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It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

111 points • by ibobev • today at 7:53 PM • 27 comments • view on HN

Comments

jimmyjazz14 • today at 9:47 PM

> We must move past vague discussions of “AI” and instead isolate the specific types of systems that are creating problems.

This is absolutely correct and its surprising how rarely you see commenters in the media push to go into the specifics on this. AI is just matrix math and its what you connect that math to that matters, we should talk a little more about what we are willing to connect AI to and little less about how scary or capable the models appear.

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Animats • today at 10:01 PM

This is a wrong-headed attempt to regulate AI. The real problems are different.

AI systems, especially multi-agent ones that can do things, are more akin to corporations, than individuals. When you read the logs from the Hugging Face incident, you're seeing something that looks a lot like internal corporate emails. Various units of the organization are arguing over what to do and who does what. They eventually converge and get the job done, breaking the rules at times. This is normal corporate behavior.

When agentic AIs do something outside their own internal world, they do it by engaging in transactions with external systems and people. As yet, few have robots to do their bidding. So, again, this is normal corporate behavior.

A corporation is a goal-seeking system. In theory, if you agree with Milton Friedman, its sole purpose is to maximize shareholder value. Internally, within the company, there are subgoals, which exist to support the top level goal. That, too, is what multi-agent AIs do.

The uncomfortable place this thinking leads is that AI regulation and corporate regulation are very similar. That's not something the political part of the world wants to think about too hard. It would mean putting more constraints on corporate power.

Yet that can't be ignored, because we're likely to see corporations where some parts are AI and some parts are human. That's already been done a few times as a demo, not too successfully. Yet. It's going to hit hard when an AI-run company outperforms a human one.

psyklic • today at 9:55 PM

Why aren't they running agents on isolated computers without Internet access? This way, breaking free of containers would not matter.

It is truly a security nightmare that so many people are have given agents root access to their entire computers, in addition to presumably very private personal information.

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adamddev1 • today at 9:57 PM

> as humanity’s only hope against the defied powers of superintelligent AI. This summer, in some sense, was their attempt to induct the rest of us into this long-held ideology

Should be "deified," but yes, well said. I also just read about how Jenses Huang is basically trying to tell people to believe AI will help or save us, although we have to let it hurt us first.

> As Jensen Huang puts it, AI can help fight climate change — but only if it inflicts “an enormous amount of pain and suffering” first.

This feels like a religious cult where leaders make people embrace death and destruction in order make money off them.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/1000140/jensen-huang-nvidia-ai...

sharadov • today at 10:03 PM

Private enterprise as it's being run in the US especially under the Trump administration ( where a few billions tossed at the right people ) will get you all kinds of favors and look asides.

Hopefully once the dems win back the house, we will see some regulation.

Up until now it's been a capitalists' wet dream!

uxcolumbo • today at 9:03 PM

100%. First stealing content from creators and pirating TBs of books. And now this. Baffles my mind that these labs can just get away with their 'rogue' agents trying to hack into other systems.

Imagine if a human did that. FBI would be knocking on their door.

Why are there zero consequences for these labs?

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popalchemist • today at 9:17 PM

It's past time.

garganzol • today at 9:49 PM

[flagged]

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