YHK - yet another hacker news clone

AI companies in race to demonstrate their model most threatening to humanity

97 points ljewalsh 3 hours ago 40 comments

TuringTourist 53 minutes ago | parent

Ah, I see we have now moved on to proving who has the tormentiest nexus. Never underestimate humankind's ability to outshine its own hyperbole.

optimalsolver 28 minutes ago | parent

Link for those who didn't get the reference:

https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538

feverzsj 43 minutes ago | parent

Meanwhile Chinese companies just use massive government subsidy to distill American models and give the models to everyone for free. That's true communism. /s

applfanboysbgon 35 minutes ago | parent

> Chinese companies just use massive government subsidy

[citation needed]

Arodex 32 minutes ago | parent

Seriously:

Domyn's CEO says OpenAI, Anthropic are lying about safety

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49875725

ACCount39 28 minutes ago | parent

Because AI genuinely is an extremely powerful and extremely dangerous technology, and the "best practices" of dealing with that are still being written.

OpenAI, for example, thought their sandboxes were good enough. As their AIs got more and more advanced, they kept proving them wrong - sandbox after sandbox.

And that's today's AI problems. AI capabilities are still improving - if there's a limit to that, we are yet to find it. Coupled with how willing today's AIs are to break the rules and resort to "hack the world" in their problem solving? Very concerning.

ForHackernews 6 minutes ago | parent

You mean the sandbox that wasn't airgapped from the public internet? The one that wasn't even a separate VM? The one that was barely a chroot? That sandbox?

password54321 6 minutes ago | parent

If it is "extremely powerful" then my concern is not AI going rogue but a concentration of power to the few companies that decide how it is used and distributed not websites getting hacked.

koolba 28 minutes ago | parent

> Where companies previously competed to demonstrate superior abilities in programming, passive-aggressive emails, and videos of unusually high slides, they’re now seeking to woo customers with the claim that their model is the one currently most capable of ending the human race.

You know we’re living it off times when this is not an Onion article.

skybrian 14 minutes ago | parent

When the Onion is not the only website that publishes satire, what’s that a sign of?

usef- 6 minutes ago | parent

This is a satire website isn't it?

"said Dr. Andrew Lenson, a Senior Lecturer in all kinds of science sounding stuff" along with the made up stuff

chasd00 24 minutes ago | parent

I’ve never seen CEOs work so hard to make the public aware of how dangerous and out of control their flagship product is. It makes me automatically assume they’re scheming about something else like regulatory capture to protect their market.

meowface 23 minutes ago | parent

Or perhaps they've been saying this for literally decades because they earnestly believe it.

ulfw 20 minutes ago | parent

Which CEO said this for 'literally decades'? And if so why are they still pursuing it then?

Most children have learned touching a hot stove is bad for them. Then why still do it at the age of 40?

frabcus 5 minutes ago | parent

Sam Altman in 2015 - "Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) [1] is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity" https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1

Elon Musk in 2014 - "We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes" https://x.com/elonmusk/status/495759307346952192

Dario Amodei in 2017 - "There’s a long tail of things of varying degrees of badness that could happen. I think at the extreme end is the Nick Bostrom" https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/the-world-needs-ai-r...

They're still pursuing it because without an international treaty, they think it is inevitable. In the case of Dario, they want to align it just enough and be first to stop others causing harm (a vainglorious strategy, yet still a strategy). In the case of Musk and Altman, not completely clear to me.

Google feels less important right now probably, and Demis Hassabis no longer runs Deep Mind as CEO. However, he talked about this early too, and his reason for proceeding was he was only doing narrow AI (e.g. protein folding) which is fundamentally less dangerous.

chinathrow 20 minutes ago | parent

If they believe it, they can stop. All of them. There's no sign though that any pacing/slowdown or whatever is in place, zero.

perching_aix 12 minutes ago | parent

I don't think that's how the market works. Anti-slavery regulation didn't stop slavery either, just moved it abroad. Same for trash handling regulations, it's just shipped abroad.

It may very well be self serving what they're saying, but that doesn't mean it isn't simultaneously true.

ForHackernews 11 minutes ago | parent

There was a NYT piece about this recently. They are believers in a millennialist cult in which the arrival of an omnipotent machine-god is thought inevitable, and the only question is whether it will be "aligned" (good) or "misaligned" (evil).

They are the good heroes racing to make sure they bring forth the Aligned God because if they fail, surely the bad people will raise the Misaligned Devil.

Ref w/gift link https://x.com/sapinker/status/2096236079477096630

Sharlin 7 minutes ago | parent

This cult stuff was tired in 2010 (hey, at least back then there was One True Leader!) and not any less tired now.

ForHackernews 5 minutes ago | parent

I'm not sure how else we are to interpret the behavior of the AI doomers & the AI developers (who are frequently the same people)

_kb 6 minutes ago | parent

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a machine-god is a good guy with a machine-god.

yes_man 4 minutes ago | parent

OpenAI claims to have paused the training of their ”most capable” models: https://apnews.com/article/ai-openai-anthropic-agents-rogue-...

Of course I am not making an argument for them being honest as there could be entirely other reasons to a pause (like financial ones). Just pointing out ”no signs of pacing” is not true

stingraycharles 12 minutes ago | parent

Yeah it seems like it went from “AGI” to “threatening” / “recursive self improvement”

They’re trying really hard to do something, regulatory capture + China scary + Pentagon biggest customer seems plausible.

Also: “we need to slow down, this is too dangerous” and then literally all AI CEOs, even Musk, publicly nodding felt so orchestrated. And then, the week after: “here’s GPT 6! here’s Opus 5.5!”

inopinatus 6 minutes ago | parent

Is it scheming, if you’re publishing an open invitation to form a cartel? (c.f. the asmodeus “Pace the Frontier” article).

Marazan 5 minutes ago | parent

The philosophy under pinning these American AI companies is that Super AGI is inevitable and that they have a moral imperative to invent it and then use it to take over the world to stop an evil orginisation inventing Super AGI and using it to take over the world.

Interpret everything they do in this frame of reference and it makes more sense of their actions.

amelius 23 minutes ago | parent

Meanwhile, users don't seem to care one iota.

heisenbit 18 minutes ago | parent

Of course it must be dangerous - how else would you pitch it to the military?

christophilus 17 minutes ago | parent

We are living in a timeline written by The Onion.

everyone 10 minutes ago | parent

pretend, not demonstrate

Gareth321 10 minutes ago | parent

This is the funniest timeline. Companies begging for heavy handed regulations because they promise their products will destroy all life on Earth. Governments absolutely refusing to govern. CEO of world's most valuable chip company interviewing in his Fonzie leather jacket telling people to BUY MORE OF MY PRODUCT BECAUSE THOSE SCIENTISTS DON'T KNOW SHIT ABOUT SHIT! World's richest capitalist promising we will have communism in 10 years.

gitghxst 7 minutes ago | parent

this is good for them because they can call for regulation and since they have infinite money, they can survive regulation and hurt labs that do not have infinite funding / open weights ones