scarmig

Which frame inspires a more productive research program? Which has better predicted the trajectory of capabilities over the past five years?

Back then, it sounded like making right-handed life was decades away. But with this work, couldn't you just as easily make this kind of synthetic cell right-handed?

It's right up there with all the propaganda to convince the public that vaccines are good, or that drinking paint thinner is bad for you.

It has to do with the scope of what they're discussing. It seems extraordinarily small: e.g. what if AI increases productivity growth by 0.4%? Do data centers use too much water? Are AIs racist when reviewing resumes?

The frontier labs, on the other hand, are thinking about replacing all human labor, ending death, and the risk of it causing human extinction. Most of the apparatus we're talking about approach it very parochially; it's almost like they're embarrassed to take the grander ideas even a little seriously, for being too nerdy/sci-fi.

Google has a compelling story for many AI scenarios: it has lots of outs. It's the only frontier lab for which that's true. A massive bubble bursting wouldn't be existential for Google; it would be quite painful, but survivable, and even offers some potential upside (picking up assets and researchers from the wrecked, mangled corpses of other frontier labs on the cheap).

Just own the wrinkles. Linen isn't meant to look perfectly structured.

The latter question is 100% reasonable, and something I also fall on.

But there's definitely a large contingent who denies that they think there's any risk at all, instead of them engaging in motivated reasoning to think their self interest just so happens to coincide with what is best for safety.

Useful info, explains a lot. Thanks.

Do people in Germany see limited liability as some kind of crazy thing only a scammer would want?

Anti-AI psychosis. Anyone treating AI as a serious topic beyond "it's spicy auto complete/obvious scam/stochastic parrots" is some mixture of evil and stupid and can be dismissed out of hand, regardless of their argument.

The point here is not the correctness of their beliefs. It's about what the actual content of their beliefs is. If someone says that Donald Trump is a secret Shia supremacist and using that to explain his actions, pointing out that that belief about Trump's belief is wrong is not a statement that Trump's beliefs are correct, but that your model of Trump's belief is incorrect.

> This would be a great point if I had introduced either the NFT/crypto comparison OR the "existential threat" parameters, but if you read through the thread, you introduced both.

To quote you, ten minutes before:

> that the apocalypse is coming and your jobs are gone and everything is going to be shitty because a bunch of ultra rich midwits want even more money and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

It's a fair description of your stance. And, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Sure; they might be caught in their own hype cycle. I am pointing out that the repeated claims in this thread (and by Geohot, ironically enough) that they are NFT crypto bros running a scam is incorrect.

Their usual stance is something along the lines of their company is creating AI correctly--not that AI will inherently destroy humanity--and that them working there helps that end. It's extremely reasonable to question their approach, but here you've jumped from "NFT crypto bros trying to run a scam" to "monsters excited to annihilate the human race," which is a wild leap, and betrays a point of view that seems more driven by anti-AI psychosis than consideration of any evidence.

Technically, it's the time discounted rate of future profits that determine valuations. If you take it as a given that they will provide exactly as much value as they do today, then, yes, your question has the obvious answer of no. If you think AI will provide greater value in the future, the answer depends on the value you think it will have.

No; I'm only stating that your model of reality is off, and I'm correcting it. No, the folks at the frontier labs do not believe they are trying to scam people with an NFT-tier fraud, and their warnings are not an attempt at marketing hype.

Regardless of whether you believe in doom or not, it's this kind of wild, willful misunderstanding that makes people roll their eyes and dismiss you. Yes, people at Anthropic (and OpenAI, for that matter!) really, genuinely do believe AI poses a potential existential threat to humanity; every single one that I know personally believes that. This has been pointed out hundreds of times, and to simply dismiss it as marketing hype by crypto bros to increase IPO valuations long ago passed into the realm of conspiracy thinking.

There are reasonable anti- and pro-AI views. There are also unreasonable ones on both sides, and it's best if they are ignored.

