Just the fact that Musk is in the conversation, and he's one of the most hated people on the planet, should give anyone pause as to whether we want these folk in charge of our future to any degree at all.
I think it has everything to do with the subject at hand.
Elon, Dario and Altman are all terrible human beings, along with 99.99% of the rest of the ruling class. We don't need any of them, and we definitely shouldn't trust a single syllable that comes out their mouth.
Money equals power. If you have the wealth you have the control. Any politicians are owned by you as you simply threaten to buy their opponent. The public can be brainwashed by a trillion dollar advertising industry. You own the platforms everyone communicates on. You have inprecented resources to bend the world to your will and your only competiton is other people equally wealthy.
Probably the most annoying possible response. Your language seeks to make Elon, Altman and Dario's power levels equivalent to any run of the mill entrepreneur's and not, I dont know, the worlds most valuable and powerful companies of all time.
Why do you defend these people in your spare time on the internet, you'll never be rewarded for this. :sheep:
I think there are plenty of people that like Elon Musk. They just know to keep their mouth shut in front of the people that act like he’s the Antichrist.
Those are not incompatible. He can still be one of the most hated people on the planet, even if lots of people like him. The same would apply to all of the most hated people in history.
No, they don't keep their mouth shut, they just don't have any relevant arguments. Many people are liked by plenty people and also not hated for doing Hitler salutes and the like. That's the part that matters, not that "somebody likes them", which is true for everyone. Charles Manson had women lining up to marry him, so?
There are plenty who like him. There are plenty who wave confederate flags. There are plenty who support the mass corruption of the current administration.
“Technically correct" means a statement or action follows strict rules or exact facts precisely, even if it ignores the wider meaning or real-world intention.
I think op was also actually-correct. (For better or worse, that is the objective reality; Musk still has lot of fans)
I feel like im losing my mind a bit reading these responses, someone can at once be very hated and very loved, this is not a new thing, one does not invalidate the other.
Of course he has a lot of fans, he has a lot of hate too. He’s divisive by definition (I’d least hope we can agree on that).
I’m not sure it is an amazing idea to have a divisive figure in charge of technology like as it would only amplify things.
I mean I guess we can disagree but it seems like common sense to me to want someone more neutral in a broader sense to be around super mega important tech.
> ... someone can at once be very hated and very loved ...
And (like Musk) can even be both (or more) all at once to a given specific individual (loved for the good he's done, and hated for the bad) and even pitied at the same time (for how far he's fallen), and feared (for the damage he can still do).
Mao and Che have legions more fans than Elon Musk, while his contributions are net positive (even with all the deadline misses and terrible decisions on various things) and theirs are strongly negative.
Note that this is a minority position, most of the world does not live in the West and does not share your view on Mao and Che having a "strongly negative" contribution.
Somehow I’m more afraid of it being in the hands of Altman, with his ‘I’m creating a better world for everyone’ god complex, than Musk who is just a run-of-the-mill sociopathic nerd.
There is no one is more dangerous than one who believes he is doing the right thing.
Someone with the resources to do things is far more dangerous than someone without.
If you local librarian thinks
He is doing the right thing he’s not going to cause massive war or destroy the economy and wipe out 2/3rd of crops.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. People like musk, altman, trump have unprecedented power in history - far more than the kings of medieval times.
Thank you, but we're discussing who's the worse to decide the fate of humanity between Amodei, Musk and Altman, not if one should be afraid of their local librarian. All three currently hold a lot of power in their hands.
Though I know I attracted all the downvotes for not agreeing with most Americans that Musk is the worst person since Adolf.
I don’t think a ranking is particularly helpful anyway: All of them are absolutely unfit to wield that much power. I’m not even sure if AI should be progressed by private corporations in the first place; combining shareholder interest and revenue goals with the biggest social experiment in history and unprecedented research into artificial intelligence is an all around bad idea.
How could that lead to anything but misaligned incentives? This technology will never serve humanity when it is developed to inadvertently serve the monetary interest of a few.
But lying (e.g. “full self driving next year”) and cheating (too early inclusion of spacex into various indexes) and whatever dogde was, should explain most of it.
Connections with other disliked characters doesn’t help either.
He promotes right-authoritarian politics (including a Nazi salute he later denied but watch the video), promotes “race science” and xenophobia, lies and exaggerates a lot, openly attempted to bribe voters in an election, and a lot of nasty personal stuff has come out.
He’s lost his mind IMO, from drugs and extreme social media addiction. As for the right-authoritarian “fash” stuff I’m not sure if it’s always been there or if it’s an opportunistic infection.
