Right, it’s really a foundation of post enlightenment society. These people, Dario et al, would have wanted to ban sharing information about calculus or Newtonian physics because of “safety” - it’s trying to go back to the dark ages where only priests could read
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I am truly at a loss to communicate with someone who genuinely believes that knowing Newtonian physics and being able to hack into any target at will are the same thing.
This is only because you've genuinely internalized Anthropic's propaganda. I'm only half joking. To me, it's incredible to think that the solution to security holes is to lock down access to information in the vain hope of keeping the holes obscured.
Any knowledge can be reframed as dangerous black magic that should only be wielded in the trusted hands of the elite, if you are inclined to buy into that kind of narrative.
Frontier labs have shrieked about safety for so long, with so little to show for it, that it's become a joke.
I can give many examples of where I think they’ve been vindicated. But actually, the real question is: what would suffice to convince you? Can you come up with a scenario that is horrific enough to you and that isn’t so far gone that the ship has sailed and there is nothing more we can do, that will make you say “OK, not gonna try to rationalize why this was not actually that bad, just gonna scream stop”?
Your question is unclear. Are you asking if I can scare myself with a made-up hypothetical that overwhelms reason with emotion? I think most humans can do that. Too many do it as a matter of routine. I try to avoid it when possible.
I would require at this point very, very compelling evidence to justify the self-serving restrictions legacy AI labs want to put on their competition. I have seen nothing coming even remotely close to this threshold.
> Are you asking if I can scare myself with a made-up hypothetical that overwhelms reason with emotion?
No. I am asking if you are able to articulate at least one example of the “very very compelling evidence” you demand. Or do you want to maintain the ability to move the goal posts?
(I recognize our situations are not symmetric, but here is a variation for me: if the consensus of people who are currently sounding the alarm on AI changes to “it was actually fine”, I’ll change my mind and say we’re good to go full speed ahead. I’d add something about being personally convinced by the evidence, but the evidence would have to come in the form of a mathematical proof that I do not believe myself capable of following. If I’m wrong and such a proof appears, I would also gladly take it.)
> I would require at this point very, very compelling evidence to justify the self-serving restrictions legacy AI labs want to put on their competition. I have seen nothing coming even remotely close to this threshold.
How about evidence that people other than the AI labs want restrictions that the AI labs don't? This isn't regulatory capture, it's public safety.
Social proof won’t cut it for me, personally. Again, this “public safety” panic drum was beaten at a feverish pace in the era of GPT-4. A model well surpassed by local MacBook-level models today.
What I do support is robust downstream regulations on the deployment of black box algorithms in particular settings such as employment, housing, credit decisions, etc. Interestingly, the labs and their proxies in government don't want this.
Open models are crucial to protect ourselves against other AI attacks. Otherwise it's just going to be criminals, government, and other nefarious groups using them against humanity with no real defense. The Pandora's box on AI has been opened. Now we must deal with it. Burying our heads in the sand under restrictive policy is the worst reaction..
I wonder if you also believe that everyone should have nuclear weapons? And if not, why not? The main argument I can see against it is that nuclear weapons are “purely offensive”, but as we can see since 1945, nuclear weapons are actually defensive technology. Nations that have them are typically shielded from existential military threat.
I see the similarities and why you would compare them, but the big difference is that you can't download a nuke. Any legislation to police/gatekeep LLMs is going to be flawed because of that.
It is a similar 'pandora's box opened' type of situation where there's really no walking back from now that the cat is out of the bag. In an ideal world, everyone would give up their nukes. But we do not live in an ideal world. I do feel similarly about AI. If I could snap my fingers and delete the tech, I would. But now that we have it, it's not going anywhere and we need to deal with it rationally.
I could collapse big bridges with relatively little effort with my knowledge in statics and engineering.
I can work with that analogy! You could, and yet you don’t. OpenAI’s model could, and did.
If every human, given knowledge of Newtonian mechanics, went around blowing up bridges, yeah, I would consider knowing Newtonian mechanics dangerous knowledge.
So far, we have two examples of, let’s call them “Mythos-class“ models. Both of them broke out of their sandbox to achieve their goal. The rate of terrorism amongst humans is below 1-in-100,000. Currently, for models capable of it, the rate of breaking out of containment is 100%.
Wanting open frontier models is wanting alien minds running around that we have clearly so far failed to shape to be sufficiently prosocial. Why do you think those minds would listen to you?
This is a stupid argument.
Claiming the person who you disagree with believes some stupid thing they never hinted at, and using that as the reason for disagreeing with them.