Ask HN: What would "slowing down" AI look like? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would "slowing down" AI look like?

1 pointAbstractH244 comments

What would the second degree effects be?

Are token prices about to skyrocket? Do the IPOs not happen? Does the bubble burst and everything dependent on this continuous growth stop?

Or does everyone who got laid off magically get their jobs back and the world goes back to rainbows and butterflies?

Or do data centers get built then we resume? And the industry gets the trust to self-regulate like social media (which went great)

I find hard to envision how this even works.

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My read of Dario’s post was very much like, slow down from 90% throttle to 75-85%, not 25-50%. I don’t think it looks like that much from the outside. A direct quote:

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”

He’s basically just saying, I dunno, spend 20% of every sprint building defensive capabilities.

So this basically is a way to get ahead of legislation and the industry to self regulate

Because 75-80% still allows them to overhaul society.

I mean for sure I don’t think Dario, Elon, Altman or anybody talking about a slowdown is suggesting they don’t want to overhaul society. They just want to avoid the guillotine while they do it.

And in their defense - I do think they honestly believe in the dangers of AI and think that defensive measures have to be built in, but yeah, as part of the overhaul of society.

Right later in the article he says:

“I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong.”

This is not a broad societal, maybe we don’t take full advantage of AI and destroy jobs. It’s just - let’s try not to have AI hack into all the critical systems and launch nukes.

I think these AI leaders give a little will be over interpreted as giving a lot, put the brakes on legislation, and basically rerun the social media playbook.

In 5 or 10 years everyone will once again be “why did we let this happen?”

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