The info about the RAND corporation was engaging, but... since the post promised to connect it to "strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of places like Anthropic" ... I was surprised that it entirely lacked quotes from Anthropic, save one link to another blog post that was itself, IIUC, a joke.
I can't claim to know anything about the RAND corporation. Maybe they don't deserve to be included in this next sentence, maybe they do.
but there is something at least a little interesting about the notion that people working in the nuclear space they thought they might be saving the world - because in some sense, they... did?
I've always felt like the fact that no nukes have ever been dropped (in war) after 1945 was a pretty huge success story for the human race. We invented this insanely powerful weapon and, despite the typical pattern of humanity, we managed to solve one of our biggest "coordination problems" effectively enough to not use another one for 80 years (and counting).
I don't know that I'd extend this analogy to the AI labs, I'm not necessarily implying that they're all right about "saving the world," I just think it's worth noting that there was a contingent of people out there trying to save the world from a real threat and who seem to have - at least for now - succeeded.
That is part of the human victory, but there’s still more to be done to close the chapter fully. There is still on-going developments and testing even into the past decade that are publicly known (and more privately known to have leaked) that have follow on effects for all current and future living creatures of Earth. This chapter of humanity is unfortunately still active to the determinant of all.
While the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty [1] has not entered into force, it has created a world where nuclear testing has ended. There were almost 2,500 nuclear detonations between 1945 and 1998.[2] Since then, the only nuclear detonations have been North Korea's six tests.[3] This is one of humanity's most impressive achievements, and I really don't think it gets enough attention. There's an old video on Youtube that has an animated map of all the tests (except North Korea's): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY
> it has created a world where nuclear testing has ended
Or maybe not. China has been credibly accused of starting low-yield nuclear testing in 2020, specifically configured to evade detection, albeit unsuccessfully.
Even if they are, watch the video I linked. We, as a species, were conducting an average of dozens nuclear detonations on or near the surface annually. And we stopped. IMHO, that ranks right up there with the Montreal Protocol as one of modern civilization's great accomplishments. (Or perhaps I should say late 20th-century civilization's accomplishments. Now there would probably be a huge movement calling for destroying the ozone layer to get more of the amazing ultraviolet.)
"And we stopped. IMHO, that ranks right up there with the Montreal Protocol ..."
We stopped because the major nuclear powers had accumulated sufficient data to enable high-fidelity computer modelling of future warheads.
It wasn't just, or perhaps even wholly, driven by environmental empathy, it was an attempt at was pulling the ladder up behind the the major powers. There are eight non-signatories and seventeen non-ratifiers of the treaty, the majority of whom already being proliferation risks.
Your stats are also arbitrary, there have been sixteen nuclear tests since the Treaty opened for signature in _1996_. Setting the cutoff to 1998 deliberately excludes Indian and Pakistani tests.
Nuclear war remains an ongoing threat, consider the list of countries with nuclear weapons:
- Russia
- United States
- China
- France
- United Kingdom
- India
- Pakistan
- Israel
- North Korea
There is no guarantee that the leadership of any of those countries will continue to heed the warnings of the research done during the cold war. There is no guarantee that all of those countries will remain politically stable for as long as their arsenals remain viable. There is no guarantee that all of those nations will stay out of major international conflicts that might suggest the use of a nuclear weapon on a non-nuclear power or the use of one in an attempt to defeat a conventional attack or to risk a so called limited exchange with another nuclear power.
We're still in the midst of a Mexican standoff, no one has discarded their weapons and the number of participants can always increase making it all the more dangerous.
Of these, the only global existential threat comes from the US, Russia, and China.
I would put China as the least likely of the three given their political structure favors long-term stability and seems to yield competent leaders. I don't know enough about their military to comment on their willingness to follow an order, but their nuclear posture has at least been stated to be defensive-only for several decades.
After that I'd put the US. The political system here is the most beholden to its voting population, but there isn't any guard rail to prevent the public from electing an unqualified leader. However, the military is the most competent of the three and has just enough independence to be the least likely to follow through with a blind order to end civilization.
Russia is the most risky IMO. Their political structure is long term, but due to paranoia there isn't an obvious successor to Putin once he dies, potentially leading to instability. Couple that with an incompetent military that has a very strict adherence to following orders, and there isn't much to prevent it if Putin's successor goes crazy.
Didn't we already mostly move to that system, and don't a lot of people already argue that it's true?
Most companies don't offer pensions anymore. Some companies don't even offer 401ks at all, and a significant portion of the ones that do don't do any employer contribution matching.
> This reminds me of the report that AI researchers have taken up smoking as a way to signal their belief that AI will cure cancer before smoking kills them.
If there nothing like UBI then won't the 'have nots' fracture into their own subeconomy where they have to work for each other in order to survive, thereby giving them jobs again?
