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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

What a complete and total joke. One random Twitter thread from a guy "illuminati-ing" the events does not a conspiracy make.

Besides, I would assume that someone who was genuinely concerned about the direction of AI research would want to amplify their voice, as he obviously did by his resignation post on Twitter and then having that picked up by prominent voices. That doesn't make it some sort of nefarious astroturfing campaign. And there was tons of genuine fear before this guy resigned when the details from the Hugging Face and other attacks came out.

Plus, that Twitter link you posted obviously has some weird tribal bone to pick against Democrats, as if there is some sort of Democratic conspiracy against AI. Yeah, does he think this guy is a Democrat?: https://x.com/HawleyMO/status/2098137180392604083

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> What a complete and total joke.

The only joke I see are your comments which make absolutely no sensible argument in support of an even less sensible cure - the magic "slowdown".

What's "slowdown"? Everyone is free to slow down to their heart's content, OAI or Antro or whoever. What's hidden behind this deceptive word? Can you explain?

According to your claims, there are only "50-100 technical people" in the know, so just list their names and ask them to slow down, if "they're already rich" they will listen, there's no need for any other "slowdown", right?

> tons of people... all seem to agree there are real, existential risks here

I don't see anybody with a proven lack of conflicts of interest agreeing with this but I do see megatons of people disagreeing with the notion that a silly token generator can be anything like an "existential risk" on its own. And the disagreeing have a point, they have strong arguments to support their view, you don't.

There have been volumes written about this, just because you haven't read them doesn't mean they don't exist.

I think the AI futures project, https://www.aifutures.org/, is a good place to start. You definitely don't have to agree with all the steps in the various scenarios, but I think more than anyone Daniel Kokotajlo and gang have traced out, step-by-step, exactly how AI acceleration (and takeover in some scenarios) occurs, so it at least provides a good framework to discuss and disagree over the details. It's just beyond annoying at this point to hear people rail against him or his general ideas who have clearly never read those ideas. Like the number of times I've read people think that AI becomes like SkyNet and acquires "sentience" in a spark and then nukes us is mind boggling, but at least it shows folks who have 0 idea what they're talking about because this is nothing like what anyone rational thinks that AI takeover looks like.

And after you read through the various AI Futures scenarios, it then becomes blindingly easy if you read the METR report about the details in Hugging Face attack (and reports on the other attacks) how a slightly more capable and slightly less aligned AI could do more catastrophic damage if AI were hooked up to and running more real-world systems.

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