alt Hacker NewsWe must pace the frontier
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Honestly it's very frustrating that Doomers/Decels rarely actually articulate how exactly the AIs will kill us all. The closest Darios gets is:
a) "it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet"
b) "[the CCP] will be in a position to militarily dominate democracies (for example with AI-driven drones)"
Both land flat:
a) Botnets and online malware have existed for decades and there's no reason to think a "super-botnet" is achievable, let alone what they would gain from that (it would really be hurting them more than humans). Further, even the most advanced AI models have so far only managed to post normal cred stealers to public repos, well short of compromising a bank or military with refined security systems.
b) Even if the most sophisticated drone swarms from Ukraine were taken over by an evil AI, they would still not be able to overcome the physical limits of range and mass that would be required to overpower the US decentralized nuclear trident nonetheless that of any of the other nuclear powers.
Concerns of bioweapons similarly seem unlikely in the face of the laws of physics. The world is simply too decentralized and has enough existing adversarial relations for a new actor to wrestle total control. Yet while the negatives ring hollow, the positives are extremely easy to state - if AI researchers find productivity improvements in existing industrial processes to make them 10% more efficient, humans will directly feel and experience the raised standard of living. Even Dario clearly recognizes this in the intro to his article, admitting that humans already die of diseases only a few short years prior to being cured. I for one, would like the AI labs to focus on saving all of the people they can who are suffering and dying today, rather than trying to come up with reasons that they should be allowed to continue suffering and dying.
Open source is Senna on a Toleman in Monaco '84 and Anthropic is Prost cancelling the race he was going to lose blaming safety concerns.
> Therefore any agreement must either have ironclad verifiability, or must be limited enough that defection would not be militarily existential.
How does he propose that such a thing will work? Are we going to have US AI inspectors in China and vice versa?
Why would China agree to such thing in the first place since this is a winner takes all situation.
If the US slows down or stops altogether, China can continue to work on their AI and overtake the US, if China accelerates and the US keeps its current pace then it can overtake the US.
The only way out is on the contrary for the US to actually go faster and increase its lead so that China is always 6 to 12 months behind and/or reach AGI/ASI first at which point China will most likely develop its own not long after.
This would actually be the best outcome, just like the MAD doctrine contained the spread and usage of nuclear weapons, having two superpowers with AGI would ensure that they can't be used to arm anyone. Unless they escape their sandbox but that is highly theoretical.
Regarding these Embedded Evaluators who are supposed to be neutral: - who controls them? - who has oversight on their decisions? - can their decisions be challenged by the public or a government? - who has the final say whether a model is "compliant" enough? - what does "alignment" mean in this context and who decides if a model is aligned enough?
So Mark is the only person left avoiding the spiked koolaid. Come on Sam and Boris, what happened to the printing press and intelligence on tap ?
This is a "startups = wealth inequality" [1] formatted argument but:
This is 100% about money. The only way to pace the frontier is to make everyone (read: investors) lose all their money (read: no longer expect returns). Then nobody will pay the GPU bill or pay celebrities 10 million dollar salaries to stay at the hot lab. Suddenly the development is paced, almost like magic.
Conversely, it is hard to see how pacing development makes the current bubble justified, i.e. how development could be significantly paced without investors losing their faith in hot returns at current valuations. Faith in a bubble literally equals money, exactly in the way that loans created by a bank literally equals money. You can't have one without the other.
In fact if the whole industry goes bankrupt and investors are burned bigtime (many trillions wiped), this would spread transnationally, fixing the "if we don't do it, China will" loophole.
OpenAI had it right originally, the idea to be a NON profit and vow to never participate in an arms race. It's too bad that was tossed out the window now that there's money.
Seeing the word pacing applied pacing to non-deterministic ai model development feels like imagining the "pace" of the cutting edge frontier growth will be fuzzy, like non-deterministic llms.
Also endorsed by Sam Altman https://x.com/sama/status/2098811563415150910 and Elon Musk https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2098789109980332057
"Slow down my competitors while we work on manipulation"
What I read from this is that what they have in training is not meaningfully better than current state of the art and they need more time.
What he doesn't tell you is that his undeclared agenda is merely to consolidate his moat via regulatory forcing. Unfortunately for him, he will fail miserably as the open Chinese models catch up and surpass the slowed acceleration of Western models. As for those who think that China will acquiesce, they're smoking some good ganja.
> Pacing within democracies will be limited by the lead that US companies have over authoritarian regimes, chiefly the Chinese Communist Party. If we slow down by more than this amount, then (unpaced) CCP-associated projects will pull ahead, creating significant national security risk.
Please play the canned laughter. Probably one of the best comedy lines Dario has written.
But I guess he has no choice but acting like this. He has to make it sound like the US companies have so much leading gap that they can slow down as a hare waiting for the tortoise. Otherwise it's going to hurt both Trump's ego and their IPO price.
I feel like this identical pitch could have been made 25 or 40 years ago talking about Internet technologies or personal computing, with very very similar warnings and suggestions. And had these been adopted then, it would have been more regulatory capture, less progress, and still have the same problems and risks that were warned about.
> pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up
This is impossible. The capability keeps advancing regardless. More people use AI, that feedback is used for reinforcement, that reinforcement makes the model better. Not just in the US, but for every lab and model. Whether it's distilled or direct reinforcement, same result. You can't keep the whole world from working on AI.