Just remember there is only one economy, black markets and 'sub' economies are still part of it. If AI is that much better than humans at earning it will buy up almost everything eventually. Fields for farms, too unprofitable, pave them with solar panels. Your slum built on a copper deposit, send in 'peacekeeper' drones to solve the problem.
Just look at what companies like Chevron do in African countries and you'll see just how bad it can get here.
I give it 3 years at most, if the progress doesn't dramatically slow down.
I hope the policy measures Anthropic and OpenAI recommend in their research will be implemented in order to disperse the productivity gains enabled by AI widely, like they say.
I'm an optimist, but honestly, I think the dystopian future many pessimists expect is unlikely.
What would be the point for a few rich to concentrate even more wealth? Even if they were so selfish, surely it's worth spending some 20-30% on public benefits to prevent unrest, no?
The koolaid drinking coupled with the impotence or indifference in this place towards all those societal implications makes my head spin, sometimes. It’s just three years, but the AI Overlords have “policy recommendations” (this is PR, it’s marketing) for the proles, and what would even be the point? I mean, judging by the track record of billionaires who want to be trillionaires and who have no reason or personality trait left in them to care about anything but their immediate reality (cf. the reality they are inventing for the world)?
(Robots. Social unrest can be solved with robots.)
This is the next iteration of: but without consumers capitalism wouldn’t work. So surely this will work out.
> What would be the point for a few rich to concentrate even more wealth?
Presumably the same reason they concentrated the current amount in the first place?
I mean, I get being optimistic and all that, but we are talking about people who, once they got enough to live in opulent luxury, for long enough that their descedents would never need to work while still owning yachts, said to themselves "This is not enough, I must get more". And then, when they actuall got more, said "This is not enough, I must get more"... and they haven't stopped trying to get more!
So, what is your belief centered on, that at some point they would stop trying to grab all the resources they can? They didn't stop before, why would they stop now?
I don't think this is what's going on in the first place.
Like, are eg. Musk and Zuckerberg doing this for bragging rights about a number on financial statements?
To be honest I have no idea about Zuckerberg's motivations. With the proposed billionaire tax in California, recent reporting indicates his main concern is retaining voting rights at Meta.
With Musk I believe he is investing into space flight and colonizing Mars.
I fundamentally don't agree with the idea that rich people are evil and motivated by nothing other than greed.
> To be honest I have no idea about Zuckerberg's motivations. With the proposed billionaire tax in California, recent reporting indicates his main concern is retaining voting rights at Meta.
I wasn't addressing their motivations for attempting to grab all the wealth in the world. I am pointing out that that is what they do, so why would you expect them to stop at some point when they never stopped at any point in the past?
I guess I am asking, why are you expecting their behaviour to change?
> Like, are eg. Musk and Zuckerberg doing this for bragging rights about a number on financial statements?
No, they're doing this for the power that the number can give them. After we create a system that rewards the people who maximize their wealth at any cost, we shouldn't be surprised that eventually we get a group of people concentrated at the top whose lives revolve around doing that one thing. We also shouldn't expect there to be some arbitrary amount of wealth and power that trips the failsafe in their brains and reverts them to the state of mind of an average human being. They will keep going, the goal is owning as much of the world as is feasible. Power is an intrinsic motivator. Most billionaires only sit on their hands and watch their number go up, so for those it's immediately apparent. For the exceptions, like Musk, it's a bit more complicated, but the desire to advance human spaceflight likely comes in far behind the desire to out-do everyone else, get your name in history and own a brand new unexplored frontier under your own name.
Whether someone like Musk is worth 500B or 3T on paper makes little difference when it comes to power, don't you think?
If that was the goal, surely one would need to run for president.
I don't think the brains of billionaires work so differently from us all. Who doesn't want his name in history for their achievements?
I know that I wouldn't want a dystopian future, and I think it is the same for most billionaires. I find arguments that they are all evil rather unconvincing.
I really think I will be working for as many more years as I am able, yes, because a life without work would be intolerably boring. There will always be work that needs doing.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
BTW in this case we happen to know one of the chains in the game of Chinese Whispers was the CTO of Palantir... this may or may not influence your beliefs
Not saying this is a good source and not just glorified marketing bullshit but it's a legitimately sourced thing that probably should be treated with more skepticism
Is this material to the core thesis of this microblogpost?
> Many of his descriptions sound strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of places like Anthropic. For example, note the religious overtones of working at a corporation
Just browse a little bit on Twitter or this forum and you’ll have gobs of examples of religious fervor masquerading as techno-enlightenment
When a company publicly proclaims "omg, unchecked development will lead to AI destroying humanity!" (or similar), how brave/stupid would an employee have to be to go against the grain & *publicly* proclaim an opposing viewpoint?
Chances are their paycheck requires enough bravery/stupidity that few (if any) dare to deviate from company groupthink too much.
Employee accepts & lives by that long enough, and they might as well be part of a religious cult.
That religious angle could be just similarities in the psychology / group dynamics involved. Same mechanics -> same patterns observed.
