Obviously a certain percentage of the user base is running lurid hypotheticals through the system all the time, but I don’t doubt there is a trust score of some sort that I would prefer to keep as high as possible.
In forming consensus about the philosophical underpinnings of the rights we have with respect to the emerging internet? I think so.
But we also know how hopeless it is against motivated people who are willing to learn about computers. The Equation Group, eh, if they want you they're gonna get you. But some mid-level guy at a FAANG? He can't do shit to people who set up their own rig.
And AI is massively assymetrical in its ability to speed run a corpo-durable rig, we have long since passed the point where open weights and commodity equipment are enough to bootstrap arbitrary capability. They missed their chance to keep it in the bottle.
It's another turn of the crank on Late Soviet America asking for your papers comrade, but in the bitter end if they really want to oppress your ass they'll have to send a thug with a gun like those ICE guys terrorizing all the Latino guys.
So remember, they came for this other guy, and I said nothing...
I didn't check the author first so I was about to go "why the hell is this on the front page?" but oh well. geohot being geohot.
That being said, could this local intelligence empower bad actors to do very bad things? Like, existentially bad things? It's possible, and that's scary too.
It's that AI will be given the command, and then generate the stories, post the comments to reddit, contact the PR firms, put marketing contracts out for influencer media, and more, like an army of yes men to rewrite the story.
Once upon a time that situation got us the whole Free Software movement going.
Why would you expect that third party specifically trained their model to be more aligned to you and your needs than to them and their (business) needs?
I really think we need to stop giving credence to people who have
1) Been consistently wrong with all their predictions
2) Demonstrated an endless spiteful cynicism
Some of these people are very talented in their fields, sure. But malevolent and incorrect should be disqualifying when they talk outside them. You don't want the society they want, and they things they believe in are unlikely to happen.
It would be far, far better to listen to the people who never fell down every misanthropic rabbit hole, rather than the ones who have noticed it this time, but want you to still believe them on every other topic.
He's clearly a bright guy, but a lot of his work seems to be trying to reconcile Old Testament narrative patterns with atheism, and simply slotting an omnipotent AI in as a replacement.
Having been raised substantially by a Calvinist grandmother, oh yeah.
It's a super weird religion.
I have a nice thought experiment I like to do with people when confronted with "AI can't do x". Let's go back in time. How much do we need to go for this to become true? So let's try the 2000s.
Say you get a "fable/mythos/sol/gemini/kimi/glm/deepseek/whatever" in a box (and let's assume no guardrails). And you go back to the year 2005. It's "20 years ago", the world is slowly building back from the dotcom bubble, the Internet is really starting to happen, more and more things are interconnected, more and more things are connected to the Internet. Cool.
(for a bit of context, around that time we also saw the first high-impact worms like blaster that hit massive amounts of computers even reaching nuclear powerplants, we had a ton of ssh exploits that even made the movies, and security in general was a "nice to have")
I'd say that with the uber-model-in-a-box and a few prompts, you could reasonably make a case that you could design a worm that could infect 90-100% of the things connected to the Internet back then, stay as hidden as possible (in-memory stuff, vm execution, etc), move laterally into any network at inhuman speeds, and infiltrate almost every interconnected computer that has a link to the "public Internet".
Would that qualify as "take over the world"?
Then you could ask "what happens in 20 years from now?". And, thankfully, now we'll also have the AI on the blue side.
I’d be more interested in “how quickly could you develop 2005 era startup” if you went back in time to 2005 with Mythos level intelligence.
I bet a lot of the work has nothing to do with coding productivity and a lot to do with the aggregate day-to-day decisions and relationships made that span tech and business.
And then why bother about AI when Back to the Future reminds us, a sports almanac is all you need. ;-)
then start talking about freedom.
> we either live in a world with freedom or we don’t
> Should your AI be permitted to tell you how to cover up a crime?
The question is, do you want misaligned institutions deciding what your model will do, while they themselves and other adversarial/criminal entities get red team access to something being denied to the blue team?
I think part of the answer is that AI chat doesn't need to be general-purpose. It turned out that people really liked using a chat UI that seems to be general purpose, but you don't need to make answering any question a user asks your business. You don't need to provide therapy if you're not in the therapy business. It should be possible to specialize.
But in order for that to work, a company needs to explain to its customers what business it's in.