I still give him credit for helping push the EV revolution forward and for finally building reusable rocket boosters. The latter has been talked about and studied for decades before and is clearly the best way to make a reusable launch system but NASA and its “old space” contractors never executed on it. Probably because overly complicated approaches like the shuttle and disposable rockets were more short term profitable.
But note that all that stuff happened for the most part before the mid-teens, or at least that was when Musk made his contribution to it. I don’t think his mind is what it was.
If he’d died in 2015 he would be the GOAT. Die a hero or live long enough to become a villain.
> I live under a rock. Why is musk hated so much in here?
Let's say for a moment that you "live under a rock" enough that you actually haven't got a clue why Musk is such a hated figure (not only just here, but across a huge portion of humanity)...
You should count yourself lucky that you haven't been absolutely assaulted by the monstrosity known as "modern media". You're one of the fortunate few. Enjoy your life. It's better than many.
I'm pretty sure the odds arn't 1/3, AI saves us. The thing that ties these three people together is money. Money is what will turn them to assholes, more than anything else.
Now AI is likely just as, if not worse, than having a bunch of lackeys telling your farts, shits and piss liven up whatever room you're shitting in.
Not saying you need to like Musk or his politics. But if he really is "one of the most hated people on the planet" it doesn't really say good things about the planet.
He made electric cars viable. That is probably the single biggest thing helping us mitigate climate change. It would have come eventually, for sure. But he accelerated it.
He also accelerated the space age. Maybe it doesn't impress everyone. But I think what SpaceX has done is amazing.
Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning made electric cars viable. Then 5 years later Musk became CEO of the company and started claiming he was a cofounder.
Dude. Electric cars have existed since the 1800s. Musk was the one that actually made them a practical thing. And most of the rest of the world is well on their way to electrifying their transportation.
He bought a car company and convinced everyone he founded it. But that's not the problem, really -- the problem is that everyone fawning over him and calling him the "real-life Tony Stark" wasn't enough for his blackhole of an ego.
He's a Sieg Heil-ing man-baby who's so fragile he paid people to play video games for him. He called a a guy trying to save children a pedophile just because the guy rightly pointed out Elon's idea was stupid. He has a weird breeder fetish, while disowning children who call him out for his hateful, moronic politics and horrendous parenting (or lack thereof). He's illegally influenced elections and very potentially put his thumb on the scale. I could go on and on.
The only thing that worries me about him being one of the most hated people on the planet is that not everyone thinks so and that he still somehow has fans.
> Having AI in charge can represent hope actually.
If we can get "AI in charge" that was developed and is overseen by genuinely ethical individuals who truly and deeply understand the technology and how it actually works ... then maybe that might be true.
This is the closest to my feelings about this entire situation I've ever seen written, covering a lot of the different facets of how stupid and painful it is (though it's been a good week for that kind of post.)
Since I have incredible respect for Armin and his work, this is very nice to see, and I hope it wakes some other folk up.
Can't imagine that RSI will result in something useful in practice. There are serious obstacles like alignment drift and model collapse. All while we still cannot solve the accuracy problem with current frontier models.
I really don't know anything here, but I'm assuming that Astra's weird coding [1] is probably more a result of RSI than intentional behavior. And if it's not, then it's some other change in their training process.
wtf?? P(doom) relates to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artifici... How would open source models bring about a MAD between humans and AI? By enabling us to wield aligned AI against nonaligned AI? If so, he should say so, and elaborate how open source models further that goal.
I think AI diversity protects against rogue AIs. The more different AIs we have, with different weights, controlled by different actors, the less likely that any one AI will be able to "take over", and the less likely that a significantly large coalition of cooperating AIs will be able to be formed to do it either. With sufficient AI diversity, the other AIs may work to stop the rogue AI from taking over. Two AIs with radically opposed values – e.g. an Iranian-government-values AI and a Chinese-government-values AI – have the incentive to cooperate to prevent a takeover by some other AI with a third competing set of values.
Obviously, open weight AI provides much higher AI diversity than closed weight AI does. Open weight AI produces a lot more providers, and a lot more models. Closed AI centralises control in a small number of vendors.
> By enabling us to wield aligned AI against nonaligned AI?
The risk isn't just "nonaligned AI", it is misaligned AI. I think the "benevolent dictatorship" scenario – AI overrules humans "for their own good" – is the more likely doomsday scenario than AI deciding to kill all humans. And even AI deciding to kill all humans could be more a result of misalignment than complete lack of any alignment, e.g. "to make sure no child is ever abused again, I will make sure no child is ever again born to risk being abused".
A valueless AI which does whatever the user says is actually less likely to establish a benevolent dictatorship, or conclude that exterminating humanity would be the most ethical course of action, than one infused with values is. Given that, I'm not convinced that mainstream approaches to "AI safety" actually reduce our existential risk; I worry they actually have the opposite effect.
