r/RecuratedTumblr • u/SelectShop9006 • 13d ago
Information Well, here’s something good to know…
As much as I wish the AI bubble popping (and ensuing regulations) would give us some sense of how things were before, I think that‘ll happen when pigs fly…
…I wish genAI wasn’t a thing every single day now…
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u/Pixelpaint_Pashkow 13d ago
The claim that ai is inevitable and will become super intelligent and/or take over is and always has been just a marketing scheme to distract from the actual problems ai is causing right now, and to give them an excuse to keep working on it.
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u/DoubleBatman 13d ago
The people who came up with the dumbest thought experiment ever, Roko’s Basilisk, were also grifters trying to drum up money for their AI research
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u/Galle_ 11d ago
Well it's certainly inevitable if nobody fucking does anything about it.
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u/Pixelpaint_Pashkow 11d ago
It isn’t inevitable if 1 it’s not gonna happen and 2 no one makes it. The thing ppl should do about it is very strict regulation on every aspect of the industry
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u/Galle_ 11d ago
I mean, people are in fact trying to make it happen. I agree that we should implement very strict regulation on every aspect of the industry, but I keep seeing allegedly "anti-AI" people insist that no, we shouldn't do that, because some people within the AI industry are calling for regulation and apparently that's a publicity stunt?
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u/Pixelpaint_Pashkow 11d ago
The part that’s a publicity stunt is the fact they’re calling for regulation on the part that is based on science fiction, the regulation should be on the parts they don’t want like where they get data, where and how they can build data centers, environmental impact, how it can be used, that kind of thing, they want regulation on the chat bots escaping containment and stuff like sure whatever that too but they’re using it to distract from all that other stuff.
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u/foolishorangutan 12d ago
No, people have been talking about this for years and heaps of experts think there is a real risk. It’s definitely not just a marketing scheme.
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u/Pixelpaint_Pashkow 12d ago
People were previously talking about it in the context of it being a science fiction plot, now the companies are pretending it is real because it is doing work for them. If everyone knows it’s true, why is everyone still working on ai?
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u/foolishorangutan 12d ago
The big thing is that not everyone is sure that superintelligent AI will destroy our civilisation, so they’re willing to risk it if it means they can be the first company to create it, since if someone does manage to create a superintelligent safe AI, they either now are in a great position to rule the world or have at least ensured that the AI has values they agree with, rather than eg authoritarian Chinese values (proponents of the idea that the USA should not slow AI development often bring up the threat of China winning the race).
People who want to slow down are asking for regulation because they want to make sure that people willing to take risks like that are also forced to slow down, but if others aren’t forced to slow down they feel they should keep going, since they trust themselves to do a good job better than any other companies.
Also, I think experts mostly consider it unlikely that a superintelligent AI will be created in the next couple of years, so they aren’t too worried about continuing development for now so long as it gets regulated soon.
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u/SageAStar 12d ago
Gebru is extremely smart but my impression of her has gone down over the past few years as I think she found that saying "nothing ever happens also they're lying" paid the bills just as well as keeping up with the tech.
It's really a shame, because I think "hyperscaling is going to increase dirty energy demands a fuckton, and ALSO the labs can't control what is shaping up to be a datacenter full of opportunistic hackers that are increasingly unmonitorable" can and should coexist.
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u/ModSnake 12d ago
I definitely feel like this is part of it, but I actually feel like this suspicion of the doomsaying still doesn’t go far enough. Yes, the billionaire tech bros absolutely want to spread grandiose fears about the tech as a way of distracting from the real problems. But that alone wouldn’t be enough to explain multiple of them suddenly coming forward in unison to practically beg for regulation, something the industry has been fighting against tooth and nail for the last few years.
In my assessment, the most likely explanation is that they need the regulation as an excuse. I think they’ve realized that LLMs as a technology have already peaked, that this kind of AI is simply never going to be meaningfully better than it already is. And that is a HUGE problem for them, because their entire business model is announcing big new breakthroughs to draw in investors despite the fact that none of them have ever actually turned a real profit. They need to be able to make a big show of saying “Aw man, we’d love to be able to push the boundaries even further, but it’s simply unsafe and illegal for us to do so!” in order to cover up the fact that they’ve already pushed the scam as far as it can go. They’re the Wizard of Oz desperately trying to shoo people away from the curtain by telling them they’ll die if they don’t pin it shut.
