Bernie Sanders tells OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta to pause AI development or face Senate action

Any pause will have to be a global treaty; the unfortunate reality is that we’re in an arms race now, and despite Sanders’ threats otherwise, I don’t think there is going to be much will to pause in the US while China keeps developing.

And to be clear, I think it would be every wise to pause development and, afterwards, keep the pace slow. We know how to make “AI” more capable, but we don’t know how to make it stay aligned with human goals. The technology is useful and isn’t going anywhere, but that doesn’t mean we have to develop it as quickly as possible without regard to the real dangers it brings with it.

Any pause will have to be a global treaty

Which is why tech CEOs love to promote it. They know it’ll never happen.

We know how to make “AI” more capable, but we don’t know how to make it stay aligned with human goals.

“Alignment” is almost entirely a myth cooked up by AI companies who want to make their word generators sound scarier than they are. There’s no such thing: the next word generator generates next word. It’s unpredictable because it’s built that way. “Hallucination” and “going rogue”, all poor terms and pathetic attempts to fearmonger and humanize, are identical functions to “working” and “aligning”.

The technology… isn’t going anywhere

The “it’s just inevitable” cliche rears its ugly head again.

Your opinion is borne from lack of knowledge about the topic you’re trying to discuss, similar to an anti-vaxxer attempting to discuss the dangers of mRNA vaccines.

Fix your lack of knowledge or don’t; that’s your call, but if you care about discussing this topic somewhat intelligently, you should probably put in some effort to understand it.

I said several things so how about you actually address them, instead of resorting to an insult and vaguely telling me to “do my research”?

Do you deny this latest wave of companies doing the exact same routine is a PR stunt, or that companies badly want regulatory capture, or what?

I meant no insult, truly. You just don’t have the minimum required knowledge to discuss this intelligently. There’s no shame in that; no one can know everything.

I can’t know the motives of anyone, but I can say it’s at least plausible that the people working on the frontier models want an excuse to slow down that doesn’t give an advantage to other countries and companies, and also doesn’t put them in the crosshairs of investors and board members.

You apparently still internalize LLMs as fancy Markov chains, which tells me that you don’t have a working grasp to discuss the topic, even at the laymen level we’re at.

These hacking events may be “PR Stunts”, but the “stunt” part would be leaving a known vulnerability as a path to the wider Internet instead of making it physically impossible to break out, not the hacking of other websites. No one credible is disputing that these models are capable of hacking.

I meant no insult

Uh-huh. You compared me to an antivaxxer , implying that people who disagree with you don’t believe in science or technology - the same reason you felt the need to throw in the “inevitability” cliche. Which I do not buy, and somebody claiming to understand the technology should never repeat.

Later, you say anyone who disagrees with you just feels “desperate” and “threatened." You’re really pulling everything from the “I am rational and you are neurotic” playbook aren’t you.

I can’t know the motives of anyone, but I can say it’s at least plausible that the people working on the frontier models want an excuse to slow down that doesn’t give an advantage to other countries and companies, and also doesn’t put them in the crosshairs of investors and board members.

It’s all the same song and dance. Dario Amodei screams “hold me back!” because he loves pretending his product is Great and Powerful.

Why do these developers never talk about real harms like the environmental damage they cause? How about the psychosis they are liable to fall into?

It’s pretty obvious they’re just doing marketing, knowingly or not. And these are smart people who should know better.

Computer science is still science. You distrust the experts in the field based on what? Something you saw on social media? Certainly not your own expertise, that much is clear.

Don’t move the goalposts. No one is claiming that “AI” doesn’t have downsides. That’s different than your original claim that they didn’t do what they appear to do.

I don’t suppose you happen to be in a field threatened by AI? In my anecdotal experience, the people that desperately want to pretend AI is all a scam are actually worried about the opposite, and their job. (A real concern I’m in no way trying to minimize.)