>>SF wants to come for your inner life and pimp you out and mediate every interaction and there’s not even a so.
I have been saying this for a while. I visited SF a couple months ago and god do people feel empty from the inside. Everything is revolving around AI this and AI that. Half of these people were not paying attention when we were training gradient boost models and now all of these people are 'AI Agents experts'.
I have never understood this line of thinking. Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't? Looking at the ongoing Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits. If you assume AGI is possible, you must agree that it would be at the very least profoundly destabilizing. The companies are built around this assumption.
> Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't?
Because it makes their technology seem more important and powerful?
Do you usually believe 100% what a company says about itself?
> Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits
Who cares about profits? None of these companies make money like a business currently. It's all speculative valuation and influenced by the same hype/doom cycle
Regulatory capture and false AGI hyping, what else? You'd have to be willingly ignoring the writings on the wall if you still haven't identified it yet.
Even if Dario and Altman originally believed what they were saying, their scaretactics worked wonders for investment. Their companies are now incredibly incentivized to keep the AI Apocalypse narrative going further and further. It is hard to imagine them stopping, as that may lose them investment.
The last 10 years have been a decade of Big Tech Vaporware. NFTs and the Metaverse were assured to be the future. Once this narrative fails too (which I am almost certain is inevitable) I think society's love affair with Technology being the solver-of-all-things will finally fracture.
It's significantly worse! All NFTs did was separate fools from their money, and crypto in general increased GPU costs. All the Metaverse did was cause Facebook to throw away a bunch of money (lol).
Meanwhile, AI has ruined the whole Internet and inflated the price of everything electronic.
The whole internet AND local computing. This may be cool for people on SF salaries but for the vast majority of the world memory has become a luxury good
What's the evidence that the doom narrative is connected to valuations? It seems more like a marketing/recruiting strategy. As the post points out, institutional investors generally think the idea of mass unemployment is BS, and they are investing accordingly.
AI obviously has military applications, no doom required to think the military will want a lot of it. I'm asking about the extreme scenarios like "AI is gonna take everyone’s jobs" and the other "totalizing narratives" that geohot is referencing.
If this is true: "AI is gonna take everyone’s jobs" then AI is the terminal technology and everyone who doesn't want to be poor forever needs to throw all their money in it.
Specifically Anthropic's whole PR has all been about danger, safety, doomerism all to make themselves indirectly more important and central to the debate.
Calling meetings in Washington DC in order to let everyone know they made a cyberweapon is part of those PR moves. Then they seem surprised lawmakers actually called them out and asked to stop serving that model.
I know this is the cynical take but I cannot unsee the elephant in the room: This doomerism allowed Anthropic to be the center of every AI conversation right now. Their market cap and upcoming IPO is indirectly benefiting from this.
I also cannot take that Anthropic while letting everyone know that Doom is coming (or is already here), are also the ones that want to decide who can profit from this Doomerism. This is how every benevolent dictators start.
Journalism and public media in general needs to be a licensed profession with tangible standards, and malpractice suits should be pursued aggressively.
Would solve a lot of problems in the US, actually. Being financially incentivized to gleefully lie and spread misinformation at the expense of others should not be protected speech.
Simple minds want to believe one simple thing and then rationalize everything else to force consistency with that one simple idea.
If you want to believe the simple idea that AI is mostly hype, then you'll get stuck in a multi-year loop talking about stochastic parrots, ridiculous valuations, and doomer scaredycats.
But the real world isn't so simple. Multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time.
Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful and useful even though it makes mistakes. Some companies are wildly overvalued. Some extremely large and expensive companies will quadruple from here. Some frightening scenarios will look silly in hindsight. Other frightening things will happen that none of the doomers foresee.
It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities.
It's so boring rehashing the same old tired and worn out ideas like "they're just hyping the danger to pump their shares up."
The question is not whether AI is useful. It is useful, full stop.
The question is whether AI is useful enough to justify valuations that dwarf the GDP of all but the top 20 countries in the world. As it stands right now, it's not even close! The leaked OpenAI financials put these AI companies in the same profitability territory as utilities, with zero justification for these crazy valuations.