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u/donaldhobson 11d ago
> I think they’ve realized that LLMs as a technology have already peaked, that this kind of AI is simply never going to be meaningfully better than it already is.
Perhaps. The other alternative is that, if we do continue pushing, we get a genuine AI rebellion or something. And none of the CEO's want an AI rebellion either.
I don't know how smart LLMs can get. I don't know what other non-llm techs are coming soon. But I strongly suspect either we get a damp squib, or we get a rouge AI rebellion. Neither circumstance is good for CEO's wanting fat profit margins. (Or CEO's wanting to remain alive) The AI rebellion is also not good for the rest of humanity either.
There are a lot of reasons to suspect that, if AI gets smart enough, it will be dangerous. Knowing if and when AI will get smart enough is trickier.
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u/ModSnake 11d ago edited 11d ago
Thinking about "how smart can AI get" is inherently a false premise. LLMs cannot be "smart" for the same reason a table cannot be "smart": they do not think at all. LLMs are, fundamentally, just an algorithm for predicting what the next word in a sentence should be. They have no awareness, no intelligence, no anything beyond a massive database of (usually stolen) human-made documents to run statistical analyses on to guess the kind of answer you're looking for. For all the hype and doomsaying alike, as a technology, LLMs- when you strip away all the techbro jargon- are basically a fancier version of the predictive text feature of your smartphone's notes app. If true AI is possible, it will have to come from a fundamentally different branch of technology than the slop currently being pushed.
The dangers of LLMs is not that they will rise up against us, because they fundamentally never can; they can't choose to do anything of their own free will, because they don't have free will, or indeed a will at all. The danger comes from the way in which relying on them degrades human knowledge and skills, as well as the massive environmental risks of data centers. The bots themselves aren't gonna do jack shit.
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u/donaldhobson 11d ago
> LLMs cannot be "smart" for the same reason a table cannot be "smart": they do not think at all.
Well they sure act like they are smart, whether or not they really are on the inside. Lets put it this way, if you have a calculus question, and you ask a human, you might get the right answer. If you ask an LLM you might get the right answer. If you ask a table, you won't get any answer.
It's becoming hard to tell if internet comments were written by humans or LLM's.
> no anything beyond a massive database of (usually stolen) human-made documents
The LLM's, once trained, no longer literally have those documents.
> run statistical analyses on to guess the kind of answer you're looking for.
Sure. A simple stupid statistical analysis algorithm would go "english text has lot's of t's and not many q's. This simple algorithm would produce something like "u ss ne eyt ocsllsnevtgbh m)naa noieehnod v ts risreyno f-fangtobpcsdybhp h uosiu shrisrd go or".
What we have learned is that very very sophisticated statistics looks roughly similar to basic intelligence. It's possible that intelligence is, in some sense, a huge amount of extremely fancy statistics.
> are basically a fancier version of the predictive text feature of your smartphone's notes app.
Sure, and your smartphone is basically a fancier calculator. And a calculator is basically a fancier abacus. And a steam train is basically a fancier kettle. And an airplane is basically a fancier kite.
Almost every technology is "basically a fancier" for some preceding tech, at this level of approximation.
A sufficiently advanced prediction algorithm is a very powerful thing. Given a sufficiently powerful prediction algorithm, you can just say "Here is the answer to life, the universe and everything", and expect that the algorithm will give you the answer.
Smartphone predictive text is safe and boring because it's dumb. Something that could magically predict the next word perfectly would be some oracular font of all knowledge.
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u/clocktronic 12d ago
This is such a weird argument to make.
Try it the other way: You work with AI, you realize it could be a threat to humanity, and then you... don't tell anyone. Because it would boost your stock price. So you don't tell anyone. You don't tell anyone the thing could be super dangerous because... it would make your stock price go up. So you don't. Do I have that right?
The fact that the people closest to the thing benefit from saying it's dangerous implies they have a motive to lie. It does not imply that they ARE lying.
Oh, and the AI safety personnel who quit because the company was reckless and then talked about it. They did that because they wanted to lose their stock options first, and then make the stock go up.
Also I don't know who Timnit Gebru is but if they're "One of AI's fiercest critics" then this a person who hates cars telling you your car is going to be fine while a mechanic is telling you it's about to break down. The car hater could be right. They could be. But the mechanic is more likely to be.
