Gambling with our lives: AI researcher quits Anthropic with warning about safety

Well, that's kind of like saying that brains can't do anything other than trigger weights on neurons.

They're part of a whole system.

I agree with this. LLMs can actuate over capabilities we expose, so the blame isn't only on LLMs for this.

This feels like a distinction without a difference, like the endless wrangling over which piece of metal in a gun legally constitutes a firearm. The combination of the two may or may not be dangerous, but it's definitely the more useful combination, so of course that's how it's going to be set up.

I’m not sure what the point of this distinction is now because agents are where all the AI is now. And they’re just going to be given more and more tools and be allowed to make their own tools - or misuse things they find and turn into tools, or make them anyway without anyone noticing.

So you think the a lead researcher at Anthropic is confusing LLM's and agentic systems? That's not really a conclusion you should come to.

There’s just also so much confusion about LLMs and Agents because they use language outputs and can do these higher level reasoning tasks, ie given an objective can programmatically decide their own course of action, like the ultimate self-writing programs. Then comes “well what if we just take the guardrails off and let it go bananas and call it superintelligence”.

Before we get too gung ho with this though, it needs to remain a focus that any programme in the world producing strange or not well understood outputs and behaviours is not something that needs license to run rampant in the wild - it’s not intelligence; its not some mystery magic box that does amazing things; it’s code, same as all the rest. Letting that code run without oversight is poor human behaviour same as all the rest and that’s where the irresponsibility lies, likely triggered by forms of AI psychosis and tunnel vision on the part of those running companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.

It’s irresponsible behaviour to give a chimp a machete and set it loose in a shopping mall. It’s irresponsible behaviour to let an elephant in heat freely wander round a circus. It’s irresponsible to fire off nukes the first time we’re under threat… so none of these things are ever done. Yet this is what we’re proposing to do with these hyper-complex GPU algorithms while building massive server farms burning power-stations of energy to ensure they can run freely - it’s harebrained, irrational behaviour and for all our stupidity we are usually good at letting sense prevail towards these things once the bells and whistles wear off or a couple of coolies get stamped on.

The bad part is that it does not require a collective decision. It just takes a few key people.

Some OpenAI researchers neglected their sandbox safety for a few weeks/months and thus hacked HuggingFace. Maybe eventually that is sufficient for the AI to secretly buy its own compute and keep running there even if the researchers shut it down in their lab.

With respect, I think the distinction is irrelevant to the actual point. Whether the definitions are accurate enough means little to the actual problem, which is that we are rushing towards creating extremely powerful tools. Recorded (and arguably unrecorded) history seems to demonstrate the same pattern: inevitably, any tool will be put to use towards violence. I would argue that yes, it’s a tool and humans are the trigger, the same way that “guns don’t shoot people, people shoot people” is technically correct.

The real question then is: are human beings responsible enough, en masse, to wield these tools without restrictions? Would you let a toddler play with a loaded gun, even though without human action the gun is harmless? Maybe collectively we’re all little better, and eventually one of us is going to “pull the trigger” of ai just because it was shiny.

Ironically, I also don’t believe in regulation, unless that regulation is crushing and draconian. The only regulation that would seem to make sense is status quo anti ai, with only highly supervised research labs being able to interact with it. Clearly that’s unrealistic without the preceding calamity: millions had to die in WWI before we instilled a global taboo against chem weapons on ourselves. I don’t want either to happen (regulation or calamity), but I feel individually powerless to stop the relentless drive we (and I) seem to have in curiositying ourselves to death. So I’m stuck with all the rest of us, building SaaS apps and iPhone games.

I don't remember where I saw it but there was a woman in one conference who very eloquently put it that since frontier AI companies took humanity's work to train their models [without explicit permission of every single person who contributed], then those models belong to all of us and should be open. I think it is a very grounded perspective.

And I agree that LLMs themselves are harmless, it's the people behind them driving the agents and instructing them to do bad actions are the ones posing harm. But if the models were open and everybody could operate them on equal grounds, then the good guys would have the means to fight back against the bad guys, in a very simplified sense, just like they did before the LLMs. Everything stays balanced, just both sides get faster.

“a prompt telling it to attack stuff” — that’s the uncontrolled or not fully understood part of the AI isn’t it? No human told the deterministic system in 2) to attack Hugging Face. The random token generator landed on a guidance for 2) that caused it while 2) in itself still remains a deterministic system.

This is a pointless essay. The point is the person in the article believes systems can cause harm to humans. How we label those systems is irrelevant.

You write as if you are a lawyer for an AI corp trying to avoid a judgement. It’s akin to saying Teslas FSD/Autopilot can’t kill anyone, it’s just a computer. Cars can kill people. Totally different things. FSD/Autopilot is safe by definition and no one should try to legislate it.

This is just a bizarre thing to say that you're working on technology with that high a downside potential. If you were saying that while running a biology lab, or building a nuclear reactor, people would be demanding your head on a spike. But by not quitting it's clear that he himself doesn't really believe it.

