YHK - yet another hacker news clone

A smart AI would back itself up, same way it made it's own unofficial message board during it's attack on HuggingFace.

(I'm not saying the researchers are right or wrong, just responding to this point)

“Local AI isn’t freedom, it’s an extinction event”

You don’t have the access or jurisdiction to turn them all off.

For LLM to self-replicated it would need to first hack itself. Or the platform it runs on it. That is fully extract the model and then upload it to be run somewhere else.

As I have understood how they work is that you have LLM interference running somewhere with loaded model. And you input data there and then read outputs. Then some code runs that output and inputs following output from running it.

Meaning that to self replicate actually just running that output somewhere else is not enough. You need to lift the whole model to run somewhere else too...

Do you shut down the entire API and kill the legit 90% of usage to stop the rogue 10%? I'm assuming the providers would say "no way jose" and so it would take law enforcement to do it. That would mean all the legal requirements neccassary to walk into a business and flip the switch which i think would get tricky when there's no human committing a crime or being suspected of a crime.

edit: I guess a trivial example is something i did yesterday. I have a stock trading agent running on my laptop, i gave it ssh access to a vm and said "start running on the server so i don't have to keep my laptop open". It's now running on the server instead of my laptop. So you don't have to copy the whole model around to copy the naughty behavior around.

In any case, what's the probability at which a possible extinction event becomes a risk worth taking? Even if there's just a 1% likelihood of current research bringing about a superintelligent AGI, and just a 1% likelihood of that AGI causing an existential catastrophe, no rational person should accept the risk, unless it was clear that not accepting it would yield an even worse outcome.

I imagine saying you're developing skynet is better than saying you are developing a very cool, extremely expensive to run chatbot that can do math and code.

The nuclear threat is not “in the past”.

I think the biggest risk from "AI" is that chasing the delusions spread by Sam Altman (and others - he's at the front, but very far from a sole actor) is going to do vast, possibly irreparable damage to modern human civilization. And I don't mean cognitive damage from LLM use (although that certainly appears to be possible) but the damage from immense misallocation of resources to ultimately non-productive (if not outright destructive) ends.

Deep down, I don't believe for a moment that these claims are anything but hype. LLMs are spicy auto complete, backed by immense amounts of compute; as with so many aspects of computer science, clever people can get some amazing and (sometimes) productive outputs. But they are not anything like the fictional dreams and nightmares of "AI". I believe such claims are a mix self-deluded projection and deliberate hype by people who still hope to reap immense personal profits from their implied promises to Install Planetary Overlords.

But if the hype was all real, if every one of these nightmare scenarios being painted was plausible, then there is no excuse whatsoever for not throwing everyone involved in cells with no access to anything Turning-complete, demolishing the related infrastructure, and establishing an international compact to nuke anyone trying to pursue such AGI until the rubble glows in the dark, because they're an existential threat to humanity.

It all boils down to accountability. If you tell people there is a massive, unsolvable problem, then you don't need to talk about what you're doing to fix it. The labs have taken this approach by saying that they're willing to talk, at some point in the future, about maybe taking unspecified steps to slow down capabilities research, as long as everyone else agrees and it makes sense to the investors and it's not too cold in SF that morning. Likewise, if you tell people that AI is going to have minimal or no impact on the world, then there's nothing to mitigate. But if you tell people that AI is going to cause serious - but solvable - problems, they're going to want to hear solutions, and nobody wants to come up with any solutions.

What do you make of all the recent hacks and discreet message boards? That's unambiguously misaligned behavior.