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Comment by baerrie | Hacker News Reader

He is a physicist and probably understands very little about how ML works. I really don’t understand how people think an LLM will provision all of its own resources in such a way to gain unlimited power

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I think he understands a lot about ML. But he doesn't give a shit about how actual brains work. For dumb reasons, ideological and personal, he has convinced himself that machine learning is a plausible model of intelligence.

A common thread among both the doom and utopia folks is a sneering contempt for the intelligence of nonhuman animals. They refuse to accept GPT-4 is very stupid compared to a dog or a pigeon - in their world, it's a ridiculous thing to consider. ("Show me the dog who can write a Python program!")

He's EA funded.

He's funded by the Centre for Study in Existential Risk, which is one of the main organizations the EA community has been funding.

This article itself is published during an EA supported AI Safety Conference cosponsored by the British and Korean governments, and Sunak is a 2nd and 1st degree connect with most people in the space well before he became politically prominent (Stanford GSB is top BSchool for a reason)

What's EA? Electronic Arts?

It's in the game! /s

No, Effective Altruism.

It's a social movement with a cult-like vibe among a subset of AI/ML enthusiasts that became popular after an infusion of funding from SBF, Tallinn (of Skype fame), Dustin Moskovitz, and a couple other techies.

I know a lot of people in the scene who think it's dumb as well, but remain for the professional aspect.

GPT-4 as a brain is already quite capable. It needs a body, be it virtual or real. It need arms and legs. And that's just code, which it is already quite capable of doing. An integrated system where GPT4 can run commands and receive feedback about them is quite smart.

So organizations won't deploy AIs to provision resources?

Executive: "We can save money by using AI to provision these resources more efficiently."

Executive 2: "Yeah, but it would be dangerous to give an AI control over these resources."

Executive: "Oh, right, forget I said anything. What's the next topic on the agenda?".

Not for decision making, and I've had these conversations with peers.

Liability is still very much a thing, and sentence extruders hallucinate, leaving you open to liability because you still need to show a decision chain.

This is why lawyers are getting disbarred (edit: formally sanctioned by Bar Associations. Repeated violation becomes cause for suspension or disbarment) for using LLMs and plenty of PMs and SWEs getting pink slipped for unauthorized LLM use.

Which lawyer have been disbarred for using LLM?

Good point.

Right now most examples are at the sanction level. As in warning. If they or anyone else tries this again they will be suspended or disbarred.

https://masslawyersweekly.com/2024/02/22/judge-sanctions-att...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/another-ny-lawye...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/lawyer-chatg...

https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-f...

https://www.coloradopolitics.com/courts/disciplinary-judge-a...

https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/LarryGr...

Even so, they would need access to money and the power grid to truly scale to a dangerous degree.

You're fearmongering. The single most-dangerous credible threat such an AI would pose is spending $400,000 on EC2 Postgres instances.

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