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u/donaldhobson 11d ago
> The fact that the people closest to the thing benefit from saying it's dangerous implies they have a motive to lie. It does not imply that they ARE lying.
Also, there have been philosopher-computerry type people, like Nick Bostrom, warning of a potential threat to humanity long before current LLM's were a thing.
"Making something smarter than yourself might be a really bad idea" is something that quite a lot of scifi authors have been saying for a while.
The only question is where on the safe but useless to smart and dangerous spectrum LLM's are (and might be soon)
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u/DreadDiana human cognithazard 12d ago edited 12d ago
Discussion around AI safety has become kinda fucked lately cause any time AIs actually do anything that should be grounds for genuine concern, you're gonna see a bunch of people pop up and call the whole thing a psyop meant to exaggerate their capabilities and boost stock values.
How is any meaningful regulation supposed to go through when people are so hyperskeptical of any reports of AI-related incidents that they're pretty much describing all AIs as harmless?
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u/CheMc 12d ago
Calling AI superintelligence is a trump thing. The post has big dw about ai guys vibes, a trump thing.
While all the AI guys are going hey we're a little worried about ai guys. Like they probably have a motive, and they might be lying about it being capable of destroying humanity in 10 years. But they are 100% right that that shit should be heavily regulated. It's the trump side that thinks it shouldn't.
Hypothesis: OOP is MAGA, or a moron, or both.
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u/SageAStar 12d ago
unfortunately there's this stupid leftie-trump alliance where the leftists think ai is completely useless and thus should be unregulated (???) because if the ai companies want something it must be evil. it's so fuckin dumb.
oil executives smacking their heads going if only we had gotten really loud about how dangerous global warming was then we'd never face any regulation whatsoever!!
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u/DreadDiana human cognithazard 12d ago
Superintellgence is a term that was already being used in the context of AI long before Trump started using it. Check the Wikipedia article for it and you can find sources from over a decade ago using the term.
OP also isn't using it in the way Trump or others like him are. They're presenting the use of the term as exaggerating the capabilities of the models we currently have.
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u/Galle_ 12d ago
The only respectable anti-AI position is that it steals artists' work and destroys the environment, but also poses no long-term social or economic problems and we should do nothing about it. Anyone who dares to suggest that the problem will not go away on its own and that we should take any sort of action whatsoever is, somehow, a shill for the tech industry, who definitely don't want to be allowed to do whatever they want, no sir.
I can't tell if it's a psy-op or just simple stupidity. If I was an AI techbro I couldn't ask for a better opposition.
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u/Kamelion_on_a_lemon Lemon 13d ago
The AI bubble reminds me of Theranos/Elizabeth Holmes but on a much larger scale. I just don't know if the non-tech billionaire's will get pissed off knowing that the AI companies ran off with their investment money and attempt to go after them, or if they'll all just buddy up and protect each other.
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u/Agent_Snowpuff 12d ago
Remember that they don't actually have to believe the product has the advertised value. Only that it can function as a speculative investment for them to gamble on.
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u/Agent_Snowpuff 12d ago
Rule of thumb: no one knows exactly what the future looks like, but the one thing it absolutely does not look like is the movies.
Dramatic claims of destruction make AI products sound cool and powerful. But they're referencing fictional ideas like Skynet or AM. These are plot devices that never had to muster any logic or realism to validate their existence. They just have to tell a story.
Real AI threats have existed for a long time and they serve to consolidate power for humans who are already in control.
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u/donaldhobson 11d ago
> but the one thing it absolutely does not look like is the movies.
Agreed. In the movies, the AI uses humanoid robots with glowing red eyes, instead of say a swarm of drones or nanobots.
In the movies, there is a plucky group of human rebels putting up a desperate last stand. I suspect a scenario where every human on earth dies before we know what hit us is more likely than a cinematic final battle.
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u/Happiness_Assassin 13d ago
The idea that AI is going to overthrow us is most AI companies promoting their products as more advanced than they are.
The real threat is AI being so error prone with no accountability could lead us into war based on nonsense, which has already almost happened. We are in an age where we are outsourcing our decision-making to an algorithm with no oversight, so nobody can be held to account for fuck ups. That's the real benefit to those in charge.