> It's so boring rehashing the same old tired and worn out ideas like "they're just hyping the danger to pump their shares up."
Yeah poor you this must be much more tiring than being told constantly that the apocalypse is coming and your jobs are gone and everything is going to be shitty because a bunch of ultra rich midwits want even more money and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Sorry dude, hearing that people don't like that messaging and are replying with copypasta talking points must really be rough for you. Praying for you in these trying times.
Regardless of whether you believe in doom or not, it's this kind of wild, willful misunderstanding that makes people roll their eyes and dismiss you. Yes, people at Anthropic (and OpenAI, for that matter!) really, genuinely do believe AI poses a potential existential threat to humanity; every single one that I know personally believes that. This has been pointed out hundreds of times, and to simply dismiss it as marketing hype by crypto bros to increase IPO valuations long ago passed into the realm of conspiracy thinking.
> genuinely do believe AI poses a potential existential threat to humanity; every single one that I know personally believes that. This has been pointed out hundreds of times, and to simply dismiss it as marketing hype by crypto bros to increase IPO valuations long ago passed into the realm of conspiracy thinking.
"They are not in a thought bubble YOU are in the thought bubble"
No; I'm only stating that your model of reality is off, and I'm correcting it. No, the folks at the frontier labs do not believe they are trying to scam people with an NFT-tier fraud, and their warnings are not an attempt at marketing hype.
What you have written does not seem to be in close contact with the OP. He talks positively about the GLM news and whatnot. He is highly skeptical only of the "doom" scenarios, including upending most or a massive amount of jobs, and how that is deployed to keep the investment machine working at such breakneck pace.
I love this website because people will write stuff like “I believe the hype because my brain is big, ‘believing the hype’ is actually very complex and cannot be embraced by lesser intellects”
There are reasonable anti- and pro-AI views. There are also unreasonable ones on both sides, and it's best if they are ignored.
However, on a site like HN or Reddit, you're far more likely to hear squawking about "stochastic parrots" or a rant about AI water usage than the mirror on the pro-AI side, making them harder to ignore.
> Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful... It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities.
I agree, but it's not so mysterious what will win out. Even if the criticism is repeated so often, that's because much of it is still valid.
LLMs are not AGI. A statistical model of language helps fill in gaps. This is super useful for new and much improved UI/UX ideas that converge with better accessibility. Similar is true for generating images, video, audio, etc. There are situations where it's the right tool for expressing an idea.
What we need is a sense of maturity. The limitations are very clear to everyone now, and we're already past the disillusionment. If we can rein in the abuse, there should be a good path forward. The technology is already boring and that's a very good sign.
Even in this article, he claims COVID wasn’t a big deal because, essentially, only a million people died in the US instead of everyone. No one ever claimed 100% mortality.
Yet the measures taken far exceeded the damage than if we had let the virus take its course.
The problem wasn't the mortality rate, it's the fact that the media can cleverly turn something in a huge deal by talking endlessly about it. During COVID, there was no other news except the virus on news for 24/7.
>>SF wants to come for your inner life and pimp you out and mediate every interaction and there’s not even a so.
I have been saying this for a while. I visited SF a couple months ago and god do people feel empty from the inside. Everything is revolving around AI this and AI that. Half of these people were not paying attention when we were training gradient boost models and now all of these people are 'AI Agents experts'.
I have never understood this line of thinking. Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't? Looking at the ongoing Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits. If you assume AGI is possible, you must agree that it would be at the very least profoundly destabilizing. The companies are built around this assumption.
*why would they warn if it they didn’t believe it.
2 words: regulatory capture.
Ban Chinese models because they’re “bad”. (can’t have head to head competition).
Bad open weight model (can’t let people escape the subscription model).
> Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't?
Because it makes their technology seem more important and powerful?
Do you usually believe 100% what a company says about itself?
> Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits
Who cares about profits? None of these companies make money like a business currently. It's all speculative valuation and influenced by the same hype/doom cycle
Setting up for the eventual bailout. Remember - "we can't let banks fail or it'll be a depression"?
Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't?
The whole point of the article is to answer this question, and here's the answer:
Because all the AI doom fear-mongering is driving sky-high valuations. The more the public panics, the more investors open their wallets.
Regulatory capture and false AGI hyping, what else? You'd have to be willingly ignoring the writings on the wall if you still haven't identified it yet.
Even if Dario and Altman originally believed what they were saying, their scaretactics worked wonders for investment. Their companies are now incredibly incentivized to keep the AI Apocalypse narrative going further and further. It is hard to imagine them stopping, as that may lose them investment.
The last 10 years have been a decade of Big Tech Vaporware. NFTs and the Metaverse were assured to be the future. Once this narrative fails too (which I am almost certain is inevitable) I think society's love affair with Technology being the solver-of-all-things will finally fracture.
> NFTs and the Metaverse
AI is not that bad
It's significantly worse! All NFTs did was separate fools from their money, and crypto in general increased GPU costs. All the Metaverse did was cause Facebook to throw away a bunch of money (lol).
Meanwhile, AI has ruined the whole Internet and inflated the price of everything electronic.
The whole internet AND local computing. This may be cool for people on SF salaries but for the vast majority of the world memory has become a luxury good
> will finally fracture.
If true, it will only be replaced with something else. With what is anyone’s guess.
What's the evidence that the doom narrative is connected to valuations? It seems more like a marketing/recruiting strategy. As the post points out, institutional investors generally think the idea of mass unemployment is BS, and they are investing accordingly.
Dumb thing to ask tbh.
Dangerous new tech with military applications sounds harder to ignore than AI that spits out text.
AI obviously has military applications, no doom required to think the military will want a lot of it. I'm asking about the extreme scenarios like "AI is gonna take everyone’s jobs" and the other "totalizing narratives" that geohot is referencing.
If this is true: "AI is gonna take everyone’s jobs" then AI is the terminal technology and everyone who doesn't want to be poor forever needs to throw all their money in it.
Of course it impacts company valuation.
I came to the same conclusion.
Specifically Anthropic's whole PR has all been about danger, safety, doomerism all to make themselves indirectly more important and central to the debate.
Calling meetings in Washington DC in order to let everyone know they made a cyberweapon is part of those PR moves. Then they seem surprised lawmakers actually called them out and asked to stop serving that model.
I know this is the cynical take but I cannot unsee the elephant in the room: This doomerism allowed Anthropic to be the center of every AI conversation right now. Their market cap and upcoming IPO is indirectly benefiting from this.
I also cannot take that Anthropic while letting everyone know that Doom is coming (or is already here), are also the ones that want to decide who can profit from this Doomerism. This is how every benevolent dictators start.
> This is how every benevolent dictators start.
Every dictator is benevolent for the people that agree with them.
> This is how every benevolent dictator starts
I don’t think “benevolent” is necessary in that sentence. It’s how many non-benevolent dictatorships started.
Journalism and public media in general needs to be a licensed profession with tangible standards, and malpractice suits should be pursued aggressively.
Would solve a lot of problems in the US, actually. Being financially incentivized to gleefully lie and spread misinformation at the expense of others should not be protected speech.
Simple minds want to believe one simple thing and then rationalize everything else to force consistency with that one simple idea.
If you want to believe the simple idea that AI is mostly hype, then you'll get stuck in a multi-year loop talking about stochastic parrots, ridiculous valuations, and doomer scaredycats.
But the real world isn't so simple. Multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time.
Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful and useful even though it makes mistakes. Some companies are wildly overvalued. Some extremely large and expensive companies will quadruple from here. Some frightening scenarios will look silly in hindsight. Other frightening things will happen that none of the doomers foresee.
It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities.
It's so boring rehashing the same old tired and worn out ideas like "they're just hyping the danger to pump their shares up."
Some AI is useless
The question is not whether AI is useful. It is useful, full stop.
