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Comment by fwn | Hacker News Reader

The biggest AI risk, by far, is the concentration of power in a few companies, located in the US.

There is a lot of fear marketing about our text generators turning into Terminator. But other than the centralization of power, such fears are largely fiction. (Actual fiction, stuff like ai2027.)

And the labs know it: If Anthropic or OpenAI believed in their own narrative of being on the brink of world dominating superintelligence, they absolutely would not plan to IPO rn.

The slowdown narrative is probably just a hedge, or a face-saving way to lower expectations in case they can not keep improving at the same speed until they actually IPO.

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I dunno, do you really want to bet that if you took a deliberately unaligned frontier model and asked it to permanently disable the US power grid, it would do a poor job of it?

What odds would you take on this bet?

I’m disturbingly close to 50/50.

If we focus too much on the world domination fiction, we really might, in a moment of lapsed attention, end up plugging essential infrastructure into the public internet, hoping some dream of global alignment might save us.

That's like giving a gun to a monkey and hoping the monkey is trained well. ..a frontier monkey though.

You believe essential infrastructure is air-gapped from the public internet today?

No. And no alignment, guardrails or slowdowns will ever secure our insecure infrastructure. Bad infrastructure decisions are a risk independent from AI.

The only way to secure infrastructure is to actually do the work needed to secure it. Our waste water treatment facility might not actually need to be able to tweet its status.

Cybersecurity is such an important topic for a country, dreaming about global alignment just to avoid fixing insecure infrastructure cannot be serious.

A Russian state backed hacker will not ask Dario for permission or argue with his LLM about ethics. That train departed long ago.

> Bad infrastructure decisions are a risk independent from AI.

All decisions are made relative to their tradeoffs including costs and risks.

"Water levels rising 100x beyond historical levels are not the problem. The dam's height is the problem!"

All systems should be made infinitely secure and all dams should be made infinitely tall.

The nuclear arsenal is absolutely air-gapped from the public Internet today. And launching ICBMs is a key plot detail in many AI apocalypse fantasy scenarios.

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