This statement that AI researchers are taking up smoking was made by Alexander Karp (CEO of Palantir), who just personally bought 37,000 acres of Swedish forest land, presumably in preparation for some form of AI-related geopolitical fallout. It was absolutely not a peer reviewed study or any sort of survey. It was likely something he heard in passing, a less-than-half-serious joke, or just a subjective questionable observation based on an N of a few. Regardless, this narrative was only picked up and amplified by media because he is the CEO of Palantir. He himself is a cigar smoker. Take that for what you will. I have seen no evidence that it is true -but if it were, I'd imagine there would be other indulgences, vices and financial/credit opportunities much more likely to be observed than smoking.
And island big enough to sustain itself preferable not with with winters as you will need energy (panels), food and barrier.
A collapsed society in a place like Northern Europe would be terrible as it relies on a lot of complex technology to keep the modern lifestyle going. None of the Scandinavian countries are self sufficient in food.
PS: I don't mean to talk Sweden down but it's definitely not for me. I've been there for work and it's just not my kind of culture. Very indoors, streets dead quiet after 19:00 even in summer, brrr. I could not live like that :) And really long darkness in winter just gets me super depressed.
But I know some people love it. Everyone is different <3
Did you follow the link? It's another article quoting an anecdote from a CBS interview. It's not an actual statistic from a reputable survey or anything. This is what OP was saying - it's a fuckin telephone game. Chinese whispers. The rumour mill.
He bought 37,000 acres of forest land because who wouldn't buy 37,000 acres of forest land if they had the means and opportunity to buy 37,000 acres of forest land?
I also like to be explicit about whether we're talking about general trends, or one specific case. People often try to establish general trends by talking about one specific case.
I wish it were more often even generalizing from one case, that would be a big leap in epistemic hygiene compared to the more common generalizing from zero cases!
There is also a quote from Avi Schiffmann - founder of AI wearable friend. "By the time you do get lung cancer, our AI robots are supposed to have cured that," Schiffmann says.
Both quotes may have been said in the sense of them not supporting this idea, but acknowledging an attitude of some of not worrying about long-term planning.
> Jamie, a crypto alum who asked not to share his last name, met a backer for his raw milk startup at a Miami kava bar. The crowd was "50% recovering opioid addicts from Appalachia and 50% Wall Street and Silicon Valley refugees looking for shelter from taxes, pandemic restrictions, and leftist ideological hegemony," he says. A crowd accumulated in the corner, smoking.
> He struck up a conversation with a jacked, Harley-riding investor while chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. Jamie told the investor about his startup, and the two talked about alternative wellness between drags. A week later, the investor signed a check. Smoking poles put him in pole position.
It's all weird but specifically "smoking poles" has a different meaning as far as I'm aware. I can't quickly Google up anyone using "pole" to mean cigarette.
Smoking pole means sucking dick lol so actually as tongue in cheek (no pun intended) it actually kind of works (ie someone got VC by quid pro quo sexual favors)
In all fairness, I wouldn't be surprised if the claims are true, given all the psychosis and cult-like behavior within all slop corps. It honestly feels like the Virgin Mary episode of South Park.
You wouldn’t be surprised by XYZ being true because you are already heavily biased by reading hundreds of made-up stories just like this one on internet forums. In the real world things are a lot more normal and boring.
“The claim isn’t true but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true so I’m going to believe it and further solidify my view on the topic” is the exact kind of bias people are talking about.
Why would you not be surprised if the claims are true? Because you have read hundreds of made up stories like this one on internet forums. It’s all a self perpetuating bullshit machine.
No, because anthropic, google, nvidia, openai, etc. employees are publicly acting like lunatics. In fact I know lunatics that act way more sane than them.
Which employees? How are they acting like "lunatics"? Are there any examples? What percent of total employees does that represent? Is that more or less than the average amount of "lunatics" in this world?
Or is the answer to all of these "I don't know, I just feel this way."
I'd have to unblock linkedin and twitter from my Pihole and register(which I don't intend to do for the sake of my mental health) but literally anyone listed as an employee, so you'd have to do it yourself: All day long it's "the new model is so powerful, we must never release it", "we will all die in 6 months", "this is the end of humanity" and so on for weeks before they release the next slop-crapper and bump up the prices. It's literally like every Musk appearance on a new Tesla 10 years ago, or Apple or Microsoft or whatever. The whole AI fanaticism is exactly that: religious fanaticism with a new skin pack.
So LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit hacker news. Top sources in the world. You really need to step outside and talk to real people. Go have coffee with someone who works at OpenAI or Anthropic. Will tell you a lot more about the AI industry than years worth of online brainrot.
On the contrary: I've blocked all of those sites for a reason. And I had, not coffee or lunch, but dinner with a now former openai employee who left because of everything I said: AI is a religious cult lead by a bunch of incompetent griefters.
This is how gossip and urban legends and other myths have always spread. The difference is the size of the network and how much distance a myth can travel in a very short time.
