Bold to claim "anti-intellectualism" when the existential risk arguments are abundant all over the internet and from AGI researchers everywhere for you to fix your misunderstanding. Intellectual capability is orthogonal to the entity's goals. If the extreme intelligence does not have the same goals, it will easily be able to pursue things that don't have our best interests in mind.
Exactly. HN has had an utterly terrible prediction record for AI. So many dismissals of capabilities and existential risk, even this year, that get proven wrong within a month.
You're probably not aware that all of the "science fiction" about AI from LessWrong written 5-20 years ago has come true and our present AI environment reflects that. It wasn't science fiction, it was prescient.
"Based on estimates of their burn rate and historic analyses, I hypothesize that OpenAI will collapse in the next 12-24 months unless it raises more funding than in the history of the valley and creates an entirely new form of AI." - Ed Zitron (Jul 29, 2024)
Yes, but clearly that's not what Zitron was implying. The rest of his thread's commentary makes that clearer. He's saying:
OpenAI is going to implode soon. They would have to raise an unfathomable amount of money, it's literally never been done and is so much it won't happen. That's why they're going to collapse.
He could have predicted that OpenAI would raise an unprecedented amount of money and are not going to collapse. He clearly believed differently.
Yep, anyone who thinks these leaders are only saying this now for marketing purposes hasn't even done a cursory 15 minute investigation into whether their beliefs are verifiably false.
Because they can't. If they actually engaged with it, they would realize how shallow the "doomer" / existential risk dismissals are. Meanwhile there are ample essays and arguments about the existential issues from Turing award winners, frontier lab CEO's, and many more. There's also https://ai-2040.com/ , you will never see the equivalent on the other side of the debate because it won't hold under any scrutiny.
Can you refute the claim that the Second Coming of Christ is imminent? It’s very convenient to put forward something completely absurd and hypothetical and then expect the other side to refute it. You can have an LLM of your choice compile a list of prominent figures who hold the opposing view. The list is not empty. By the way, AI-2040 used to be AI-2027. I’m already looking forward to more updates.
As you should. Sacks takes the contrarian moronic take on everything, and the people that are correct and prescient (idk maybe all of the people who ended up as CEO's of frontier labs and Turing award winners in AI?) are saying that AGI is a very real risk of humanity's extinction.
Indeed, although now we are assured by the thing occupying the President's chair that we need nothing but "STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT" (as if we had one) to handle the problem, so I should believe that, right?...
At the very least, Dario Amodei is clearly correct that we need at least more mandatory transparency among all of them.
And Sacks is absolutely wrong, since individually self-disarming without some kind of overseeing referee and force to police such a disarming is a guaranteed losing move, so no one can start the self-regulation system.
You've properly nailed Sacks — contrarian moron is exactly it! His shtick does seem to be just taking the stupid opposite take on everything and acting like it is brilliant. The only mystery is why anyone takes him seriously.
This thread is a testament to the travesty of how bad HN discourse has gotten. It's become an echo chamber of knee-jerk cynical sneering. All the heads of the labs (Sama, Dario, Demis Hassabis, Ilya, Musk) agree with the risks to humanity's existence. Most of the core employees agree. Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Bernie Sanders agree. These issues have been discussed in more intelligent channels for a decade now, and still after all the incredible mathematics and coding progress that is improving incredibly fast every 6 months, this forum is fundamentally unserious. You will not find prescient views in the HN majority anymore, for many years now. The people intelligent, prescient, and forward thinking enough, skating to where the puck was going, to be involved in shaping the future of AGI are elsewhere and barely involved in this place from how badly it's gotten. The inventor of RLHF [0], and newest board member of OpenAI, wasn't on HN, they were on LessWrong.
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/orthogonality-thesis
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/instrumental-convergence
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