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.
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.
> I can only assume the reasonable people at openai and anthropic were all pushed out long ago
Typical uninformed take on the side of "doomers are crazy".
Both CEO's of OpenAI, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, and many in their leadership, believe AGI has a very real probability of causing humanity's extinction. Both companies were founded upon this belief, it is at the core of the company. Only later were mercenaries hired chasing $1m compensation packages.
If you're a doomer, wouldn't the "let's try to get there so fast" actions of the companies suggest that, in fact, there are no reasonable people in positions of influence there?
By your own description neither Altman or Amodei are reasonable if their thought process goes: "this is an existential risk, give me hundreds of millions of dollars so I can accelerate it."
GP defined reasonable people as not believing in existential risk from AGI. I think the leadership and alignment teams are way more informed and reasonable than some of the very poorly thought through takes like GP just making things up about the labs. There’s just no evidence of it whereas lab leadership are operating under a mostly informed worldview.
Yes, I don’t think lab leadership are totally reasonable as they were concerned about the risks and yet lack of reason caused them to directly contribute to the problem we’re facing. They’re still not being reasonable when they throw their hands up at the arms race and hope the utopia come, when that’s not our trajectory at all and more lab employees are realizing it
If they truly, truly believed that, would they be speeding towards building it? If yes, that would make them truly insane, right? Not as in a quaint "off their rocker" but more "non compos mentis".
Both companies have deluded themselves into thinking the arms race is going to happen anyway and they need to rush to it first, as if somehow that helps. They have publicly stated as such repeatedly. They think the ~10-50% chance of extinction sucks, but that it's going to happen anyway and they believe they can steer it towards something good the best and unlock all the potential positives like infinite life.
I'm not saying they are crazy, I'm saying their predictions have a record of not being accurate, and thus give them no weight compared to others'.
In any case, if Altman really does believe it is an existential threat, he must be a misanthrope as he now opposes heavy handed government regulation, unlike in 2015 when he was the only game in town. It's almost like he doesn't actually believe it and just wanted regulator capture.
Before OpenAI was ever even founded, way before any regulatory capture plausible claims:
"Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) [1] 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
Both companies have deluded themselves into thinking the arms race is going to happen anyway and they need to rush to it first, as if somehow that helps.
How is it not addressed? The company never contained only "reasonable people" that believe AGI is not an existential risk to humanity. At both inceptions were people who believed in AGI x-risk, even the founders. Only after time, did there become more "reasonable people" who were mercenaries and only believed it to be a typical tech job. Today, there are more "reasonable people" than ever there. They haven't been pushed out. We're just witnessing some prescient mercenaries smart enough to Eureka the grave implications of what is actually happening.
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