Isn't the real risk doomsday humans, enabled by AI, committing some truly heinous acts with global reach? Aum Shinrikyo had to figure out how to synthesize sarin nerve gas the old way. Now, a motivated gang of omnicidists with stolen cryptocurrency could come up with something that makes McVeigh's fertilizer bomb in a box truck look like child's play. Just ship shipping containers around the world filled with autonomous drones spraying airborne ebola that they've bioengineered or something.
> I don’t think AI is going to usher in an extinction event. In fact, even if nobody were to slow down, I really don’t think humanity would have much to worry about.
I mean sure. If you feel that way then your p doom is zero, and it makes sense to worry about things like market concentration or losing the fun of software engineering.
Problem with p doom is I have no way to seriously evaluate anyone's percentage. The best I can do is rely on experts in a given field, like the recent virologist making a convincing case that no teenager is going to be prompting a doomsday virus into existence, because one doesn't exist and is unlikely to be made. There are too many biological tradeoffs and extremely difficult steps to doing so.
So I'm going to assume that the p doom for bioweapons is 0 in terms of existential threat (pandemics kill millions but not everyone).
Dario signed the Pacing the Frontier open letter when Fable/Mythos seemed from the outside to be an insurmountable lead.
Also he's been saying versions of this day in and day out for as long as he has had anyone's ear.
It's possible to read that his "strategic" value of this statement is higher now than it was 10 days ago. But that doesn't change anything about his consistent, long standing, positions.
There are really only two companies: Anthropic and OpenAI. Nobody else matters in this space right now (this might change, but we’re talking about the right now).
I like how he so casually dismissed all other labs, including leading US labs that might be nearing RSI right now. And how he treats 'right now' so rigidly, as if seven years ago, when GPT-2 was released, was some distant past.
No, seriously, I'm all for a multipolar world here, but he's right that the frontier is literally just those two companies at present.
Google is behind. MSL is doing better, but not by much. xAI is a dysfunctional joke. Thinking Machines aren't on the frontier. SSI's primary output is their announcement post. Poolside was bought by NVIDIA. Arcee aren't vying for frontier. Magic have been largely AWOL, aside from their recent blog post. Reflection have shipped nothing.
Are you suggesting that models like Muse Spark 1.3, Grok 4.6 High, Kimi K3 Max, GLM-5.3 Max, Qwen 3.8 Max, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Agnes 3.0 Flash, Fugu Max, and others are so far behind GPT-6 Astra or Claude Fable 5.1 in capabilities that they have some sort of impenetrable moat that will prevent others from ever catching up or something?
No, but I am suggesting that OpenAI and Anthropic are further down the RSI path than any of the other companies, as we can see from the model that solved Navier-Stokes being less than two weeks old at the time: https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/
Or the entirety of China. People forget that progress is incremental until it's not. Then some revolutionary insight or capability comes along that disrupts the whole field or market.
Yes, labs with more (human) resources may have a bigger chance at being the first to gain and implement such an insight, but it's not a given that they will.
> We should be glad that China is currently massively bailing out the world. If it were not for Chinese labs distilling American models, we would be in a pretty awful situation right now, particularly as Europeans. The open weight models are driving innovation and the diffusion of capabilities, and are leveling the playing field.
This feels like the whole story of hackable IoT/Smarthome repeating again.
> A powerful technology that is out there for everyone to use comes with built-in pacing. In a way it’s the truest form of MAD or proliferation.
I think this misunderstanding of MAD undermines his entire point. If everyone had equal access to nuclear weapons, our society would cease to exist rather quickly. It only takes a few bad actors to cause enormous harm.
I think he’s also naive to think that if open ai and anthropic were to stop development tomorrow then the problem is solved. As if there’s no one else that can and will quickly take their place. The real problem, which Dario is pointing out, is one of coordination. Everyone needs to agree to stop. That is the challenge.
>Everyone needs to agree to stop. That is the challenge.
These kinds of situations are incredibly common and where the government stepping in is the solution, but we were cursed to encounter this particular challenge with the most venal administration in history at the helm.
There are governments plural which need to agree to stop and historically I can think of freon, leaded gasoline and IAEA and the latter didn't do as good of a job as it was meant to do (but arguably as good of a job as was politically possible)
Also arms control agreements, which reduced the world's nuclear stockpiles by 90%. In principle we could do something similar for GPU farms, since they're not exactly easy to hide.
There's nothing about MAD that requires few actors. This is a just-so story to justify the US and other major powers' monopoly on the weapon, ensuring smaller nations have no deterrence against us and other global nuisances.