However, on a site like HN or Reddit, you're far more likely to hear squawking about "stochastic parrots" or a rant about AI water usage than the mirror on the pro-AI side, making them harder to ignore.

So, the reasoning goes, I don't consent to other people using AI, therefore when you do you are violating me?

No one is "forcing" you to use AI. If you don't like it, then... Don't use it. And if you're right that it's all a bunch of cryptobro NFT lies that offers nothing to the world, you'll be fine and well-positioned once it goes away.

Everyone I know who works at Anthropic genuinely believes in safety and has deep concerns about the potential existential impact of AI; the "they are just hucksters pretending to care about it so they can run a scam" point of view isn't at all close to reality.

But, granting it for the sake of argument, yeah, they're clearly failing there: if other companies are able to outcompete them on the regulatory capture front, then if that's their strategy then they're losing.

David Sacks is probably the least credible guy associated with Trump administration AI policy. Yes, worse than Hegseth and Trump himself. Consistently duplicitous.

On the other hand, Anthropic really needs to up its game here. I am sympathetic to their position, but their actions betray a lack of understanding of the seriousness of the situation. If we're to believe that only they can align a super intelligence, they should start by aligning the Trump administration into a productive relationship.

Yes, we get that if you assume there is zero existential risk from AI, then there is zero existential risk from AI.

"We need an approach to make sure AI doesn't destroy the world and wipe humanity to extinction."

"Yeah, and quotas on web scrapers!"

You have a slightly less great model. Depending on your thesis on how fast AI will advance, that might be minimal, or it might be huge. However, "AI is advancing too fast for people to make obvious efficiency improvements economically worth doing" is rather hard to square with "AI is a lie and will never generate profits."

"I feel very strongly that I'm unique, therefore you are wrong" is a bad argument.

Consciousness is an extremely confusing, ambiguous topic, and no one has a good way to establish it, or even define it. But it seems to demand people make very strong statements about what is and isn't conscious, entirely driven by convenience and emotionalism. (Curiously, very few people who think that bags of chemicals and action potentials give an entity a conscious soul are eager to extend that to other animals, with broadly similar hardware.)

> Isn’t this a problem with human proofs as well?

Human proofs are themselves a kind of a proof of work. They certainly write flawed proofs, but you can expect a human author of a paper to have put in more effort--substantially more--than the human reader needs to verify it. Arguably, this asymmetry disappears for generated proofs.

Automated theorem provers help a bit here, but they don't eliminate the human verification cost.

"Forcing redistribution" doesn't always happen. Typically, redistribution happens when negotiating leverage has increased such that the beneficiaries of any redistribution can make it more painful to not redistribute than to redistribute. I.e. they have labor power, which can be converted to force if necessary.

In a world where capital can substitute for labor, however, that substitution also applies to force-wielding labor. People want to strike because of intolerable working conditions? Send in robot scabs. People want to demonstrate en masse against a regime? Have robot officers police them, and have models identify participants so post-event disincentives can be applied. They want to have a violent uprising? Send in the mass fleet of drones.

Ideally, you'd avoid these outcomes entirely by molding the population into ideal consumers and distract them with superficial sports team style conflicts, so they never get to the point where collective action is even conceivable. But they're a useful backstop if those strategies fail.

That's one philosophy, sure. My philosophy is that schools that graduate students who are illiterate and innumerate have failed, no matter what rhetoric they put out about equity and social problems.

(There are limited situations where it does make sense, logistically, for schools to provision social services. E.g. meals for students who don't have access to steady food sources. But those are relatively uncontroversial, as opposed to curricular and classroom management practices that make sacrifices of schools' educational integrity for a theoretical goal of equity, while failing to even deliver that.)

That mistakes the point of education. Schools do not exist to fix every social problem, and demanding they treat fixing every social problem as their number one priority is how we got into this mess of "teach nothing but make sure everyone passes" in the first place.