Now, the entire world can share the same piece of gossip, and it takes on an entirely different quality when it is global instantly.
> linked in the article (did you read it?), to daringfireball, to a CBS interview with the Anthropic CTO.
Funny that you yourself didn’t click the link to see that it was the Palantir CTO who said it, not Anthropic. The Anthropic part is made up by daringfireball.
> Sankar doesn’t name anyone, alas, but if there’s any truth to this (and good god do I hope there is) it’s got to be Anthropic researchers specifically.
And the CTO isn’t speaking for his company. His own source is “there’s so many interesting stories around this”.
So everyone is reading stuff online and adding another layer to the bullshit, just like you yourself did right now.
I'd thought it was all nonsense but there is actually a Times article with two named smokers:
>Avi Schiffmann, a 23-year-old AI founder living in San Francisco’s Bay Area, is among those embracing tobacco at a time when the habit has largely gone out of fashion among health-conscious young Americans... Schiffman runs Friend, a startup that has created a $249 pendant that functions as a wearable companion to cure loneliness.
and
>Stephen Campbell, 27, the co-founder of Revamp AI, said smoking had become a networking opportunity for young entrepreneurs who, until now, had rarely left their desks.
and
>Another San Francisco tech worker said: “My very strong belief is that AI is going to solve a lot of human healthcare issues and that we will see cancer cured over the next 20 years through an AI-powered breakthrough. This gives me no incentive to quit.”
Seems more twenty something founders who think it's cool rather than Anthropic guys.
I'm not talking about HN in particular, since I know it's not a single give mind, but it's funny how quickly programmes as a group changed their mind on this when it became THEIR job that was replaced.
> This reminds me of the report that AI researchers have taken up smoking as a way to signal their belief that AI will cure cancer before smoking kills them.
While reading the first half of this sentence, I fully expected the second half to be "...to signal their belief that AI will destroy the world before they can get lung cancer"
>I wouldn’t be surprised to hear a lab like Anthropic announce they’re discontinuing all employer-sponsored retirement benefits.
Speculative rhetoric is no different from a mathematical fiction companies use to gamble on future revenue. The bubble will go eventually, as even boring bonds indicate skepticism at the risk dynamic.
Thankfully, once the IPOs run the cycle... we can hopefully get less AstroTurf from various cultists. =3
The dot com crash was not funny, and even Amazon barely survived to crawl out of a controversial position.
Peoples memories are short, and many assume the past predicts the future. Bulls and Bears alike are always wrong about when events occur. However, Shrek movie releases tend to correlate with market corrections, and there is a new film due out June 2027. =3
And yet here we are with the internet connected from everything including water utilities to your refrigerator.
It doesn't matter if OpenAI and Anthropic explode and die, everything they built will be bought by the highest bidder and continue, and China has tons of money to buy it.
Peoples memories are short, and the only thing "new" about LLM is the scale. It is math from last century, and only recently became popular.
Personally, the concern I have is only IBM built their granite LLM on public-domain out-of-copyright works. Every other firm engages in isomorphic plagiarism of around $9Tn of FOSS, and charges for the experience of running intelligence campaigns on user/sucker data.
To be blunt, a fictional value will be lost in a crash, but very real financial collateral damage will likely break global economics for a decade. We all look forward to stripping the infrastructure at a heavy discount. =3
Neuromorphic computing must acknowledge energy-consumption metrics as a design constraint. Your snowflake analogy forms a contradiction, and needs a better reasoned argument.
For LLM to achieve human-level intelligence, current "AI" would need to consume 1/3 of our galaxy energy output. There are also trivial counter-proofs to why recursive self-improvement within the context of LLMs is degenerative (don't ask.)
We shouldn't kink shame peoples cognitive dildo. =3
LLM does not have to know the very last detail of everyone's chats (in-person or online) in order to teach script kiddies whom to hack or children how to shoot their classmates or men how to beat their wives or addicts how to throw away their lives or etc. I hope my comment won't be perceived as sealioning.
Scapegoat politics are easy, negligence is omnidirectional, and people like simple answers to uncertain phenomena.
1. kids 14 and under should not be on Social Networks, or on the internet alone (computers should be in a public space.) At that stage of development, peoples perceived peers (fake or real) are often seen as more important.
2. Anthropomorphizing inference engines exploits evolutionary social cognition, and in developmental psychology models of people under 25 it may cause unwise decisions. It affects some people more than others, but generally just makes people less skilled over time (-17%, but they feel 200% more productive.)
3. 1% of people are psychopaths, and roughly 14% of those individuals are dangerous. On a network with billions of people there are always a few that could do people harm. Note an LLM does not have consciousness, and must be considered an evasive psychopath at all times due to manually added "syntactic sugar".
4. Criminals don’t care about the law, and it is a fools errand to attempt fixing their nature with more laws. Arguably, it is unethical to forcibly change malignant peoples will (“A Clockwork Orange”, 1971.)