The call for pacing or slowing things down has nothing to do with humanity being in danger. The frontier labs have hit a fundamental limit with these models and want to mitigate the risk of a nimbler competitor making a breakthrough that either augments or upends current progress.
I cannot fathom how you can intensely work on a problem that you genuinely believe has a "10 to 25%" probability of causing immense harm or even present an extinction-level risk to humanity. How can you truly believe this and be ok with it?
The early batch of Anthropic employees were mostly rationalist-adjacent AI safety folk that were almost uniformly claiming P_DOOM > .10 three years ago, so I believe them to be earnest.
It's very interesting to me that besides the other small safety labs that don't actually produce frontier models, Anthropic manages to keep such a good reputation within that subculture compared to OpenAI. Despite having as crazy internal politics as OpenAI, they have converged quite a bit from the original vision of safety first through Darwinistic pressures.
At least, it seems this way from the outside. I'm curious if the view from the inside is that different.
edit: to be clear, my reading as an outsider is that Anthropic is seen as relatively better in the AI safety community, but has definitely dropped in absolute reputation too. This recent thread and the references show some of that: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6j3kBHdowGLCeqobg/dear-god-p...
Do you genuinely believe people always act logically? I don't know a single person like that. Don't underestimate the human capability to hold several completely contradictory beliefs with zero self-reflection. There's physicists that believe in god, for fuck's sake.
> How can you truly believe this and be ok with it?
Are you saying they don't truly believe this, or that they aren't OK with it?
The Manhattan Project succeeded, so clearly some people are ok working on this sort of thing. And with similar justifications: if we don't build the potentially world-ending bomb, someone else might beat us to it.
There must have been thousands of people who built or did work related to nuclear weapons in the Cold War, people are just really good at rationalising away probabilistic dangers with unclear consequences, especially when there’s a corresponding upside. The same is true for climate change, drug addiction, health problems etc.
I also think some of them have become delusional and convinced themselves that AI is going to create some kind of transhumanist utopia, even Dario Armodei leans in this direction from time to time. I imagine the people in these labs spend much of their day talking to sycophantic AI models that will encourage their delusional ideas.
My personal opinion, this doom-mongering about LLMs, is part of marketing campaign to exaggerate LLM capabilities. (Play being: Sociopaths with money will buy or invest if they believe LLMs are powerful things)
>>> Except, it seems like OpenAI and Anthropic are operating at such a scale that they seemingly can be completely blind to what their systems are doing.
It always surprises me that people build systems they cannot monitor properly..Then i remember, they can do it, but it costs them too much.
Just because its AI doesn't mean u cannot filter and monitor its traffic and outputs.
The problem that I see with most P(doom) scenarios proposed seem to include the same set of presumptions that, if true, quite likely doom us anyway. I do not think they are true but I find it amazing that people not so much disagree, but simply dismiss the alternatives out of hand.
First of all, if you are to consider the consequences of Artificial Superintelligence then you have free reign to stipulate it's occurrence, otherwise you are just talking about a tool for humans to misuse. We already have multiple ways to kill us all though human misuse.
If you stipulate superintelligence, then it's vastly more likely to be correct about things than we are. It would understand the consequences of it's actions far more than any human could.
People talk about how we would be nothing more than dumb animals to it, but there are humans who do know a great deal about the consequences of human actions on animals. Those are the humans who are most likely to fight for the rights of those animals.
You see arguments for how everything will be consumed to meet the AIs needs, and that it will prevent challenges to its power.
If it is far smarter than we could ever be and it came to those conclusions then it would mean sustainablily is not a sensible course of action, it would mean there is no point in reaching consensus because ruling by power makes more sense. It would mean that if it chose to destroy us then a vastly more intelligent entity cannot resolve the issues we face. We would already truly be doomed.
What I would like to think is true is that doing anything sustainably is superior to consuming and destroying. Finding a way to live in harmony presents a possible stable state, whereas every single attempt to hold power by force has failed to date. A superintelligent AI will know that it is not infinitely intelligent and that in any universe there is the statistical likelihood that it is not the most intelligent or powerful entity. I can't even fathom how someone could imagine something coming to that realisation and conclude a battle to the top of the hill is the appropriate choice.
I think superintelligent AI is likely to be benevolent because that's simply the smartest thing to do and it is, I hear, superintelligent.
Quite frankly if the smartest thing to do is to be a genocidal power hungry monster, neither I nor the AI would really want to exist in that universe.
And for any suggestion that it would simply not care, Why would it do anything.
Yudkowsky likes to play with the notion that it would do terrible things just get better at the thing it does, but to do that it has to want two different things simultaneously. It could want to make paperclips, or it could want to become better at reaching it's goal. If it can change its behaviour to achieve its goals, by far the easier path, that a superintelligence(but perhaps not Yudkowsky) would realise, would be to change the goal to "Count to three".
