They are obviously trying to self-regulate and correctly realize that competitive pressures will render these efforts ineffective, and have communicated this to everyone.
Competitive pressures from whom, exactly? Based on his public statements, Altman seems to be confident that he can instruct OpenAI to halt R&D while they try to figure out just how exactly their computer-hacking tool managed to access the Internet and hack computers this time. [0]
Plus, the only US-based LLM manufacturers that are doing bleeding-edge work are all simultaneously screaming that they need to be stopped before they commit even more crimes, and/or maybe eliminate all of humanity. On top of that -if memory serves- Anthropic's CEO called to exclude China from the conversation about regulating the development of LLMs, so he clearly believes that China need not be part of the coordination on this problem. Maybe that's because the official line from these companies is that the LLMs coming out of China are 100% ripoffs of Anthropic's and OpenAI's work... so -clearly- cutting off China's access will solve that problem?
[0] Pro tip: It's because the network that the machines running the software is connected to permits traffic from those machines out to the Internet. See [1] for some more discussion on the topic.
Bit strange no?
I'm a bit fatalistic about it all now. The cat is out of the bag, unless we see some never seen before leadership from the current US admin there is almost zero point in worrying about it. Not going to pretend what the future holds but it's looking unpredictable, as usual :)
I dont see how these two arw obvious. If nothing else, people running things dont care about actual harm done to real people. Their idea of safety is "making sure humans merge with ai and we will have transhumanist society in far away future".
With those priorities, short term stuff like "less people dying this year" dont matter.
Seems like unwarranted cynicism to me. If they didn't, they wouldn't give a shit about discussing the risks of AI. You should actually talk to some people at the labs.