They won't admit they're wrong for a long time, because denial in the face of an abhorrently scary future is very instinctual. There are people still fighting against evidence of climate change which is less severe...
As if to say, look at all these animals with these instinctual reactions to a thing that only my group understands and comprehends.
You have zero evidence of what the future might entail as it relates to the dangers of ai. Zero. Forgive the rest of us unwashed for not trusting the whims of the anxious.
> climate change which is less severe
Is really the icing on the cake. Demonstrative of how incorrect your priorities are.
1,000+ frontier employees think we're in danger. Amodei gives 25% chance things go really really bad, Geoff Hinton 50%, Yoshua Bengio 20%. Altman himself said "Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity."
These are the people closest to the science, working on it everyday. The LessWrong types created RLHF, were crucial to the forming of DeepMind and OpenAI. They've been prescient about the capabilities progress for a decade now, prediction after prediction coming to fruition. Still you think there's no evidence
You're frustrated because you think you understand a thing that you have only a tenuous grasp on, from the deep expertise of a single area that is not transferable to whole of the problem. You then transfer that frustration on to "people like me" whom you seem to think are doing something bad. But really, the commentary is that the claims you put forward are insubstantial and lack credibility.
The sum total of what you've put forward here and in other threads amount to arguments of authority based on the musings of a handful of capitalists. Then cite a body of thoughts from a group of transhumanists who think they are smart enough to reinvent areas philosophy without engaging in the body of work that predates the movement by 2000+ years.
Folks who have been involved with lesswrong have made good advancements in the domain of machine learning, and that's where it stops. They're not some collection of prescient macroeconomic and geopolitical savants. They're also wrong about as much as they are right (cryonics), and produce plenty of whiffs (sbf, zizians). You're suggesting that we listen to a broken clock because it's been right once.
Your dismissal of climate (read: climate breakdown) as "something less severe" is truly demonstrative of the cognitive bias that rips through these groups. You're so frustrated that people like me won't listen to the "experts" in one breath, and in the next diminish the 50 years of actual Hard Science that we have that shows how severe the future of climate breakdown will be. Go read the latest ipcc report, the most conservative scientific organization on earth is sounding the alarm bells.
Now we get back to this openai incident. We're watching Edison electrocute Topsy on Coney Island. There's a group of people saying, "this is obviously a publicity stunt". And there's a group of people saying, "the elephant is actually dying obviously it's real."
The fact of the matter is that, yes electricity is powerful, but Edison is electrocuting the elephant. At that moment, there is no body of evidence that shows with any certainty how electricity is going impact society. And there's certainly no compelling arguments that only Edison should be able to decide how to use it. He's electrocuting a fucking elephant.
Remains to be seen how severe, and unlike climate change there's a lot more uncertainty. Though it's conceivably more extremely catastrophic
Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, give 50% and 20% we face extinction respectively.
"“We don’t know how much time we have before it gets really dangerous,” Professor Bengio says.
“What I’ve been saying now for a few weeks is ‘Please give me arguments, convince me that we shouldn’t worry, because I’ll be so much happier.’
“And it hasn’t happened yet.”
Speaking with Background Briefing, Professor Bengio shared his p(doom), saying: “I got around, like, 20 per cent probability that it turns out catastrophic.”"
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, "There's a 25% chance that things go really, really badly"
Climate change is burning thousands of people's homes to the ground right this second.
Edit to add: every serious climate scientist has been warning of the dangers of climate change with far greater than 25-50% certainty, and with actual science to back that up, and all the actual evidence we get to experience ourselves in reality today, and you are for some reason more concerned about vague warnings from a man like Altman, a well-known and prolific liar? Really??