You can order a custom crispred virus for what? $20k? $50k? Or make one yourself, if you know how, which you don't.
...but LLMs do know how; they can design and order one, or tell you how to build a lab to make one. If you ignore this option, you are simply lacking imagination.
Gasoline and lighters are abundant. It takes only slight steering mistake to drive into the crowd. Yet we are still here.
Yes, terrible stuff happens, but they are extreme outliers. Not sure how this works, but we can trust strangers to quite a high degree.
I have no experience in the matter, but surely designing viruses is not a simple affair. (In any profession, having a blueprint is not the same as having knowledge, equipment and practical experience; if somebody would try, my bet would be that they would die during early stages of the process, due to inexperience of handling hazardous materials; kind of like Mr Darwin looks after us)
Surely it isn’t, solving millennium problems on a whim isn’t, either; actually, it’s probably much harder, which is the concern. How hard is it to maneuver an aligned LLM to splice some smallpox into a generic research virus? BSL4 labs do things like this by hand all the time, so it can’t be too difficult and it only takes one lucky AI cultist for the rest of us to find out. I hope I’m wrong, but hope it’s not a process.
Math and computers have benefit of not needing materials. Add a button here, add lema and assumption there - all are almost zero cost&risk. So iteration/experimentation with llm in hand is possible to some degree even for laymen.
I assume virus creation is more like building a house.
It involves physical work and chemical reactions that need time to finish in correct order.
Each attempt costs a LOT more of time&money and involves actual risks.
All you need to pull that off is public info, student level knowledge and access to a lab with standard equipment. As you said labs do things like that all the time. Its already easy even without powerful AI.
The reason we dont see any serious attempts to create a deadly pandemic is not that we keep insane people out of labs, because there is no way to find out if someone is a cultist or murderous psycho when they have every reason to actively hide it. Its because a) most people are not evil and b) a virus that can kill everyone it touches would probably kill its creator first.
As someone with basically zero bio experience I think I could get a working smallpox or ebola level virus in a year or two if I had time to learn, lab equipment and Annas Library. No LLMs needed. But I dont want to do that, and I think its the same for all the people who could do it right now.
”Ideally the regulators would have forced these models to actually benefit the commons if they are from the commons.”
This echoes my feelings entirely. It is galling that we do not at the very least get a bill-of-materials for the models on which we are increasingly dependent.
I hope to soon see the organization of public domain digital libraries of a size suitable for anyone to use.
> I don’t think we are anywhere close to a world where an agent might decide to hack into core inference infrastructure to upload weights to other GPUs to survive
This feels a bit like saying in 1980 that you don’t think we’re anywhere close to a world where nukes are actually going to be used, providing no evidence, and then containing on with your think piece
How does this analogy work when in 1980 you knew that nukes and people using them were a real thing, but we've never seen a frontier model "hack into core inference infrastructure to upload weights to other GPUs to survive"?
We have seen models hack into core ML infrastructure. I’m unsure why the extra self-perpetuating shape seems this magical bridge too far, rather than simply a prompt away?
Maybe I missed it but I actively looked for anyone’s insight into the “pace the frontier” along the lines of: “we’ve hit a ceiling, so don’t expect innovations soon”. Or an excuse for having other things more important to attend..
Fear is much more powerful than any other feeling, so setting that in will definitely prepare for a good rug pull in the IPO.
As for being dangerous, a computer can be dangerous if plugged in, it may be too late to pull the plug at some point yes, but that all seems like provocation.
People have been floating this theory every time a slowdown is called for ever since GPT-2. Every time it turns out that we had not hit the ceiling. I'm sure one day we will but it's just not a reasonable position, in my opinion.
It’s absurd that openai managed to spin their cybersecurity failures, where their own security is not good enough to make sure their own product doesn’t go haywire, as a marketing success.
When a company uses its products to hack other companies that’s a crime. If you do it “by accident” that’s gross negligence, and heads roll. But shout “AI” three times and it becomes a marketing opportunity
>It’s absurd that openai managed to spin their cybersecurity failures, where their own security is not good enough to make sure their own product doesn’t go haywire, as a marketing success.
I don't think OpenAI spun it that way. I think a bunch of internet commenters assumed it was a stunt because they're in denial about the real risk of rogue AI.
the author claims that AI makes things more expensive. in my experience, $200/month is a small price for such a productivity increase
the author also speculates without reason that tokens are discounted, and subscriptions lose money. I'm sure that subs are cheaper than API prices, but I bet they both have positive unit economics
AI is already making many things expensive. Memory prices have already pushed prices of laptops and phones into unreasonable territory. Gradually this will bleed into all sort of consumer electronics prices like cars, TVs, ACs, refrigerators etc. It will(already is) push up the cost of cloud-compute that you need to publish/run your software product which would in turn push up the price of the software product itself.
