia…
> relatively large and well educated population
Aging and dying. "Demographic crisis". Same for Japan, but at least Japan's doing better in most other metrics.
> launch payloads into space on the regular
"Regular", in the sense that the launch rate collapsed by over 80% in the late 1980s, and hasn't recovered⁴, even as the US and PRC have been exploding.
> export complex things like nuclear reactors.
So do Germany, France, Canada, the Netherlands— Most advanced economies, really.
> On the military side, they are one of the only that could sink an entire carrier battle group or an entire city in a flash.
Their flagship needs a tugboat following for when it bursts into flames⁵. They've built a grand total of 36 "5th-generation" combat aircraft, which are apparently less advanced⁶ than most countries' newer 4th-gen fighters⁷. They've even used up their stockpiles of tens of thousands of ancient tanks (at least the ones that hadn't already been rusted and looted irreparably) at a rate⁸ they'll never be able to replace.
Nuclear weapons aren't hard if you have a civilian nuclear energy sector. Rockets are old tech unless you're looking at non-chemical propulsion, reusable boosters, etc. Lots of countries could do those things within a couple years if needed, but we don't because they don't usually make enough sense unless you're already a superpower in other ways⁹.
Russia does a large number of flashy things, but it's for prestige, momentum, and autarky, and they can do less and less of it each year, rather than expressing any actual economic power.
They probably could have done quite well by focusing on tech/cultural, manufacturing, and resource exports. But wealthy nations won't buy from them now they've gone mask-off with the genocidal aggression, and their civil society is too corrupt to the core to fix itself.
---
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Nagorno-Karabakh_War#Ru...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Economic_Union#Econom...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93Commonwealth_o...
4. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1327132/payloads-launche...
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_aircraft_carrier_Admir...
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-57#Stealth
7. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/stealth-aircra...
8. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/08/09/russian-ta...
The economic growth measurements are by Western institutions. Considering they're cut off from SWIFT and the most sanctioned and demonized nation on earth, they're actually doing pretty well (remember, they were supposed to completely collapse like a house of cards).
> CSTO¹, EEU², CIS³, etc. are a joke
BRICs combined GDP is larger than the G7, and growing. Sans Russia and China, that's where the future population growth (and economic opportunities) are.
> Canada, Brazil, Australia, Indonesia
Brazil and Indonesia are absolutely up and coming major powers.
> Aging and dying. "Demographic crisis".
While still declining, their demographic situation has largely stabilized. It's better than the rest of Eastern Europe and even better than many Western European countries.
> "Regular", in the sense that the launch rate collapsed by over 80%
In the 1980s it was the USSR. We're talking about just Russia, a much smaller population and economy. And they launched at least 20 large payloads just last year, including a number of military sats.
> Germany, France, Canada, the Netherlands
Yes, you're making my point.
> Their flagship needs a tugboat
An old aircraft carrier is not their "flagship"; NATO ships also age out. Look into Project 22350 and Yasen class subs. Both carry Zircons and could disable a CBG.
> They've built a grand total of 36 "5th-generation" combat aircraft
If you're talking about the Su-57, it only went into serial production this year (2024) and their prototypes already have more air-to-air kills than the F-22 (via the R-37 which out ranges anything in NATO inventory).
US, EU, China, India.
Russia is a big country by size and resources, so it will be important, but it is a small (and getting smaller) country by population size and economy.
China has the economic and manufacturing clout and is building up its military, but outside of the 'Global South' and various needy countries it has little soft power.
The US has stumbled somewhat mostly due to the overreaction to 9/11 and Bush's disastrous presidency, followed by the overcorrection of the Obama and Biden presidencies. But it still has the biggest and most powerful military, and NATO has been shocked out of its long complacency.
What the US has going for it is the possibility of renewal and reinvention, that is its strength and its enduring power. The US will keep on innovating, hopefully also in the political realm, and will retain global leadership. That's assuming that the Trump led Republican nihilist suicide cult doesn't destroy it first.
This is both a problem (i.e. the reason that doesn't work is because it's pretty explicitly not a military problem) and kind of amazing.
Isn't that pretty much the definition of losing the fight?
This isn’t sophistry, war is just extension of politics by other means. The vast majority of unfixable problems the US faced in Afghanistan were political, you can’t kill your way to a functional multiparty democracy.
Altman was of two minds about handing OpenAI products to Lynch and Carter.
“I unabashedly love this country, which is the greatest country in the world,”
he said. At Stanford, he worked on a darpa project involving drone helicopters.
“But some things we will never do with the Department of Defense.” He added,
“A friend of mine says, ‘The thing that saves us from the Department of Defense
is that, though they have a ton of money, they’re not very competent.’ But I feel
conflicted, because they have the world’s best cyber command.” Altman, by instinct
a cleaner-up of messes, wanted to help strengthen our military—and then to defend
the world from its newfound strength.
Decades from now we may wish we all raised up a bit more fuss about it, though.
So it wasn't an America or Germany situation, in fact nobody on the planet was close to 'getting the bomb' in 1942. Though not for lack of trying. The Manhattan project was a stupendous effort compared to anything else done to move science forward by brute force up to that that. And short of the space race nothing like it has been seen since until the current effort to bring AI into the world and in some ways it still pales in comparison.
For example, not many people oppose the sale of F35s to Australia or Leopards to Norway.
Yes, war is a game of cat and mouse. Notice how no exploit or countermeasure is definitive.
"I'm sorry but as a language model I am unable to drone strike a village"
Done, now what?
When they were founded, I was hopeful that the capped profit structure could be a way of preventing enshittification, where the winnings of these mega successful companies are more equally distributed between shareholders, employees, and the public.
Instead, they seem to have basically betrayed all of those founding principles. Now they're just another tech company.