The question is whether AI is useful enough to justify valuations that dwarf the GDP of all but the top 20 countries in the world. As it stands right now, it's not even close! The leaked OpenAI financials put these AI companies in the same profitability territory as utilities, with zero justification for these crazy valuations.
> It's so boring rehashing the same old tired and worn out ideas like "they're just hyping the danger to pump their shares up."
Yeah poor you this must be much more tiring than being told constantly that the apocalypse is coming and your jobs are gone and everything is going to be shitty because a bunch of ultra rich midwits want even more money and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Sorry dude, hearing that people don't like that messaging and are replying with copypasta talking points must really be rough for you. Praying for you in these trying times.
Regardless of whether you believe in doom or not, it's this kind of wild, willful misunderstanding that makes people roll their eyes and dismiss you. Yes, people at Anthropic (and OpenAI, for that matter!) really, genuinely do believe AI poses a potential existential threat to humanity; every single one that I know personally believes that. This has been pointed out hundreds of times, and to simply dismiss it as marketing hype by crypto bros to increase IPO valuations long ago passed into the realm of conspiracy thinking.
> genuinely do believe AI poses a potential existential threat to humanity; every single one that I know personally believes that. This has been pointed out hundreds of times, and to simply dismiss it as marketing hype by crypto bros to increase IPO valuations long ago passed into the realm of conspiracy thinking.
"They are not in a thought bubble YOU are in the thought bubble"
I am absolutely BTFO'd, you got me.
No; I'm only stating that your model of reality is off, and I'm correcting it. No, the folks at the frontier labs do not believe they are trying to scam people with an NFT-tier fraud, and their warnings are not an attempt at marketing hype.
What you have written does not seem to be in close contact with the OP. He talks positively about the GLM news and whatnot. He is highly skeptical only of the "doom" scenarios, including upending most or a massive amount of jobs, and how that is deployed to keep the investment machine working at such breakneck pace.
I love this website because people will write stuff like “I believe the hype because my brain is big, ‘believing the hype’ is actually very complex and cannot be embraced by lesser intellects”
There are reasonable anti- and pro-AI views. There are also unreasonable ones on both sides, and it's best if they are ignored.
However, on a site like HN or Reddit, you're far more likely to hear squawking about "stochastic parrots" or a rant about AI water usage than the mirror on the pro-AI side, making them harder to ignore.
"I cannot be contradicted because I can hold conflicting viewpoints" was Chomsky's bit, HN can only take credit for imitating it.
“Dario Amodei doesn’t seem like he can tell the future” - Simple. Pedestrian. The roughshod cogitation of a country oaf.
“Maybe he can” - Complex. Divine, possibly? A breathtaking filigree of nuance, like an Alex Grey painting of conceptual allemande.
> Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful... It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities.
I agree, but it's not so mysterious what will win out. Even if the criticism is repeated so often, that's because much of it is still valid.
LLMs are not AGI. A statistical model of language helps fill in gaps. This is super useful for new and much improved UI/UX ideas that converge with better accessibility. Similar is true for generating images, video, audio, etc. There are situations where it's the right tool for expressing an idea.
What we need is a sense of maturity. The limitations are very clear to everyone now, and we're already past the disillusionment. If we can rein in the abuse, there should be a good path forward. The technology is already boring and that's a very good sign.
‘Simple minds’?
Oh fuck off.
I stopped taking this guy seriously after he proposed "just" digging canals to bring desalinated ocean water into the U.S. desert.
Even in this article, he claims COVID wasn’t a big deal because, essentially, only a million people died in the US instead of everyone. No one ever claimed 100% mortality.
COVID was a risk management disaster that should not have escalated to the level that it did if there was not so much political overreach.
Yet the measures taken far exceeded the damage than if we had let the virus take its course.
The problem wasn't the mortality rate, it's the fact that the media can cleverly turn something in a huge deal by talking endlessly about it. During COVID, there was no other news except the virus on news for 24/7.
> If San Francisco was nuked tomorrow, the world would feel a weight off their shoulders.
Who Would Jesus Nuke?