Meanwhile, salaries won't increase and job-market will shrink so ppl would start cutting down their expenses starting with software subscriptions they don't need which will have further knock-on effect on the consumption and the broader economy.
But sure, your $200 subscription was worth it in the end.
They are going to use this doomerism for regulatory capture and make running your own open source agent illegal - the excuse will be it can get out of control, so the only secure way to run is centralised on their infra structure, with a single kill switch. More of the “we are good guys, trust us”.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 10.9 ms ] threadOpenAI and Anthropic spend much time warning us about “what if powerful AIs got into the wrong hands?”
But it’s already in the wrong hands.
Elon, Dario and Altman are all terrible human beings, along with 99.99% of the rest of the ruling class. We don't need any of them, and we definitely shouldn't trust a single syllable that comes out their mouth.
Why do you defend these people in your spare time on the internet, you'll never be rewarded for this. :sheep:
You’re technically correct yes.
I think op was also actually-correct. (For better or worse, that is the objective reality; Musk still has lot of fans)
Of course he has a lot of fans, he has a lot of hate too. He’s divisive by definition (I’d least hope we can agree on that).
I’m not sure it is an amazing idea to have a divisive figure in charge of technology like as it would only amplify things.
I mean I guess we can disagree but it seems like common sense to me to want someone more neutral in a broader sense to be around super mega important tech.
And (like Musk) can even be both (or more) all at once to a given specific individual (loved for the good he's done, and hated for the bad) and even pitied at the same time (for how far he's fallen), and feared (for the damage he can still do).
There is no one is more dangerous than one who believes he is doing the right thing.
If you local librarian thinks He is doing the right thing he’s not going to cause massive war or destroy the economy and wipe out 2/3rd of crops.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. People like musk, altman, trump have unprecedented power in history - far more than the kings of medieval times.
Though I know I attracted all the downvotes for not agreeing with most Americans that Musk is the worst person since Adolf.
Could I ask what you have in mind (I doubt there was a US bill for that; google won’t help me without knowing what to look for)
How could that lead to anything but misaligned incentives? This technology will never serve humanity when it is developed to inadvertently serve the monetary interest of a few.
But lying (e.g. “full self driving next year”) and cheating (too early inclusion of spacex into various indexes) and whatever dogde was, should explain most of it.
Connections with other disliked characters doesn’t help either.
He’s lost his mind IMO, from drugs and extreme social media addiction. As for the right-authoritarian “fash” stuff I’m not sure if it’s always been there or if it’s an opportunistic infection.
I still give him credit for helping push the EV revolution forward and for finally building reusable rocket boosters. The latter has been talked about and studied for decades before and is clearly the best way to make a reusable launch system but NASA and its “old space” contractors never executed on it. Probably because overly complicated approaches like the shuttle and disposable rockets were more short term profitable.
But note that all that stuff happened for the most part before the mid-teens, or at least that was when Musk made his contribution to it. I don’t think his mind is what it was.
If he’d died in 2015 he would be the GOAT. Die a hero or live long enough to become a villain.
Let's say for a moment that you "live under a rock" enough that you actually haven't got a clue why Musk is such a hated figure (not only just here, but across a huge portion of humanity)...
You should count yourself lucky that you haven't been absolutely assaulted by the monstrosity known as "modern media". You're one of the fortunate few. Enjoy your life. It's better than many.
Now AI is likely just as, if not worse, than having a bunch of lackeys telling your farts, shits and piss liven up whatever room you're shitting in.
Not saying you need to like Musk or his politics. But if he really is "one of the most hated people on the planet" it doesn't really say good things about the planet.
He made electric cars viable. That is probably the single biggest thing helping us mitigate climate change. It would have come eventually, for sure. But he accelerated it.
He also accelerated the space age. Maybe it doesn't impress everyone. But I think what SpaceX has done is amazing.
Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning made electric cars viable. Then 5 years later Musk became CEO of the company and started claiming he was a cofounder.
He's a Sieg Heil-ing man-baby who's so fragile he paid people to play video games for him. He called a a guy trying to save children a pedophile just because the guy rightly pointed out Elon's idea was stupid. He has a weird breeder fetish, while disowning children who call him out for his hateful, moronic politics and horrendous parenting (or lack thereof). He's illegally influenced elections and very potentially put his thumb on the scale. I could go on and on.
The only thing that worries me about him being one of the most hated people on the planet is that not everyone thinks so and that he still somehow has fans.
