The Growing Push to Ban Superintelligent AI | Hacker News Reader

The Growing Push to Ban Superintelligent AI

time.com

3 pointslf888 comments

AI boosters: we have reached AGI! we have reached super-intelligence! You better adapt, things are moving fast, you are going to be left behind

AI boosters also: wait, you can’t ban it, we don’t even know what intelligence is yet.

It's interesting to see a push for banning superintelligence before anyone can agree on a definition for superintelligence.

It will be too late by then! At the very least, an immediate pause of the training of frontier AI models is necessary to figure things out. Personally, I am not particularly thrilled to rush into the bleak future that few AI companies have dreamed for the rest of humanity.

Yeah, I see a huge disconnect between what enthusiasts see as 'the future' with AI, and what the actual owners of the technology are saying and doing. They aren't building a utopian future for all mankind, and are saying it openly.

Yet jump on any online forum and there's always this wishy-washy "oh lets see what happens!" mentality.

> They aren't building a utopian future for all mankind, and are saying it openly.

They aren't going to stop even if you pass laws to halt progress. The Pentagon is a direct customer of Nvidia, and they'll continue to develop cutting edge surveillance and war AI as they have for the last 30 years. It's facetious to imply that any type of LLM regulation would legitimately prevent AI (or even LLMs) from being used for any evil purpose.

> there's always this wishy-washy "oh lets see what happens!" mentality.

Why would the US halt commercial AI research if China could continue developing and exporting equivalent capabilities? They already can today. We already live in that "see what happens" world since unaligned finetunes of frontier models are freely available on HuggingFace. It feels like OpenAI and Anthropic only cry foul because neither of them can IPO in the current economic conditions.

I don't have the energy for an argument like whats being instigated here, and what you're saying isn't quite relevant to what I'm saying sorry. (And if that's not the case, then also sorry. Social media has me beat)

What I'm saying is that the owners/ceos of the companies are saying they expect unrest/disruption/collapse from their technology (eg, Sam Altman saying exactly this), and yet the enthusiast base say this isn't the case. If I'm having a house built, and the architect says it will fall over, but other home owners say it won't, I feel I need to still trust what the architect is saying.

Sam has been repeating the idea that society would collapse because of AI long before ChatGPT existed whatsoever[0], it's his pet obsession and is part of why YC invested in him. It is a sci-fi delusion, and equally exhausting to hear people insist that it has to be taken for granted.

[0] https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2

He is absolutely not alone in that, and even if you think it is delusional it is a shared opinion between many of the AI figureheads. My point being that the people in charge are telling a different story to the fans.

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