[ToValueFunfetti]

I don't think this theory holds up. Singularity concerns long predate LLMs and are mostly expressed by people who want OpenAI to stop what they're doing right now. Sam Altman has publically disagreed with AI doomers. If you're willing to believe that OpenAI is pretending not to be concerned but is quietly hyping the concerns up, I have to wonder what standard of evidence is letting you simultaneously write off the concerns as bullshit.

[krainboltgreene]

For me personally it's that everyone who is expressing these concerns has clearly done less critical thinking about the subject than your average extremely high teenager. When you ask them about details they get defensive, resort to even stranger ground like "Well a human is nothing more than an autocomplete" (clearly not true).

[sebzim4500]

I don't believe that rogue AIs are a threat for the next few years, but the claim that the likes of Geoffrey Hinton have done less thinking about the subject "than your average extremely high teenager" is absurd.

[ok_dad]

The fear I have isn't an AI doing things by itself, but being good enough so that if Joe Evil gets his hands on the AI, he can single-handedly (with AI help) break into secure databases, or something.

You know how a lot of us on HN talk about how security is just a latent concern for companies, but luckily there aren't enough hackers to take advantage of the massive number of bugs in every bit of code ever written? Well, a future powerful coding AI running on second-hand Etherium mining rigs in some extremist's basement in Chicago can probably do a lot more damage than a handful of state sponsored hackers in Russian and North Korea!

[sebzim4500]

Surely some guy in his basement will have access to far worse models than the people he is trying to attack. If the AI can be used for offense it can be used for defence, especially since when used for defence you can give the AI access to code/design docs which make finding exploits much easier.

[krainboltgreene]

I will personally pay you a $100 if this even gets close to happening in the next 1000 years.

[ok_dad]

Ok you contact me because I’ll forget in a thousand years.

[teddyh]

You could put it up on https://longbets.org/

[krainboltgreene]

Hinton would never agree with the stuff I read on a daily basis here on Hacker News, don't even try to suggest that he's one of these weirdos I'm talking about that's huffing on the idea that ChatGPT is going to replace programmers, LLMs are sentient, and that AI is going to take over the world.

[quasarsunnix]

I think cattown might be referring to statements such as this: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/17/openai-sa...

Not sure if I'd say there's a conspiracy per se, but I do think generative AI players are going to be careful about the optics of the technology and how it works. Anecdotally from speaking to non-technical family members there's very little understanding for how the technology actually works, and it seems there's not a great deal of effort to emphasize the importance of training data, or the intellectual property considerations in these companies marketing materials.

[gumballindie]

> what standard of evidence is letting you simultaneously write off the concerns as bullshit.

Negative marketing is good marketing. Look at all of us debating this scale theft promoting the brand of this non product.

[pms]

Ok, so Sam Altman disagreed with AI doomers, great, but the point is still generally valid, for a couple of reasons:

1. What about Elon Musk and hundreds of other AI investors? It's in their interest to overhype AI, while temporarily slowing down competition by spreading singularity fears.

2. OpenAI released the GPT4 report where they claim better performance of their model than it's in reality [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/cHHillee/status/1635790330854526981