alt Hacker NewsI don’t understand how you can look at what’s happening right now and call people simply calling for caution “hysterical”
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I don't think you can characterize the discussion around then as simple calling for caution. There was a serious attempt to keep all access to even very basic LLM techniques locked into essentially an exclusive guild.
In the same month the Llama weights were leaked, Eliezer Yudkowsky – possibly the most prominent AI doomer, had an article published in TIME magazine saying that we should conduct airstrikes on foreign datacentres to stop their AI development. I’m comfortable labelling that “hysterical”.
Did you know that if trains or cars go over 30 mph, it's disastrous for public health? Not from accidents. Just trauma from (ahem) acceleration:
https://illuminatingfacts.com/the-train-speed-panic-why-peop...
Reason that hysteria remains apropos now is that then, and now, we're figuring out how to deal with something beyond merely incremental change.
Irony is roads and sidewalks should have changed much more. We never did get around to good controls leading to zero deaths*, we decided a 100 people dead per day is a reasonable cost of convenience.
How much do our cyber traffic and cyber pedestrian controls need to change for everyman to get to drive AI? Car seats? Seatbelts? Air bags? Speed limiters? Pedestrian only living spaces? Driverless cars?
Many practical responses, likely a mix of things we haven't thought of yet, just as horses and horse drawn carriages didn't require most of them to coexist. Controls develop like scar tissue more naturally than they appear in advance.**
And if the better analogy for LLMs turns out to have been less like cars, more like flammable gas blimps, we'll figure that out too and tell cautionary stories for generations... but long before the stories are forgotten we'll have already come up with something more practical, faster, and – oh well – perhaps even deadlier per mile.
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* Still working on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero
** Not saying that's as it should be.
Because when you position yourself saying "people were hysterical", you indirectly categorize yourself as an expert.
They were provably hysterical, again and again, just to say 3 months later "that model was weak sure but this time we will have the real dangerous one" and again.
> what’s happening right now
And that would be closed-AI companies failing to keep their AI closed in a box, thus proving open-AI proponents right and the hysterical group wrong?
Not to be coy, but what is happening right now?
You definitely have some scams and some software flaws being exposed, but I think for a revolutionary leap in tech this is all quite muted. Revolutionary tech advances often come with some severe consequences. For instance, to this day (after a century of safety improvements) cars still kill more than a million people a year, to say nothing of wrecking the atmosphere, but that's considered a reasonable price to pay for being able to get between places faster.
The reason I think cars are a good example is because that's certainly vastly higher than any price we're paying for LLMs, or probably ever will, yet the overall 'positive' effect of LLMs will likely be far greater than cars. Gotta put 'positive' in quotes because the possibility for automation and the like is going to be.... nuanced.... in effect, but at least in the longrun it'll be a very good thing.