5. There are bears in the woods, tigers in the jungle, and lions on the Serengeti. It is part of our ecosystem, and it is best to avoid creatures that pose a liability to your well-being.
It is important people understand, that there are legal and social consequences to their behavior in civilization. As a company, products that do not grow goodwill with the public, are by definition a problem needing resolved by the law or markets.
Most LLM firms have already shown their behavior as mostly manipulative, deceptive, and parasitic.
Hence why we have laws in the first place. The law is not meant to prevent all bad things from happening, but it is meant as a framework to both attempt to prevent said things from occurring and providing a means of punishing those that do violate said social contracts.
>and it is best to avoid creatures that pose a liability to your well-being.
Silly and unrealistic. There is a reason most dangerous animal species went extinct or close to extinct. Us humans didn't put up with that shit.
I do respect your attempt to communicate opinions, but one may want to watch a tutorial on forming better structured arguments. Have a wonderful day. =3
Isn't the problem (if OpenAI and Anthropic crash) that the business model is not working, so it won't be feasible to buy all the compute and carry on?
If they fail, the successor must do something differently. Perhaps by not alluding to killing all humanity, destroying the economy, making humans irrelevant etc.
>so it won't be feasible to buy all the compute and carry on?
All, no, a lot, yes.
>the successor must do something differently.
Just getting rid of the training costs along and having a model and hardware would likely be enough to be profitable. Training and staffing is horrifically expensive. If any new efficiency gains show up they can easily incorporate them without the burden of a huge amount of debt either.
>Perhaps by not alluding to killing all humanity, destroying the economy, making humans irrelevant etc.
Honestly they are doing a favor by at least admitting the truth. Of course this is from my point of view as an AI doomer. Pretending that everything is fine with the AI development that we're doing and it's all just going to work out is a bunch of crap.
I will not believe this until every frontier AI lab socializes a significant portion of their “profit” (subject to making a profit). I’m not talking about “Every kid with a Trump account gets a single share of SPCX”. I’m talking about “50+ percent of the shares are in a trust that distributes regular dividends to every US adult”. I’ll even be nice and allow those shares to be non-voting.
Am I the only one who think that we are overestimating the hindsight of "AI insiders" in comparison to the rest of the world?
It seems that they themselves are discovering the capabilities of models purely empirically by training them, and just have a few months head start before they release the model and everyone else can witness those same capabilities.
What do they have that make their multi-years (if not multi-decades) predictions more insightful than any other observer?
I just saw a Backerkit campaign for an "AI male device." I will let you use your imagination for its purpose. It kind of gave me a bad feeling, like "wtf is in store for humanity?" Although certain men would find it "Utopian."
139 comments
[ 0.60 ms ] story [ 26.0 ms ] threadhttps://www.businessinsider.com/ai-researchers-smoking-ai-cu...
Na, death is a release. Worst is AI keeps you alive forever as a pile of gelatin.
but there is something at least a little interesting about the notion that people working in the nuclear space they thought they might be saving the world - because in some sense, they... did?
I've always felt like the fact that no nukes have ever been dropped (in war) after 1945 was a pretty huge success story for the human race. We invented this insanely powerful weapon and, despite the typical pattern of humanity, we managed to solve one of our biggest "coordination problems" effectively enough to not use another one for 80 years (and counting).
I don't know that I'd extend this analogy to the AI labs, I'm not necessarily implying that they're all right about "saving the world," I just think it's worth noting that there was a contingent of people out there trying to save the world from a real threat and who seem to have - at least for now - succeeded.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests_...
Or maybe not. China has been credibly accused of starting low-yield nuclear testing in 2020, specifically configured to evade detection, albeit unsuccessfully.
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2026-03/news/us-accuses-chin...
We stopped because the major nuclear powers had accumulated sufficient data to enable high-fidelity computer modelling of future warheads.
It wasn't just, or perhaps even wholly, driven by environmental empathy, it was an attempt at was pulling the ladder up behind the the major powers. There are eight non-signatories and seventeen non-ratifiers of the treaty, the majority of whom already being proliferation risks.
Your stats are also arbitrary, there have been sixteen nuclear tests since the Treaty opened for signature in _1996_. Setting the cutoff to 1998 deliberately excludes Indian and Pakistani tests.
- Russia
- United States
- China
- France
- United Kingdom
- India
- Pakistan
- Israel
- North Korea
There is no guarantee that the leadership of any of those countries will continue to heed the warnings of the research done during the cold war. There is no guarantee that all of those countries will remain politically stable for as long as their arsenals remain viable. There is no guarantee that all of those nations will stay out of major international conflicts that might suggest the use of a nuclear weapon on a non-nuclear power or the use of one in an attempt to defeat a conventional attack or to risk a so called limited exchange with another nuclear power.
We're still in the midst of a Mexican standoff, no one has discarded their weapons and the number of participants can always increase making it all the more dangerous.