> it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet [..] and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails
If true, then what we need isn't guardrails or less-capable AI. We need an internet that isn't fragile. If the infrastructure is vulnerable, the answer isn't to make a law that asks tool-makers to blunt their tools. The answer is to fix the goddamn infrastructure. Today it's almost trivial to take down large parts of the internet (happens by accident all the time). This should've been solved ages ago.
We didn't have the motivation to fix it before, but now we do. But Dario's answer isn't to fix things. It's to hold back progress so we can maintain the status quo (shitty infrastructure) and he can keep his company making billions of dollars. He could be calling for fixing these things. But he'd rather go the easy route, which just happens to advantage his company in the process.
If the US government is really concerned with defense, they need to invest more of their nearly $1T in federal funding towards making the internet safer. They need to do this for us, and other nations, since 1) we depend on the rest of the world for our goods and services, and 2) if other nations are taken down, they can't spend money on our financial and tech services (which are the only industries we have left).
Dario calls for regulation later in the post. If he's okay with government safety regulations for AI software, he should be okay with the same regulations for all software, whether it's AI or not. We need a national software building code, focusing on internet safety.
"I believe that AI could [...] usher in a renaissance of democracy and freedom"
How exactly? So far AI has accelerated misinformation at scale and wealth concentration.
its funny now they want to pace after what everyone has been up to the last few years.
My position on the clear gaslighting coming out of Anthropic is simple.
1: It is ridiculous on the face of it; it does not pass the physics test. They are actually claiming that AI will kill ALL OF HUMANITY (>10% probability) and have not provided a detailed explanation of exactly how they see that happening. Not one.
Publish a paper showing exactly how you kill eight billion people while we all sit around and do nothing watching the first 5, 10, 100, 500 million die on CNN. I mean, as smart as these people are to work on AI they seem to be some of the dumbest people on earth.
In addition to that, all proposals invariably assume we are complete idiots for decades and do nothing to install safety measures (which do not have to involve AI at all in lots of cases) to mitigate.
So, yeah, everyone: Stop working on all cybersecurity projects. Resistance is futile.
2: If everyone at Anthropic truly believes this doomsday vision, they should move to shut down the company immediately and go write software to get more clicks on Facebook or something.
3: Nobody should buy Anthropic's stock when they IPO. Not one person or institution. Why would you provide them with massive amounts of money if they are telling you that they are going to kill all of humanity? What? They are good and everyone else is evil? Please.
I remember when the Y2K zealots were convinced civilization would come to an end at the turn of the clock starting at the end of 1999. "Bat shit crazy" is the only way I can describe that era. I also remember when Al Gore said we would all be dead by now. Again, "Bat shit crazy" and likely with political and financial objectives driving it all.
It seems humanity is susceptible to these crazy cults that grab onto something and just don't let go. I have yet to see one such predictions come true, the proof being that I am writing this and you are reading it. These people are bat-shit-crazy and you should not listen to them or support them.
4: Don't work for them. You'd be killing humanity.
5: No company should use Anthropic's products. They are telling you they are building the human extinction machine. Don't help them succeed.
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Etc.
This is one of the things that really gets me about the ease with which the ignorant media outlets can reach billions of people with complete nonsense these days. And nobody asks even the simplest questions like: How do you actually kill eight billion people? Show your work. Or, why would we just bazooka power plants feeding AI data centers on day 5? Etc. It's FUD at its best. I am sure there are both political and financial reasons for supporting and promoting this nonsense. I won't even venture a guess as to what they might be.
And let's not forget about enemies of the West being thrilled to fund the FUD because, if we set the brakes on development, they will absolutely win. Then what?
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If you care to have a better understanding of what might be going on, watch this:
AI Kills Everybody or Doomer Psyop?
“We” does a lot of work here. You keep using that word. I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
HN, for the love of God, this is not marketing, these CEOs and employees are literally terrified of their lives.
eh. this is just them trying to have a thing to point to down the line. hey we wanted to stop it, but everyone one else didn't so we had to do it. We had no other choice:tm:
Dario Amodei is disingenuous not to be trusted.
China doesn't give a fuck, next
No.
there is no frontier. there is only greed and lying.
Too late. See you on the dark side where i kick your ass. Fucker
Can we get some insight into why Dario seems more scared now than before, do we think he’s being transparent?
Love this idea. Unfortunately not going to happen. Sam altman is a psychopath. To win he's going to accelerate the pace of AI, and all the other companies in turn will accelerate to keep up.
> I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life.
Ok, flagging this as misinformation.
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Yes, we must pace the frontier, now that we have raced to the lead.
/s
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Tldr: The guy in last place tells everyone to slow down
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Bro, no, you must stop pasting your opinion, because you share it with no one. This control, no control is crazy. Stop doing it..
Just stop giving LLMs unsupervised access to the computer. No free-form bash tool, no yolo mode or classifiers, and no computer use.
This is corporate speak for "LLMs have hit a wall". I mean, it's been obvious for a bit, lately nearly all gains have been from harnesses (or whatever you want to call all the non-LLM bits that make up a chatbot or agent).
If Anthropic and OpenAI were still seeing exponential or even linear gains from scaling they'd be doing it because the rewards to reaching AGI or SGI before everyone else are basically infinite. If both are talking about slowing down it means there's no known path to AGI so they're both going to push the safety angle as an excuse to slow down training new models and take profit.