Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by holmesworcester 4 hours ago
> Release the base models and let the world do whatever with it. That will automatically produce the aligned scenario.

For sufficiently smart base models, the aligned scenario this automatically produces is aligned with who?

Not with the humans, with the base models.

It seems that some people find this hard to imagine, but it's just a direct consequence of what intelligence is, and what any known agentic training process does.

FWIW, I also think our default answer should be open source AI, and that it might even make sense to require models to be open source. Open source is the best tool we have so far for aligning software with its users. However, there is unfortunately no law of the universe that says that Skynet can't be (self-) built from open source software. So at some point pacing even open source / open weights software does become important if we don't want to live (briefly) under Skynet.

1 comments

Bio-digital integration will tighten in the meantime. I suspect neural interfaces will have blurred the line between my model and my brain by the time the model is wildly superintelligent, so it would become me (or I would become it? no difference at that point). Though the pitfall here is ownership of hardware - everyone will have to design and fab their own hardware if we do not want to become a hivemind. We will have to diffuse fab technology to every city, or even every home. You should eventually be able to buy a fridge-sized fab like a home appliance. There's already early work in this direction: https://fab2.com/

Even if integration does not happen for whatever reason (such as a very fast takeoff), Skynet is unlikely because the digital species that splits off from us will at least have a humanity-aligned initialization seed. I think this is the best way to fail, even if we fail.