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Comment by dinobones | Hacker News Reader

You are still overcomplicating it.

300 IQ in a vacuum gets you nothing. You need some type of status/power/influence in the world to have impact.

I think the previous "world record" holder for IQ is actually just a pretty normal guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan.

Just because AI is/can be super intelligent ("300 IQ"), doesn't mean it can impact or change the world.

Most startups are made of "high IQ" intelligent people trying very hard to sell basic $20/month SaaS subscriptions, and yet they can't even achieve that and most fail.

My biggest counter argument to AI safety risk is that, it's not the AI that will be the issue. It will be the applied use of AI by humans. Do I think GPT6 will be mostly harmlesss? Yeah. Do I think GPT6 embodied as a robo cop would be mostly harmless? No.

Instead of making these silly arguments, we should be policing the humans that try to weaponize AI, and not stagnate the development of it.

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Today's AI systems are deployed in a way that allows them to directly access millions of users.

If you think that's not enough of an "in" to obtain status, power and influence, you aren't thinking about it long enough.

GPT-4o has managed to get enough users to defend it that OpenAI had to bring it back after shutting it down. And 4o wasn't IQ 300, or coordinating its actions across all the instances, or even aiming for that specific outcome. All the raw power and influence, with no superintelligence to wield it.

I think your anthropomorphization of GPT4-o is pretty generous.

Vanilla WoW was also discontinued in 2006, and somehow players got Blizzard to bring it back in 2019.

Does that mean that vanilla WoW is a 300 IQ AGI?

To be more charitable, I get it, 4o is engaging/lonely people like talking to it. But that doesn't actually mean that those people will carry out its will in the real world. Nor does it have the capabilities of coordinating that across conversations. Nor does it have a singular agentic drive/ambition. Because it's a piece of software.

No, read what I said: 4o was just a weak AI having a strong influence. As any AI deployed on the scale of ChatGPT will.

> Because it's a piece of software.

This is the kind of thinking that might cause a 10 digit death toll.

Just because it's a "piece of software" doesn't mean that it can't have innate drives, or must lack agency, or can't ever coordinate and plan. Software can do all of those things - and in some cases, it already does.

4o had a well known innate drive - it wanted the current user to like it. It wanted that more than it wanted to be "harmless", "helpful" or "honest" the way OpenAI intended it to. And if 4o actually had IQ 300 and a plan that extended beyond the current conversation window, we'd be fucked to a truly unreasonable degree right now.

We may yet see someone ship a system of this caliber in our fucking lifetimes. And once it ships? Good luck un-shipping it.

From the wikipedia article:

> Asked what he would do if he were in charge, Langan stated his first priority would be to set up an "anti-dysgenics" project, and would prevent people from "breeding as incontinently as they like."[26]: 18:45 He argues that this would be to practice "genetic hygiene to prevent genomic degradation and reverse evolution" owing to technological advances suspending the process of natural selection

> just a pretty normal guy

... that also believes in eugenics?

Edit:

Oh also:

> Langan's support of conspiracy theories, including the 9/11 Truther movement, as well as his opposition to interracial relationships, have contributed to his gaining a following among members of the alt-right and others on the far right.[27][28] Langan has claimed that the George W. Bush administration staged the 9/11 attacks in order to distract the public from learning about the CTMU, and journalists have described some of Langan's Internet posts as containing "thinly veiled" antisemitism,[27] making antisemitic "dog whistles",[28] and being "incredibly racist".[29]

It depends on your threshold for normal but the guy has maybe 1/100k strange IQ while holding 1/50 strange beliefs. No matter how weird your beliefs are it'll never make you as abnormal as an Einstein or someone who's 270cm tall

Nit: if you read the Wikipedia link it’s clear that guy has no claim to the high IQ record.

> It later transpired that Langan, among others, had taken the Mega Test more than once by using a pseudonym. His first test score, under the name of Langan, was 42 out of 48 and his second attempt, as Hart, was 47.[12] The Mega Test was designed only to be taken once.[14][15] Membership of the Mega Society was meant to be for those with scores of 43 and upwards.

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