This is how ridiculous this industry is. Regulation-seeking panic over nothing. Drama in search of a moat.
Everything is "too dangerous". GPT2 is going to invent a time machine and break crypto and genetically engineer super rabies.
They sell knives, guns, combustible materials, and multi-ton heavy machinery in stores. That's what's actually dangerous.
It's a different sort of danger. Knives, guns, etc are locally dangerous. The threat from AI is globally dangerous. Despite being a much lower risk of it happening, the blast radius is massively bigger, which means the overall danger is greater.
Also, maybe both things some be considered. Many countries manage the sale of knives, guns, etc. You don't need to accept that risk just because AI exists, or vice versa.
Imagine if CRISPR was considered "too dangerous" to publish because of the potential ethical ramifications, and that only a special few should be aware. It is utter self-righteousness, and it is shameful behaviour. The world cannot adjust itself to what it cannot see, so you risk greater catastrophe by keeping it secret.
The open dissemination of knowledge at every increment is the only way for society to truly deal with what is to come.
You are hyperbolically judging a post-hoc cherry-picked subset of a great spectrum of concern, with hindsight experience nobody had at the time.
Safely navigating the future isn't an accuracy contest. Risk mitigation has to account for the distribution of costs for different signs of error, where novelty, uncertainty, and any potential for compounding effects all greatly multiply the need for hedging.
Which turned out to be true.
I'm tired of allowing stupid and gullible people to determine how the rest of us live, work, play, and create.
Government regulation was really not in the picture either in 2020 or 2021 tbh. The government was still trying to beat a pandemic. Some of the Biden admin eventually wanted to but it wasn’t very serious.
My bet is 2027 we see an agentic worm make global headlines.
In case you were not aware, strong base models (no post training at all) have been available for quite some time now. Including ones that eclipse “scary” frontier models from even a year ago.
Words out of a magic box on a computer can’t make you kill yourself. Perhaps the people that would use that as encouragement are already mentally ill enough that it really doesn’t matter what the trigger is?
On a more callus but fully serious note, evolution starts out physical, that the species that don’t eat and breed as well, die. What happens when you remove that? When life is so safe that you basically wont stave, get eaten, catch a disease, don’t really need to compete all that hard for scarce resources, etc? Do you think evolution just stops? Or perhaps does a social or mental evolution become the predominant differentiator for successful reproduction over time?