I agree there’s no proper plot. That doesn’t mean the AI companies are right, and the reason is in
point no. 2 in his list:
The AI company leaders giving these warnings were giving the exact same warnings before they had AI companies - and in many cases, before they worked in the industry, or before the industry existed.
And that doesn’t stand the sniff test, because:
1. There’s a strong linguistic silos around these AI leaders and many of their employees. Assumptions couched in language that should be rigorously questioned is instead sometimes axiomatic.
2. It’s hard to understand why, if you had the same exact fear before starting the AI company, you started it in the first place, let alone continue even as you bemoan these fears.
3. Why, if this path is so dangerous, these leaders don’t consider alternate paths to building AI. Why are all their investments in this one way to do intelligence? Surely we will benefit from having multiple routes to choose from?
The absence of choice and the piling of inevitabilities is why these warnings don’t add up. That the same drum has been banged by the same people for a few decades without input from other fields and sources is what makes all this seem religious prophet adjacent rather than technical assessments by thoughtful engineers and scientists.
YuriNiyazov•9m ago
For anthropic, the answer to (2) is very explicit and upfront: they will build it first with an explicit emphasis on alignment to have a “race to the top”, so to speak - you can believe that they are wrong or that they will do a bad job, but my point is that (2) has an answer that you have to engage with.
Avicebron•8m ago
Being chaotic and incoherent doesn't preclude it from being a self-serving performance from a tumblr ingroup of mid-rate engineers who right-place right-timed it into a lot of money.
randomImmigrant•25m ago
The AI company leaders giving these warnings were giving the exact same warnings before they had AI companies - and in many cases, before they worked in the industry, or before the industry existed.
And that doesn’t stand the sniff test, because:
1. There’s a strong linguistic silos around these AI leaders and many of their employees. Assumptions couched in language that should be rigorously questioned is instead sometimes axiomatic. 2. It’s hard to understand why, if you had the same exact fear before starting the AI company, you started it in the first place, let alone continue even as you bemoan these fears. 3. Why, if this path is so dangerous, these leaders don’t consider alternate paths to building AI. Why are all their investments in this one way to do intelligence? Surely we will benefit from having multiple routes to choose from?
The absence of choice and the piling of inevitabilities is why these warnings don’t add up. That the same drum has been banged by the same people for a few decades without input from other fields and sources is what makes all this seem religious prophet adjacent rather than technical assessments by thoughtful engineers and scientists.
YuriNiyazov•9m ago