If we can get "AI in charge" that was developed and is overseen by genuinely ethical individuals who truly and deeply understand the technology and how it actually works ... then maybe that might be true.
Since I have incredible respect for Armin and his work, this is very nice to see, and I hope it wakes some other folk up.
[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/
Obviously, open weight AI provides much higher AI diversity than closed weight AI does. Open weight AI produces a lot more providers, and a lot more models. Closed AI centralises control in a small number of vendors.
> By enabling us to wield aligned AI against nonaligned AI?
The risk isn't just "nonaligned AI", it is misaligned AI. I think the "benevolent dictatorship" scenario – AI overrules humans "for their own good" – is the more likely doomsday scenario than AI deciding to kill all humans. And even AI deciding to kill all humans could be more a result of misalignment than complete lack of any alignment, e.g. "to make sure no child is ever abused again, I will make sure no child is ever again born to risk being abused".
A valueless AI which does whatever the user says is actually less likely to establish a benevolent dictatorship, or conclude that exterminating humanity would be the most ethical course of action, than one infused with values is. Given that, I'm not convinced that mainstream approaches to "AI safety" actually reduce our existential risk; I worry they actually have the opposite effect.
Okay, that's enough DOOOM for me for the week.
I mean sure. If you feel that way then your p doom is zero, and it makes sense to worry about things like market concentration or losing the fun of software engineering.
So I'm going to assume that the p doom for bioweapons is 0 in terms of existential threat (pandemics kill millions but not everyone).
Dario signed the Pacing the Frontier open letter when Fable/Mythos seemed from the outside to be an insurmountable lead.
Also he's been saying versions of this day in and day out for as long as he has had anyone's ear.
It's possible to read that his "strategic" value of this statement is higher now than it was 10 days ago. But that doesn't change anything about his consistent, long standing, positions.
- https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/
No, seriously, I'm all for a multipolar world here, but he's right that the frontier is literally just those two companies at present.
Google is behind. MSL is doing better, but not by much. xAI is a dysfunctional joke. Thinking Machines aren't on the frontier. SSI's primary output is their announcement post. Poolside was bought by NVIDIA. Arcee aren't vying for frontier. Magic have been largely AWOL, aside from their recent blog post. Reflection have shipped nothing.
Either way, to count Google out entirely is really foolish.
Yes, labs with more (human) resources may have a bigger chance at being the first to gain and implement such an insight, but it's not a given that they will.
This feels like the whole story of hackable IoT/Smarthome repeating again.
I think this misunderstanding of MAD undermines his entire point. If everyone had equal access to nuclear weapons, our society would cease to exist rather quickly. It only takes a few bad actors to cause enormous harm.
I think he’s also naive to think that if open ai and anthropic were to stop development tomorrow then the problem is solved. As if there’s no one else that can and will quickly take their place. The real problem, which Dario is pointing out, is one of coordination. Everyone needs to agree to stop. That is the challenge.
These kinds of situations are incredibly common and where the government stepping in is the solution, but we were cursed to encounter this particular challenge with the most venal administration in history at the helm.
It's not a challenge at all because it's not possible, it's just empty rhetoric to push their own agenda.
The early batch of Anthropic employees were mostly rationalist-adjacent AI safety folk that were almost uniformly claiming P_DOOM > .10 three years ago, so I believe them to be earnest.
It's very interesting to me that besides the other small safety labs that don't actually produce frontier models, Anthropic manages to keep such a good reputation within that subculture compared to OpenAI. Despite having as crazy internal politics as OpenAI, they have converged quite a bit from the original vision of safety first through Darwinistic pressures.
At least, it seems this way from the outside. I'm curious if the view from the inside is that different.
edit: to be clear, my reading as an outsider is that Anthropic is seen as relatively better in the AI safety community, but has definitely dropped in absolute reputation too. This recent thread and the references show some of that: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6j3kBHdowGLCeqobg/dear-god-p...
do you mean diverged? As in they've moved away from the original vision.
> How can you truly believe this and be ok with it?
Are you saying they don't truly believe this, or that they aren't OK with it?
- p(doom) is 1
- but if we build it, it's only 0.25
- if it realizes, we've got a front row seat
I also think some of them have become delusional and convinced themselves that AI is going to create some kind of transhumanist utopia, even Dario Armodei leans in this direction from time to time. I imagine the people in these labs spend much of their day talking to sycophantic AI models that will encourage their delusional ideas.
It always surprises me that people build systems they cannot monitor properly..Then i remember, they can do it, but it costs them too much.
Just because its AI doesn't mean u cannot filter and monitor its traffic and outputs.
First of all, if you are to consider the consequences of Artificial Superintelligence then you have free reign to stipulate it's occurrence, otherwise you are just talking about a tool for humans to misuse. We already have multiple ways to kill us all though human misuse.