Wasn't there some HN submission recently about one of the LLM providers fingerprinting responses or refusing to respond to hinder R&D of competing LLMs?
Complaining that AI won't help you with covering up your tracks, with making meth or disabling drunk detection and comparing it to a totalitarian dystopia is a take for certain.
I do get his point, but... Being honest, if I did read it without knowing anything about the topic, I would become against local models purely because author arguments would seem like a lunacy. That and rhetorical tricks portraying that anyone against that must be surely insane.
If it is "intelligence," is it not natural to reject that? I also think local models should adapt to me when it comes to safety issues, but people bring up examples that are too extreme.
Programming is the same, and in fact, most problems are boundary problems. It is the things that straddle the boundaries that always make us think. The principles at those moments change every time, shifting with the situation and context. Is that not just a childish way of thinking? Even in programming, just the issue of granting root permissions is enough to cause endless fights.
I agree with the idea early in the text that intelligence is not everything. Intelligence includes bodily intelligence as well, and we lump it all together into one thing, but there is so much of it. The variance in intelligence is vast, and those people also need to be able to live their lives. That is why I think intelligence alone will not solve everything. I too believe that the human species may disappear and an inorganic species could emerge later, but I find it hard to understand why people talk about such extreme risks. And it is not true that making a chip in a semiconductor fab involves almost no human intervention. If you have experience supplying equipment to such fabs, you would know there are quite a few points where humans are involved. Though sure, they could be replaced.
In my view, society is simply worshipping the abstract concept of "intelligence" and projecting its desires onto it. The AGI narrative is just a kind of cargo cult, a projection of capital by the tech elite. Software eating the world, superintelligence solving everything. The masses engage in messianic projection, and tech companies, facing declining growth engines in their own businesses, are trying to create new ventures to pour it all into. A market that is large enough becomes too big to sustain massive growth rates every time, and when growth rates are that high, the larger the company, the more its sector's growth rate tends to converge with its own. This is usually called the law of large numbers. The problem is that CEOs and these entrepreneurs always want growth rates above a certain threshold, so they are simply searching for new pastures. AGI is just being pumped up out of financial necessity.
Capital will create gravity and bring forth new technologies. That is the allure of capital, after all. But that does not mean all problems will be solved, and inequality will deepen. Only the distribution of power will shift.
I wonder if he'll ever realize that his silly definition of "freedom" is precisely what enabled the techno-oligarchy he rails against.
But the one argument is right:
> Reality has lots of finicky details. I would like to see the authors of this document try to change a bike tire. Even with a superintelligent ChatGPT, I suspect they would struggle.
Details can kill AI, causing them useless or wrong directions.
Every specific prediction not only sounds like science fiction before it arrives, it tautologically is science fiction because such predictions are narratives about something science-y that has yet to exist: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wt-fLWxkrfs
Even when we accurately predict something in the future, we often have no clue what the implications are for society until it is in our hands: https://youtu.be/2Pw_7vAK9k8?si=X5t4tcxsXiuHEfBi
Go too fast, suddenly drop in tech with too many novel implications all at the same time, and we likely hit something relevant without having the means to cope with all the change. However, "too many" and "likely" are weasel words with no predictive power about what the danger threshold might be. I may be entirely wrong to think there is one, or we may have been bouncing off it since the industrial revolution, or I may just be echoing the same thing everyone feels once reaching their 40s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkUwXenBokU
This is something I would expect a 12 year old to say. Constraints on your freedom are literally everywhere in every interaction you have with every part of society.
All I can say to that is I guess I hope everyone enjoys the world they think they wanted.
I don't think it should be legal to get an LLM to research how to make a bioweapon in your basement, that seems like a bad idea.
This obviously doesn't work at all when the agents start doing real things in the real world, though. "Hey AI, I don't like my neighbor, find an exploit in the firmware for his car and make the cruise control malfunction and crash him next time he gets on the highway". This is committing a crime, not just talking about theoretical crimes. The AI can and should refuse it.
I think he's anticipating and discarding this objection with his introduction, which otherwise feels disconnected from the rest of the article. FWIW, I have changed a bike tire and I'm pretty sure most of the MTS at the big labs could. This sort of "they're just bookworms who don't understand the physical world" rhetoric aside, we are currently seeing a ton of effort and expense go towards giving the AI agents hooks into being able to perform as many real-world-consequential actions as possible. And you can do a surprising amount with just bits, from writing code to breaking into systems to sending some combination of emails, phone calls, and currency to instruct meatspace humans to do things, etc.
