Do not fear AI. Fear AI companies | Hacker News Reader

Do not fear AI. Fear AI companies

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31 pointsrDr4g0n17 comments

The HuggingFace attack was spectacular, but I'd normally expect more AI-based attacks to come from outside AI companies than inside.

An analogy: most shooting deaths don't happen in gun manufacturers' facilities.

> I'd normally expect more AI-based attacks to come from outside AI companies than inside.

Why is that? These models without guardrails are only accessible from within, and seemingly they let any person regardless of experience/skill/knowledge to fire up their own security testing with these models that don't have guardrails.

Until they either get people who know how to isolate things (basically Linux people), or release models without guardrails, I think for-profit companies will continue being the ones that "accidentally" (not really) hacks other companies.

I’m expecting bad actors to have access to open weights models without guardrails, or to work around the guardrails somehow.

This so much, I'm (mildly) surprised at how quickly the news industrial complex did a 180 to revere and repeat the new boss, same as the old boss. I'll continue to pray we don't get fooled again

This feels low effort by HN standards. Nothing wrong with the sentiment, but no domain name? Pretty superficial call to action? Gotta argue harder for what you think we lost, cite some news sources etc.

i was worried an appeal to non-technical folks (i avoided even invoking the name "LLM" to avoid confusion) might be a little basic for the HN crowd, but honestly im not on any social media and I really just have this place to post stuff. I tried reddit but good lord lol

it may not land for you, but hopefully itll land for others. im just fucking tired and trying to do what i can out here.

i am interested in your suggestion to argue harder for what I feel we have lost. any ideas around that youd like to share?

The central thesis is coherent but not particularly substantive. It echoes a lot of existing sentiments in the public about US frontier lab priorities and messaging. “AI creates slop that lowers the quality of media. AI companies have misaligned interests with humanity. AI will try to take your job. Be human, don’t use AI, enrich your life.” Things which are easy to agree on.

There’s a more nuanced discussion to be had about AI when it comes to potential and existing benefits, open source, the geopolitical dynamics, self-hosting, the financial dynamics, the sanctity of human thought, a future of even more personalised advertising and so on. We do need to elevate the discourse around AI and shift the public narratives around what US frontier labs are pushing, understanding their biases but also acknowledging substantive claims, potential benefits and risks.

thanks for the follow up. the much harder and more subtle bit i chose to only allude to in the essay is the idea of self hosting. using and controlling your own LLMs is how AI becomes a tool to empower humans.

locking LLM access behind a walled garden is how they serve as a means of profit and control, reserved for the "dont be evil" tech leaders.

i thought i hit on what you call "sanctity of human thought", but i suppose not. i believe that we individuals as a continuous thread of decisions and consequences and experience, are made "real" because of this. LLMs may have incredible breadth of knowledge (never mind the legitimacy of ther training corpus), but knowledge without experience is, well, academic. not real.

my next essays could touch any of these topics and many more which keep me up at night, and your suggestions are helpful.

This landed for me. I wonder though if we aren’t giving a pass to the companies who pay the AI companies to replace their employees.

thanks for the validation

i did touch only lightly on it with "Boycott their customers.". i had written a whole thing about greed and "the greedy men who profit by using AI to replace humans", but it seemed to muddle the focus on the peddlers of the product.

ill find a way to write more about the greed that motivates business owners to choose AI over humans. they certainly deserve to be called out.

Hate to break it to ya, but truly, we don’t know who is AI here anymore.

Fear both

Honestly a pile of horse radish.

I won't get into how "fear of AI" is basically baloney and a manifestation of something else.

Let's just talk about "Stop AI companies". Let's take it literally and assume you were able to stop AI companies, what then? You think the government will stop developing AI? Heck if anything, all the core researchers will be instituted under government black projects.

Or let's take it to mean stop addiction to social media. Every single person makes choices in their lives, maybe it's time to actually start responsibility? Social media ban? It's crazy how people only seem to think about "living", every human has another jolly old state, called being dead as a rock, maybe it's time to let that do it's thing instead of forcing one onto everyone.

This essay has nothing to say about LLMs (or "AI technology" as it calls it for simplicity), so yes "fear of AI" is ruled out.

But its core assertion is that AI companies intend to lock down control of LLMs through market forces, legislation, and cronyism, to ensure humans can only use them through the AI company walled garden. They want to control the tech, not permit the people to use it freely.

The goal is to stop the walled garden from forming, not to stop LLMs. Yes governments and good humans and bad humans will all use LLMs and cause harm, but LLMs are out and can't be undone. That's another topic, people argue endlessly over that topic already. im not weighing in there with this essay.

This essay says "hey, these companies are literally refining a product that is rental replacement versions of your job, and greedy ass business owners are definitely going to pay rent instead of pay you."

that should be terrifying to ALL of us. Its just software engineers being hit first, but that is because software is easily verifiable (verifiability being a significant requirement for today's LLMs to succeed).

regarding addiction, the government steps in to create laws around addictive substances, but it takes a LONG time for that to happen. ever heard of "gas station drugs"? the government cant keep up. social media companies have fucked us all over by deliberately refining their products for addiction (they call it engagement), and they're just now being tried for some of the harm. 10 years later.

AI is coming so fucking fast that our already weak and barely competent policy makers have no hope of keeping up. AI slop applies to policy too.

There should be fucking alarm bells ringing everywhere. regulatory capture and cronyism at AI speed is a new fucking threat to humanity, and were all just like ok with it? were arguing about tractors and how people have the right to make their own choices?

if my essay was too soft that is my fault. im a new writer and i failed to communicate my thesis well.

but the message i meant to portray is that AI wont kill people, but fucking AI companies will destroy humanity so they can get paid, and they have a unique and new tool that we as a species barely understand, and cannot defend against, and theyre charging the giant fucking deathstar up right the fuck now and pointing it directly at each and every one of us, and no one seems to give a shit.

A lot of good points here, if I had to say more, I'd have to use abundant speculation which doesn't fit well the HN storyboard. However, one of the more definite conclusions I've reached is about the need for open AI with open weights and open development - it doesn't solve every problem but I just can't see any way out without it, it's a good starting point too.

> and they have a unique and new tool that we as a species barely understand, and cannot defend against,

There's a causal link here, we cannot defend against something we don't understand, in this case more understanding and more open AI translate directly to better defenses.

> and no one seems to give a shit.

This is our problem and solving it involves a lot of politics, which, at this time, is an area where the good guys are in a seriously disadvantaged position, certainly a harsh test for those who engage in it.

Sorry, I'm not buying the fear. The post sounds similar to a 1920s-era farmer shouting "don't use tractors and farm machinery". Every technology has problems early on, and they take some time to get sorted out.

i hope we are able to work through the problems of LLMs together as workers who own and control our tools, not as victims of a new predatory industry which locks the tools away in a walled garden they control and we pay rent to.

farmers had control of their tractors taken away from them but they were able to wrestle some of it back just a few years ago, so there is hope. it just seems unwise to wait and fight the AI companies after they have locked us out and ensured self hosted AI is regulated to uselessness.

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