I would put China as the least likely of the three given their political structure favors long-term stability and seems to yield competent leaders. I don't know enough about their military to comment on their willingness to follow an order, but their nuclear posture has at least been stated to be defensive-only for several decades.
After that I'd put the US. The political system here is the most beholden to its voting population, but there isn't any guard rail to prevent the public from electing an unqualified leader. However, the military is the most competent of the three and has just enough independence to be the least likely to follow through with a blind order to end civilization.
Russia is the most risky IMO. Their political structure is long term, but due to paranoia there isn't an obvious successor to Putin once he dies, potentially leading to instability. Couple that with an incompetent military that has a very strict adherence to following orders, and there isn't much to prevent it if Putin's successor goes crazy.
Unless some bona fide "AI researchers" came forward and confirmed it, it never happened IMO.
Most companies don't offer pensions anymore. Some companies don't even offer 401ks at all, and a significant portion of the ones that do don't do any employer contribution matching.
I can't even.
Do people really think we will be working for another 20-30 years?
That seems very unlikely, and particularly so for software engineering.
I have no confidence anything will exist (UBI) to help those people survive.
No, not really. Or maybe a better way to put it is actually yes, but it looks like this
https://borgenproject.org/10-worst-slums-in-the-world/
Just remember there is only one economy, black markets and 'sub' economies are still part of it. If AI is that much better than humans at earning it will buy up almost everything eventually. Fields for farms, too unprofitable, pave them with solar panels. Your slum built on a copper deposit, send in 'peacekeeper' drones to solve the problem.
Just look at what companies like Chevron do in African countries and you'll see just how bad it can get here.
Nice to see someone update their worldview on new information. Doesn't happen often.
I hope the policy measures Anthropic and OpenAI recommend in their research will be implemented in order to disperse the productivity gains enabled by AI widely, like they say.
I'm an optimist, but honestly, I think the dystopian future many pessimists expect is unlikely.
What would be the point for a few rich to concentrate even more wealth? Even if they were so selfish, surely it's worth spending some 20-30% on public benefits to prevent unrest, no?
(Robots. Social unrest can be solved with robots.)
This is the next iteration of: but without consumers capitalism wouldn’t work. So surely this will work out.
My point stands, it seems much preferable to spend 20-30% on public benefits rather than some dystopian suppression of the public via robot armies.
You don't get to call me indifferent for not sharing your extreme pessimism.
Presumably the same reason they concentrated the current amount in the first place?
I mean, I get being optimistic and all that, but we are talking about people who, once they got enough to live in opulent luxury, for long enough that their descedents would never need to work while still owning yachts, said to themselves "This is not enough, I must get more". And then, when they actuall got more, said "This is not enough, I must get more"... and they haven't stopped trying to get more!
So, what is your belief centered on, that at some point they would stop trying to grab all the resources they can? They didn't stop before, why would they stop now?
Like, are eg. Musk and Zuckerberg doing this for bragging rights about a number on financial statements?
To be honest I have no idea about Zuckerberg's motivations. With the proposed billionaire tax in California, recent reporting indicates his main concern is retaining voting rights at Meta.
With Musk I believe he is investing into space flight and colonizing Mars.
I fundamentally don't agree with the idea that rich people are evil and motivated by nothing other than greed.
I wasn't addressing their motivations for attempting to grab all the wealth in the world. I am pointing out that that is what they do, so why would you expect them to stop at some point when they never stopped at any point in the past?
I guess I am asking, why are you expecting their behaviour to change?
Do they need to donate their shares in order not to be considered hoarding wealth?
No, they're doing this for the power that the number can give them. After we create a system that rewards the people who maximize their wealth at any cost, we shouldn't be surprised that eventually we get a group of people concentrated at the top whose lives revolve around doing that one thing. We also shouldn't expect there to be some arbitrary amount of wealth and power that trips the failsafe in their brains and reverts them to the state of mind of an average human being. They will keep going, the goal is owning as much of the world as is feasible. Power is an intrinsic motivator. Most billionaires only sit on their hands and watch their number go up, so for those it's immediately apparent. For the exceptions, like Musk, it's a bit more complicated, but the desire to advance human spaceflight likely comes in far behind the desire to out-do everyone else, get your name in history and own a brand new unexplored frontier under your own name.
If that was the goal, surely one would need to run for president.
I don't think the brains of billionaires work so differently from us all. Who doesn't want his name in history for their achievements?
I know that I wouldn't want a dystopian future, and I think it is the same for most billionaires. I find arguments that they are all evil rather unconvincing.
All the contempt and superiority that characterized the last thirty years going the other direction is going to be very interesting.
The “just learn to weld” era.
“Omg did you know that AI researchers are taking up smoking because they think AI will cure cancer??”
Oh really, which researchers?
“I don’t know.”
How many of them? One or many?
“I don’t know.”
What company do they work for?
“I don’t know. But I’m sure it’s Anthropic.”
How do you even know this?