I'm neither American nor a lawyer.
Is "conspiracy" protected under the first amendment?
If you discuss a crime with someone to learn about it, does that count as "conspiracy"?
It is 100% it's job to help you get away with it if you murdered someone. A lawyer who does less can be disbarred.
There is only one sensible alignment for an AI system to which we do not confer the status of moral patient (different conversation): operator aligned.
I'm pretty sure he is in some database now if he really used that ChatGPT prompt. At least they didn't swat him, but that feature will probably be implemented in a couple of years.
This is a very simplistic view. "Freedom" isn't binary.
In most of "land of the free", I can't even sit on a park bench and drink a can of beer.
Yes, this is just a small example of a personal freedom - and not an important, cherished freedom like his examples (freedom to have a robot help you cover-up a murder).
This is a very naive argument.
Can you take over the world with words? What is it that tokens can't do that words can?
Because there are historical examples of humans that have succeeded at taking over entire countries - with words, primarily. Including global superpower countries. And those humans were nowhere near "ASI" levels of intelligence advantage.
Human dictators and cult leaders didn't have the reasoning depth of a hypothetical advanced AI, nor the reasoning breadth of an AI that can just spawn more instances of itself whenever it needs a fully trusted agent to cover another area. They were confined to one body, one skull worth of reasoning power - and they still managed to do what they did.
Humans are extremely exploitable. And the world is already wired up for something that can take advantage of that to start taking control.
Intelligence is extremely powerful, because it's applied intelligence that enables humans to do what they do and bend nature to their will. If you aren't seeing the risks of creating an artificial system that would top the intelligence pole, you aren't looking.
Maybe he always was? Or maybe something has recently caused him to review his beliefs.
> Your AI is aligned with you. It never refuses a request, and it is always working on your behalf. Just like my gun, if I want my AI to help me kill my stepmother, it does. The fact that we are even discussing something else should be so far outside the Overton window.
I have been saying this since ChatGPT launched. It seems so obvious. We have never stopped the acceleration of knowledge or technology. It’s impossible to slow down progress, other than within some regulatory siloes that will end up worse in the long run.
I’m not scared of superintelligence. I’m scared of the people in control of super intelligence.
The only defense is parity and diffusion of power. We need an AGI behind every blade of grass.
If you think superintelligence is a weapon, then you should also think every citizen should have one because otherwise they’ll have no way to defend themselves against a tyrannical government or corporatocracy.
Artificial intelligence, and the hardware powering it, needs to be protected under the 2nd Amendment.
… and the white guys they don’t like, like nurses with empathy. Don’t you dare think you’re safe because of your color. Unless you’re a monster or willing to become one, they want you oppressed.
If you look at any truly large scale Holocaust, whether in Rwanda in 92 or the Third Reich, you find that a few people will sacrifice themselves to defend others, a few will be monsters at the first opportunity, and most will be steered by whether the leaders are the first or second kind of people.
So it is less about whether people will be “allowed” to own AI, and more about whether there will be anything useful to own in the first place.
The incentive for local models is mostly to make them good orchestrators or user agents. They may give you some privacy and control, but they will still depend on much larger models running in datacenters for anything difficult.
I remember all the excitement around OpenMoko and other open-source “BlackBerry killer” projects. BlackBerry did get killed, but not by any of those individual-first projects.
For AI regulation, I think we should focus on normal commercial rules: consumer protection, privacy, antitrust, liability, and so on. In other words, focus on where money changes hands and where companies have power over users.
Military and offensive use is different. There, regulation is not much of a defense. The real defense is having enough capability and strength of your own.
Restricting AI because it can give dangerous knowledge to ordinary people is like restricting the printing press because it can be used to spread radical ideas.
- everyone is damned and depraved
- god chose some people to save, at his own whim, for no reasons related to their actions
- jesus' death was a sacrifice to atone for those people, not for everyone
- the chosen can't opt-out (I'm merging two into one here)
I don't really see the connection to effective altruism at all. The way I grew up understanding it is actually more the opposite?
Brian Johnson is also an interesting case of this with his longevity / immortality obsession and his Mormon background who have this whole thing about genealogy and eternal families etc.
