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Comment by adolfojp | Hacker News Reader

Sad to see discourse on this website reduced to competitive cynicism.

I mean, none of the frontier labs are beacons of ethics and collective progress. They all want to corner "the market" and pump the riches to their own pockets.

The discourse is a result of their behavior. Not the opposite.

Exactly. People are expecting wode eyed optimism in response to some of the most cutthroat and cynical behavior from the leaders of the AI firms. Its crazy. They're making their bed but they dont want to lie in it

People are expecting you to consider the possibility that they might believe what they're saying. If you don't start from the premise that they're lying, you'll discover that their behavior is not cutthroat or cynical at all, and the behavior that appears to be is instead an inevitable consequence of things that they knew would happen and warned the public about years ago.

Given the track record of corporate America, to take these folks at their word would be monumentally stupid. “Lying to get their way” is practically the M.O. for corporate America and now, on this topic, we’re expected to take it seriously? For real?

Based on what?

You're expected to take it seriously because a number of their previous predictions about where the technology would go have ended up being correct. A lot of problems AI systems are already causing would be in a much better spot had people listened to Sam Altman's warnings in 2019, instead of making fun of him for the idea that text generation could possibly be dangerous.

> Sam Altman's warnings in 2019, instead of making fun of him for the idea that text generation could possibly be dangerous.

Can you remind them to us, if it will not inconvenience you? Also, Timnit Gebru warned us earlier, but people ended up ostracizing her.

Interesting investigation: https://recul.ai/news/sam-altman-lobbied-against-ai-regulati...

In early 2019 OpenAI released a post titled "Better language models and their implications" (https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/). In this post, they explained that their new GPT-2 model shows broad capabilities across a wide range of tasks, why this should be worrying to the public and to policymakers, and how this led to their decision not to release it widely. In particular, they said:

* This kind of decision is similar to the norms in biotechnology and cybersecurity, where AI misuse may soon become relevant.

* They understand that some people have the technical capacity to build and publish similar systems, but they hope the AI community will be careful about doing so.

* Governments should start tracking the impact, adoption, and progression of AI capabilities.

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By 2023, the problems had become a blaring alarm bell at OpenAI, and they started posting papers like https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03718 demanding that the government must regulate AI quickly because of the dangerous capabilities that will soon start appearing. (They also signed the famous "Pause AI" letter, although there's truth to the criticism that using the frontier model they'd literally just released as the benchmark for a 6 month pause is kinda silly.)

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Now we're in 2026, those dangerous capabilities have clearly arrived, and we don't have the regulations to deal with them because nobody listened to the warnings. You say Timnit Gebru warned us, but her warnings were about a very different topic, because she insisted and to this day continues to insist that AI systems do not actually have dangerous capabilities. In her view, it's categorically impossible for any LLM-based system to be dangerous, except in the sense that human beings could intentionally use it to commit political sins. Her response to the guy who resigned from Anthropic last week (https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:azpq3hfq3llpowyqpjkqwgxs/po...) was that his concerns are obviously stupid and people only think otherwise because they're racist.

Perhaps, but that is no excuse. Rampant and unconstrained cynicism is toxic and self-destructive. Like a child that starts smashing their toys, hoping someone will take pity on them.

Counterpoint; HN was destined to change.

Guys like Paul Graham are a rare breed, a Hobbit-like optimist living in the equivalent of Mordor. When the political headwinds are strong, that type of hopecore content finds the right people and motivates legitimate change. If we still lived in 2009, then yeah, this would be a bizarre reaction to a national-scale business saying that we need to organize for a greater purpose.

But two decades have passed. I'm not going to enumerate everything that happened, but the US lost a lot of international standing in that time. We saw unprecedented protectionism, app store censorship, crypto/NFT celebrity scams, national-scale bribery, American annexation threats against NATO members; 10 years ago this would all be called parody by HN. We all watched neoliberalism get the Gallagher watermelon treatment.

This HN is the older and callous one. It's not a comfortable status-quo, but blaming the skepticism reveals a shocking blindness on many people's behalf. The problems with Anthropic and OpenAI today isn't the possibility of RSI, it's their political commitment to corruption, lies, hysteria and debt. The closed-door research only exists to impose an artificial authority that wouldn't exist if oversight committees and responsible disclosure was enforced by a trustworthy government. None of that is "cynical" to highlight, it's an objective development in America's national AI story.

Im less concerned about hn change and more about society and the public I have to coexist with. People use cynicism as a tool to avoid thinking or engage with reality.

It is just reactionary snark, and everyone nodds along. It isnt a position or analysis. Nobody even cares if it is accurate because the vibe is what matters. Nothing constructive comes of it and everyone is digging their own intellectual graves.

For me, it's not a reactionary snark. I'm just fed-up with people lying, and my default mode has switched from trust to distrust for these people.

Am I guilty of not trusting people who have a habit of lying, or is this their own problem? Or as another example, do the villagers did wrong to the boy who cried wolf?

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