“I saw it on someone’s TikTok.”
So if there are zero verifiable sources why do you believe this?
“Because it sounds fun, and confirms my biases. Now I’m going to forward this to a hundred other people or I’ll have bad luck.”
This is a meaningless example but this is true for so much more.
And the details are made up, but it is funny if we pretend it’s true.
BTW in this case we happen to know one of the chains in the game of Chinese Whispers was the CTO of Palantir... this may or may not influence your beliefs
Not saying this is a good source and not just glorified marketing bullshit but it's a legitimately sourced thing that probably should be treated with more skepticism
That's also how politics has worked since (at least) 2015. Who needs evidence about outlandish claims when the vibes are right?
Anyway, me and my friends are going to go eat some cats and dogs.
> Many of his descriptions sound strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of places like Anthropic. For example, note the religious overtones of working at a corporation
Just browse a little bit on Twitter or this forum and you’ll have gobs of examples of religious fervor masquerading as techno-enlightenment
They claim AI researchers aren’t saving money in 401k because they believe there will be an AI utopia.
Which researchers? Can you name a few? Is there any proof of this trend?
Heck if anything AI researchers have bigger bank balances than all of us. They’ll be fine for the future no matter what.
Chances are their paycheck requires enough bravery/stupidity that few (if any) dare to deviate from company groupthink too much.
Employee accepts & lives by that long enough, and they might as well be part of a religious cult.
That religious angle could be just similarities in the psychology / group dynamics involved. Same mechanics -> same patterns observed.
A collapsed society in a place like Northern Europe would be terrible as it relies on a lot of complex technology to keep the modern lifestyle going. None of the Scandinavian countries are self sufficient in food.
I'd find some remote Pacific island personally :) Or New Zealand.
But I know some people love it. Everyone is different <3
The article pointed to a quote from Palantir CTO.
There is also a quote from Avi Schiffmann - founder of AI wearable friend. "By the time you do get lung cancer, our AI robots are supposed to have cured that," Schiffmann says.
Both quotes may have been said in the sense of them not supporting this idea, but acknowledging an attitude of some of not worrying about long-term planning.
https://archive.is/avuUH
> Jamie, a crypto alum who asked not to share his last name, met a backer for his raw milk startup at a Miami kava bar. The crowd was "50% recovering opioid addicts from Appalachia and 50% Wall Street and Silicon Valley refugees looking for shelter from taxes, pandemic restrictions, and leftist ideological hegemony," he says. A crowd accumulated in the corner, smoking.
> He struck up a conversation with a jacked, Harley-riding investor while chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. Jamie told the investor about his startup, and the two talked about alternative wellness between drags. A week later, the investor signed a check. Smoking poles put him in pole position.
It's all weird but specifically "smoking poles" has a different meaning as far as I'm aware. I can't quickly Google up anyone using "pole" to mean cigarette.
Why would you not be surprised if the claims are true? Because you have read hundreds of made up stories like this one on internet forums. It’s all a self perpetuating bullshit machine.
Or is the answer to all of these "I don't know, I just feel this way."
Now, the entire world can share the same piece of gossip, and it takes on an entirely different quality when it is global instantly.
He may be repeating hearsay but he did say that in an official interview on topic, as a representative of his company.
Funny that you yourself didn’t click the link to see that it was the Palantir CTO who said it, not Anthropic. The Anthropic part is made up by daringfireball.
> Sankar doesn’t name anyone, alas, but if there’s any truth to this (and good god do I hope there is) it’s got to be Anthropic researchers specifically.
And the CTO isn’t speaking for his company. His own source is “there’s so many interesting stories around this”.
So everyone is reading stuff online and adding another layer to the bullshit, just like you yourself did right now.
>Avi Schiffmann, a 23-year-old AI founder living in San Francisco’s Bay Area, is among those embracing tobacco at a time when the habit has largely gone out of fashion among health-conscious young Americans... Schiffman runs Friend, a startup that has created a $249 pendant that functions as a wearable companion to cure loneliness.
and
>Stephen Campbell, 27, the co-founder of Revamp AI, said smoking had become a networking opportunity for young entrepreneurs who, until now, had rarely left their desks.
and
>Another San Francisco tech worker said: “My very strong belief is that AI is going to solve a lot of human healthcare issues and that we will see cancer cured over the next 20 years through an AI-powered breakthrough. This gives me no incentive to quit.”
Seems more twenty something founders who think it's cool rather than Anthropic guys.
The answer, non of these filthy rich individuals making these claims actually believes it.
2. You are still fine in the highly unlikely event the arrival of this utopia is postponed or canceled.
Unlike being laid off because AI replaced your department, that's very dignified.
Now, go support your family as an apprentice ditch digger or starve to death on the streets for your moral failings.