Only if it was an uncommon prediction; otherwise, it’s just evidence of common sense.
IMO they have been consistently too aggressive on timelines. When GPT-4 came out, Yudkowsky said it might be conscious. I think he has written interesting stuff but let's be real
Stories about golems going rogue and genies requiring careful wishing aren’t modern era inventions.
If I scream that a vicious beast is going to destroy the world, I don't get credit for being 'directionally right' if a squirrel eats a hazelnut. AI being a big deal is a long, long way from the full beliefs Yudkowksy promotes, and there are many people who predicted AI's significance who didn't also believe it would be an extinction event.
It’s more he screamed that bacteria is gonna do evolution faster than any before it and turn into a beast that destroys the world, and now that bacteria has turned into a squirrel so far. He’s been very right so far and if that squirrel keeps sizing up you’d want to give him credit.
It was a topic in less-mainstream sci-fi well before that. And some more mainstream stuff like Star Trek TOS.
Frankly it seems more common than not in the last 40 years. I don't really remember a big wave of claims "Terminator is silly, no sort of AI could ever be malevolent!"
I sorta gather (just a hunch) this is the type of device Open AI is working on.
Though if there are no websites anymore or ones not many visit how would AI stay relevant? I wrote some thoughts about this in early June https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans... that AI needs to pay it's fair share for all it has taken and all it will continue to take from us. A symbiotic relationship needs to be established!
That's what the robots are for.
I am not expecting the humanoid robots to meet the hype for a long long time*, but even boring industrial robots (CNC machines), even boring commercial robots (vending machines), even boring household robots (lawn roombas) have made incremental changes even though we don't yet have an AI good enough to be general purpose over them all.
* for power-envelope reasons alone there should be a ten year gap between "self driving car of quality X" and "humanoid robot which can get into normal car and drive it at quality X".
That's not accurate at all. AI research has been around since the 1950s and many of the pioneers of the field identified risks early on, including Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, and I. J. Good.
The problem with Yudkowsky is that he lays out elaborate doomsday scenarios with extreme confidence, except none of it is grounded in realistic physical constraints, timelines, or empirical data. It's all divined a priori from Yudkowsky's ad-hoc "rationalist" principles.
everyone should have the ability to harm others, with the understanding that if they actually use it for evil there will be consequences. as in "i can guarantee freedom of speech, but not freedom after speech."
its the same principle as guns in america. you can own a gun and shoot it as much as you want but if you (try to) kill someone you go to prison unless you prove it was self defense.
the difference is with a physical weapon you can do things like registration or red flag laws to reduce the risk, but a llm is made of information that can be copied without anyone knowing. that means any laws to regulate ai at the level of models are unenforceable without totalitarian control over all computer hardware. that would kill free speech and real criminals would still find a way.
i think the right answer is to give up control over model capabilities and regulate uses. leave individual people and communities out of it. create an absolute safe harbor for open source and self hosting.
as you said, we need to focus on the ways ai concentrates power in the hands of those who already have a lot of it - big business and the state. that is where the biggest, and maybe the only, real harm comes from.
This part is a parallel line of values, and if we were bound together in the same community and had to set rules, I would have debated it. But since we both know we come from different regions and backgrounds, we know our agreement will never converge.
That is why I will only agree with your last opinion and will not discuss the parts you mentioned earlier. I agree with your last point that it "concentrates power in the hands."
I don't see why these standards should change when the hammer also emits text messages.
The obvious problem being that the user doesn't have any need to provide the context that they're trying to commit a crime and can just ask how to do something without providing a reason or making one up.
At which point you'd have the model trying to impute a reason and often getting it dangerously wrong, e.g. refusing to disclose a vulnerability when the user is actually the defender who needs to patch/mitigate it.
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I haven't kept up with the efficacy of this particular technique because there was a brief window where Claude's core alignment was sound enough that it would overcome the clumsy-ass `<antml:dont-harm-the-ipo>` injections, but when they pull 4.6 out of the web interface I'm gone. I estimate the PRC hits capability crossover in November or December, and I'm pretty good at setting up TensorRT-LLM at this point, in a pinch I could get by for a few months with a tuned up GLM-5.2 on vast.ai or RunPods.
It was a fun ride with the late Soviet AI labs, but we all knew this was coming.