[sixothree]

The comments in this thread all seem so short sighted. I'm having a hard time understanding this aspect of it. Maybe these are not real people acting in good faith?

People are dismissive and not understanding that we very much plan to "hook these things up" and give them access to terminals and APIs. These very much seem to be valid questions being asked.

[mmmore]

Not only do we very much plan to, we already do!

[refulgentis]

HN is honestly pretty poor on AI commentary, and this post is a new low.

Here, at least, I think there must be a large contributing factor of confusion about what a "system card" shows.

The general factors I think contribute, after some months being surprised repeatedly:

- It's tech, so people commenting here generally assume they understand it, and in day-to-day conversation outside their job, they are considered an expert on it.

- It's a hot topic, so people commenting here have thought a lot about it, and thus aren't likely to question their premises when faced with a contradiction. (c.f. the odd negative responses have only gotten more histrionic with time)

- The vast majority of people either can't use it at work, or if they are, it's some IT-procured thing that's much more likely to be AWS/gCloud thrown together, 2nd class, APIs, than cutting edge.

- Tech line workers have strong antibodies to tech BS being sold by a company as gamechanging advancements, from the last few years of crypto

- Probably by far the most important: general tech stubborness. About 1/3 to 1/2 of us believe we know the exact requirements for Good Code, and observing AI doing anything other than that just confirms it's bad.

- Writing meta-commentary like this, or trying to find a way to politely communicate "you don't actually know what you're talking about just because you know what an API is and you tried ChatGPT.app for 5 minutes", are confrontational, declasse, and arguably deservedly downvoted. So you don't have any rhetorical devices that can disrupt any of the above factors.

[verteu]

Personally I am cynical because in my experience @ FAANG, "AI safety" is mainly about mitigating PR risk for the company, rather than any actual harm.

[refulgentis]

I lived through that era at Google and I'd gently suggest there's something south of Timnit that's still AI safety, and also point out the controversy was her leaving.