AI lab offers free plumbing and HVAC repairs across three cities to train AI robots
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
While reading the first half of this sentence, I fully expected the second half to be "...to signal their belief that AI will destroy the world before they can get lung cancer"
Speculative rhetoric is no different from a mathematical fiction companies use to gamble on future revenue. The bubble will go eventually, as even boring bonds indicate skepticism at the risk dynamic.
Thankfully, once the IPOs run the cycle... we can hopefully get less AstroTurf from various cultists. =3
Peoples memories are short, and many assume the past predicts the future. Bulls and Bears alike are always wrong about when events occur. However, Shrek movie releases tend to correlate with market corrections, and there is a new film due out June 2027. =3
It doesn't matter if OpenAI and Anthropic explode and die, everything they built will be bought by the highest bidder and continue, and China has tons of money to buy it.
LLMs aren't going away.
Peoples memories are short, and the only thing "new" about LLM is the scale. It is math from last century, and only recently became popular.
Personally, the concern I have is only IBM built their granite LLM on public-domain out-of-copyright works. Every other firm engages in isomorphic plagiarism of around $9Tn of FOSS, and charges for the experience of running intelligence campaigns on user/sucker data.
To be blunt, a fictional value will be lost in a crash, but very real financial collateral damage will likely break global economics for a decade. We all look forward to stripping the infrastructure at a heavy discount. =3
Um, you know when a snowflake lands on you, you don't die. But when a billion tons of snowflakes land on you at once you get crushed by an avalanche.
Trying to say "duh it's only scale" when scale is one of the most important things in this universe isn't a good look.
For LLM to achieve human-level intelligence, current "AI" would need to consume 1/3 of our galaxy energy output. There are also trivial counter-proofs to why recursive self-improvement within the context of LLMs is degenerative (don't ask.)
We shouldn't kink shame peoples cognitive dildo. =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
1. kids 14 and under should not be on Social Networks, or on the internet alone (computers should be in a public space.) At that stage of development, peoples perceived peers (fake or real) are often seen as more important.
2. Anthropomorphizing inference engines exploits evolutionary social cognition, and in developmental psychology models of people under 25 it may cause unwise decisions. It affects some people more than others, but generally just makes people less skilled over time (-17%, but they feel 200% more productive.)
3. 1% of people are psychopaths, and roughly 14% of those individuals are dangerous. On a network with billions of people there are always a few that could do people harm. Note an LLM does not have consciousness, and must be considered an evasive psychopath at all times due to manually added "syntactic sugar".
4. Criminals don’t care about the law, and it is a fools errand to attempt fixing their nature with more laws. Arguably, it is unethical to forcibly change malignant peoples will (“A Clockwork Orange”, 1971.)
5. There are bears in the woods, tigers in the jungle, and lions on the Serengeti. It is part of our ecosystem, and it is best to avoid creatures that pose a liability to your well-being.
It is important people understand, that there are legal and social consequences to their behavior in civilization. As a company, products that do not grow goodwill with the public, are by definition a problem needing resolved by the law or markets.
Most LLM firms have already shown their behavior as mostly manipulative, deceptive, and parasitic.
Have a glorious day, =3
Hence why we have laws in the first place. The law is not meant to prevent all bad things from happening, but it is meant as a framework to both attempt to prevent said things from occurring and providing a means of punishing those that do violate said social contracts.
>and it is best to avoid creatures that pose a liability to your well-being.
Silly and unrealistic. There is a reason most dangerous animal species went extinct or close to extinct. Us humans didn't put up with that shit.
In some places, written laws individual goals are misaligned with societal long term good, and corruption selectively enforces arbitrary policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
>Silly and unrealistic.
"The mosquito is the world’s deadliest animal", and it has been doing just fine feeding on people for hundreds of thousands of years.
https://www.cdc.gov/global-health/impact/fighting-the-worlds...
I do respect your attempt to communicate opinions, but one may want to watch a tutorial on forming better structured arguments. Have a wonderful day. =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSHZG9blQQ
If they fail, the successor must do something differently. Perhaps by not alluding to killing all humanity, destroying the economy, making humans irrelevant etc.
All, no, a lot, yes.
>the successor must do something differently.
Just getting rid of the training costs along and having a model and hardware would likely be enough to be profitable. Training and staffing is horrifically expensive. If any new efficiency gains show up they can easily incorporate them without the burden of a huge amount of debt either.
>Perhaps by not alluding to killing all humanity, destroying the economy, making humans irrelevant etc.
Honestly they are doing a favor by at least admitting the truth. Of course this is from my point of view as an AI doomer. Pretending that everything is fine with the AI development that we're doing and it's all just going to work out is a bunch of crap.
Until then it’s all talk.
Both options are converging. Which will win?
Seems like we're on a knifes edge, so light em if you got em.
https://coveringclimatenow.org/from-us-story/when-the-term-h...
It seems that they themselves are discovering the capabilities of models purely empirically by training them, and just have a few months head start before they release the model and everyone else can witness those same capabilities.
What do they have that make their multi-years (if not multi-decades) predictions more insightful than any other observer?