Yep, anyone who thinks these leaders are only saying this now for marketing purposes hasn't even done a cursory 15 minute investigation into whether their beliefs are verifiably false.
Because they can't. If they actually engaged with it, they would realize how shallow the "doomer" / existential risk dismissals are. Meanwhile there are ample essays and arguments about the existential issues from Turing award winners, frontier lab CEO's, and many more. There's also https://ai-2040.com/ , you will never see the equivalent on the other side of the debate because it won't hold under any scrutiny.
Can you refute the claim that the Second Coming of Christ is imminent? It’s very convenient to put forward something completely absurd and hypothetical and then expect the other side to refute it. You can have an LLM of your choice compile a list of prominent figures who hold the opposing view. The list is not empty. By the way, AI-2040 used to be AI-2027. I’m already looking forward to more updates.
As you should. Sacks takes the contrarian moronic take on everything, and the people that are correct and prescient (idk maybe all of the people who ended up as CEO's of frontier labs and Turing award winners in AI?) are saying that AGI is a very real risk of humanity's extinction.
Indeed, although now we are assured by the thing occupying the President's chair that we need nothing but "STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT" (as if we had one) to handle the problem, so I should believe that, right?...
At the very least, Dario Amodei is clearly correct that we need at least more mandatory transparency among all of them.
And Sacks is absolutely wrong, since individually self-disarming without some kind of overseeing referee and force to police such a disarming is a guaranteed losing move, so no one can start the self-regulation system.
You've properly nailed Sacks — contrarian moron is exactly it! His shtick does seem to be just taking the stupid opposite take on everything and acting like it is brilliant. The only mystery is why anyone takes him seriously.
This thread is a testament to the travesty of how bad HN discourse has gotten. It's become an echo chamber of knee-jerk cynical sneering. All the heads of the labs (Sama, Dario, Demis Hassabis, Ilya, Musk) agree with the risks to humanity's existence. Most of the core employees agree. Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Bernie Sanders agree. These issues have been discussed in more intelligent channels for a decade now, and still after all the incredible mathematics and coding progress that is improving incredibly fast every 6 months, this forum is fundamentally unserious. You will not find prescient views in the HN majority anymore, for many years now. The people intelligent, prescient, and forward thinking enough, skating to where the puck was going, to be involved in shaping the future of AGI are elsewhere and barely involved in this place from how badly it's gotten. The inventor of RLHF [0], and newest board member of OpenAI, wasn't on HN, they were on LessWrong.
It's worrying because they all agree, along with Turing Award winners like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, that this is indeed an existential risk to humanity.
"The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear. No other human activity poses this level of danger." - https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843#m
"Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could." - Sam Altman
Yes, that's the point. It does no good for the US to stop if China doesn't. It does no good for the US to go full speed ahead to beat China, it still leads to a high probability of extinction. That would be like saying "I can't let China blow me up, I'll blow myself up first." Well, if you're unsure if China will blow you up, at least don't do it to yourself.
This forum is fundamentally unserious and complete kneejerk cynicism these days. At one point it was prescient. Now these types of things were discussed years ago in other channels and when we reach a point where finally everyone comes around to the right conclusion based on tangible evidence in the news, a majority of people here go "huh i guess so"
This is exactly how Cloud Computing looked in 2012-2018. Dumping huge $ into computing buildout that wasn't profitable yet. All those co's: Amazon, GCP, Azure paid off immensely and are ridiculously profitable.
No, it wasn't. Cloud computing was almost immediately profitable.
And Amazon was famously "unprofitable" for their first 9 years because they were investing all their very real profits into a form of capital that the US tax code didn't recognize.
You are being downvoted but only a few years ago Google contemplated whether to kill GCP altogether because of lack of traction in the market or revenue goals.
IIRC Amazon chose to reinvest early revenue to grow AWS intentionally, and the revenue curve eventually evened out and obviously surpassed expenses. The problem with the AI buildout is that there's not a ton of evidence that these companies are approaching profitability, we can't even know because they're private.
Amazon's incubation of AWS was methodical and transparent. OpenAI is saying that they don't expect to be profitable until at least 2030, with over a trillion dollars in committed spend before that point. It's the largest "trust me bro" play in human history.
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