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by NitpickLawyer 3 hours ago
> We should want the AI Labs to make binding agreements to proceed safely and slower

That's a red herring, IMO. Once the cat is out of the bag, there's no "slowing down", only "slowing up". What's even more egregious is that the people behind the "slowing down" camp are also the people who've had 10s of billions invested in their companies. It smells of "we got ours, now you can't follow". It reeks of regulatory capture, which is a proven net downside for everyone else. The thropics, and the oais, and the googs have billions to make it look like they comply (and just make it look like it), while the rest are ... what? Waiting for them to give us the privilege of prompting a thing, and maybe get a result? If we're good kids and eat our supper?

The moment they started adding "nucular" to the acronyms of "safety alignment" you could tell this is just kabuki at best. There's absolutely nothing that a chatbot will tell you that will get you closer to anything nuclear. It's a joke.

Meanwhile, companies hit by real-world attacks get guardrails. How's that for being safe?

2 comments

>What's even more egregious is that the people behind the "slowing down" camp are also the people who've had 10s of billions invested in their companies. It smells of "we got ours, now you can't follow". It reeks of regulatory capture, which is a proven net downside for everyone else.

This sort of cynicism feels un-falsifiable.

If companies advocate against regulation, the cynics will say: "These corporations want capitalism to run amok with no regulation to interfere with their profits. They need to go full steam ahead in order to show profits for their investors."

If companies advocate in favor of regulation, the cynics will say: "Regulatory capture."

If you have legitimate concerns, how about a constructive discussion regarding how those concerns could be addressed, in light of the "risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems" which over 1000 frontier AI company employees expressed concern about?

I don't think it's justified to jump immediately to cynicism, if you haven't even made a token effort at good-faith engagement.

>The moment they started adding "nucular" to the acronyms of "safety alignment" you could tell this is just kabuki at best. There's absolutely nothing that a chatbot will tell you that will get you closer to anything nuclear. It's a joke.

What are you referring to? Are you referring to this quote from the OP?

>The world is locked in a deadly race towards an intelligence explosion, where AI’s ability to create better AIs reaches a critical point, just like a runaway nuclear chain reaction. Going slower would give us much-needed time to make it go well, but no individual actor is willing to stop unilaterally. To survive, we must coordinate to slow down the race.

Your response seems to be a total non sequitur, or failure to understand Leo's point. Exponential growth can easily get out of control, as we saw early in COVID. The point about nuclear is just an analogy.

We have to stop comparing nuclear weapons with general intelligence. They are nothing alike.

Nukes are weapons of mass destruction that can only destroy. Intelligence is dual-use. If we look at all organisms on Earth, species that are more intelligent are also more prosperous. This is true from bacteria, to insects, to animals, to humanity. Intelligence itself is not harmful.

There will be new adversarial games when everyone's smarter (bio/cyber offense/defense), but those games are always symmetrical in the long run, and there will also be new cooperative strategies. The reason some adversarial strategies appear to have an asymmetrical advantage right now is because we're too stupid, like how monkeys are too stupid to understand how humans work. Otherwise, we would not see more intelligent species being more prosperous as a general evolutionary trend.