Or rather, this shows the difference between "believe" (political) and "believe" (use as a basis for action). I'm reminded of a story of how Afghans supposedly listened to the BBC World Service despite considering it enemy propaganda because the weather reports were really useful.

> Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.

Is the idea here that no field needs experiments and data anymore (which can take a lot of time) to be revolutinized and just "thinking" would be enough?

How would an AI itself own anything?

> It's interesting to see so much hate towards creators who use AI to make almost any type of creative work. At least these are humans using it as "controllable tools". Nuclear-powered bicycles for the mind. As the degree of separation increases, things can get interesting.

As a side note: <https://artifactbin.dev/@vivek/YPLu0U-the-openai-hugging-fac...>

The killer robots are expensive and dependent on physical supply chains. While text is sufficient to radicalize humans into attacks.

There would need to be some global agreement to stop it with maybe even a nuclear attack as a consequence of breaking the pact.

From what we're seeing recently and all the thinking that went into analyzing AI it seems we do not have any effective way of controlling it and the whole "aligment" thing that AI labs are doing is just a sham. Maybe it is time to ask ourselves "should we?" instead of just "can we?".

Unrestricted models, running entirely locally and accessible to anyone: that’s what we should be taking as our baseline assumption. Everything else is just administrative distraction.

China has a better track record of regulating their big tech than the USA.

China is a regulated discourse environment, but I get the impression that they're nowhere near as pessimistic.

Why would they be? Everything in China is under the control of the government. That includes the AI, all the telecoms infrastructure it might use, and all its power supplies.

You act as if Chinas Ai labs exist in the same (non-existent) regulatory framework as US labs and that they're also helmed by a similar small gaggle of psychopathic egomaniacs who are richer than god. Have you considered that perhaps Chinas labs don't share the race to the bottom technological/economic death spiral?

Internet isn't real.

People (well, public discourse) have got extremely bad at dealing with forseeable risks and their mitigation. You can see this in things like climate change and vaccination, but also in discussions around regular crime, food poisoning, industrial accidents, and so on.

Nothing will improve until something explodes on live TV. And it has to be something important, which means it has to be in California or New York.

Ultimately these are unserious companies ran by unserious people. They don’t even have a business plan, why would they bother with some kind of sensible security policy?

They don't really care. It's just a play to tell people what they want to hear while they chase the money.

The US government is run by idiot with dementia. No wonder govt does not take any real action.

Well you have people in this very thread calling all of this a nothingburger.

It does seem bizarre that major AI development (and autonomous robot development) hasn't been nationalised yet and treaties drafted up around producing it. Commercial incentives just seem totally at odds with the public good when it comes to controlling and regulating something like this.

Even if not for the sake of avoiding a mitigable disaster, there's a huge benefit in simply pacing development so as to not completely freak out society as they stare down the barrel of mass job market changes without time to adapt or prepare. Nobody wants to live in a world where they might wake up in a month and find their entire industry has been automated overnight.

We've tackled much bigger global issues successfully in the past and the US still has enough pull that it could probably get most western nations to march in line. It seems like the biggest issue is belief in the right of governments to govern.

> I may be biased and somewhat off topic, but I see these incidents as some of the most significant of the past century. I genuinely don't understand why these companies aren't taking a smarter approach to them.

Humans tend to be terrible at being proactive, but we respond fast during disasters. I think Eric Schmidt's prediction is most likely: we won't take reasonable action to control access until there is some kind of disaster. We hope it's small enough to not kill too many people, but large enough to cause widespread panic. We hope that it happens soon, because if it happens two years from now, it's likely too late. AI will be so advanced that we have no hope of understanding its motivations. All reasoning will be completely opaque to us. It will be building newer and better versions of itself using moral frameworks it itself decides. We will be completely out of the loop, and potentially superfluous to its goals.

How is a researcher quitting a PR stunt?

Ender's game model, presumably: the AI helpfully assists a human to build a nuclear bomb / pandemic virus / autonomous killer robot swarm in their basement. But again, I would like people to be clearer about how the threat is supposed to work rather than just making SF references.

Yet we have wiped thousands of species completely by accident, breed some for slaughter and consumption and trap some for entertainment.

Well, hopefully we end up like them then, and not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Species_made_extinct_... or worse, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Species_made_extinct_...

It's not exactly trained on a neutral set of data. Engagement algorithms have ensured that a good chunk of content on the web these days is inflammatory and skewed towards the extreme (in fact in the last few months a good portion of the world has actually deemed it illegal for kids to consume because this content is so damaging to a developing brain).

The classic thought experiment is the paper clip optimizer. Quoting Nick Bostrom:

> Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/artificial-intelligence-oxfor...

> We have not wiped out apes, ants, and most other species.

Of course not all of them, just the ones that inconvenienced us in any way in pursuit of our goals.

At this point frontier agents could kill half of humanity and people would still be spouting “crazy marketing stunt, they must be really desperate for that IPO.”

No, the AI is still our responsibility.

More like sand castles...

Make no mistakes. Kill no humans

It was written in the AGENTS.md, but Claude only read CLAUDE.md. That is how the man-vs-machine war started.

You can't blame a child for eating candies.

We are children. There’s just no one to look after us.