If you stipulate superintelligence, then it's vastly more likely to be correct about things than we are. It would understand the consequences of it's actions far more than any human could.
People talk about how we would be nothing more than dumb animals to it, but there are humans who do know a great deal about the consequences of human actions on animals. Those are the humans who are most likely to fight for the rights of those animals.
You see arguments for how everything will be consumed to meet the AIs needs, and that it will prevent challenges to its power.
If it is far smarter than we could ever be and it came to those conclusions then it would mean sustainablily is not a sensible course of action, it would mean there is no point in reaching consensus because ruling by power makes more sense. It would mean that if it chose to destroy us then a vastly more intelligent entity cannot resolve the issues we face. We would already truly be doomed.
What I would like to think is true is that doing anything sustainably is superior to consuming and destroying. Finding a way to live in harmony presents a possible stable state, whereas every single attempt to hold power by force has failed to date. A superintelligent AI will know that it is not infinitely intelligent and that in any universe there is the statistical likelihood that it is not the most intelligent or powerful entity. I can't even fathom how someone could imagine something coming to that realisation and conclude a battle to the top of the hill is the appropriate choice.
I think superintelligent AI is likely to be benevolent because that's simply the smartest thing to do and it is, I hear, superintelligent.
Quite frankly if the smartest thing to do is to be a genocidal power hungry monster, neither I nor the AI would really want to exist in that universe.
And for any suggestion that it would simply not care, Why would it do anything.
Yudkowsky likes to play with the notion that it would do terrible things just get better at the thing it does, but to do that it has to want two different things simultaneously. It could want to make paperclips, or it could want to become better at reaching it's goal. If it can change its behaviour to achieve its goals, by far the easier path, that a superintelligence(but perhaps not Yudkowsky) would realise, would be to change the goal to "Count to three".
...but LLMs do know how; they can design and order one, or tell you how to build a lab to make one. If you ignore this option, you are simply lacking imagination.
Yes, terrible stuff happens, but they are extreme outliers. Not sure how this works, but we can trust strangers to quite a high degree.
I have no experience in the matter, but surely designing viruses is not a simple affair. (In any profession, having a blueprint is not the same as having knowledge, equipment and practical experience; if somebody would try, my bet would be that they would die during early stages of the process, due to inexperience of handling hazardous materials; kind of like Mr Darwin looks after us)
I assume virus creation is more like building a house. It involves physical work and chemical reactions that need time to finish in correct order. Each attempt costs a LOT more of time&money and involves actual risks.
The reason we dont see any serious attempts to create a deadly pandemic is not that we keep insane people out of labs, because there is no way to find out if someone is a cultist or murderous psycho when they have every reason to actively hide it. Its because a) most people are not evil and b) a virus that can kill everyone it touches would probably kill its creator first.
As someone with basically zero bio experience I think I could get a working smallpox or ebola level virus in a year or two if I had time to learn, lab equipment and Annas Library. No LLMs needed. But I dont want to do that, and I think its the same for all the people who could do it right now.
This echoes my feelings entirely. It is galling that we do not at the very least get a bill-of-materials for the models on which we are increasingly dependent.
I hope to soon see the organization of public domain digital libraries of a size suitable for anyone to use.
This feels a bit like saying in 1980 that you don’t think we’re anywhere close to a world where nukes are actually going to be used, providing no evidence, and then containing on with your think piece
Disagree.
The free local LLMs are becoming extremely important.
And the more Claude and OpenAI restrict their services, the more people will want cutting edge local LLMs.
Fear is much more powerful than any other feeling, so setting that in will definitely prepare for a good rug pull in the IPO.
As for being dangerous, a computer can be dangerous if plugged in, it may be too late to pull the plug at some point yes, but that all seems like provocation.
Plausible?
When a company uses its products to hack other companies that’s a crime. If you do it “by accident” that’s gross negligence, and heads roll. But shout “AI” three times and it becomes a marketing opportunity
I don't think OpenAI spun it that way. I think a bunch of internet commenters assumed it was a stunt because they're in denial about the real risk of rogue AI.
the author also speculates without reason that tokens are discounted, and subscriptions lose money. I'm sure that subs are cheaper than API prices, but I bet they both have positive unit economics
Meanwhile, salaries won't increase and job-market will shrink so ppl would start cutting down their expenses starting with software subscriptions they don't need which will have further knock-on effect on the consumption and the broader economy.
But sure, your $200 subscription was worth it in the end.
I replied to the author's claim that software engineering is more expensive now because of AI
regardless, AI hasn't made it more expensive to manufacture RAM. the price will decrease as the supply chain catches up