"X is made of <smaller simpler component>" is a fully general counterargument for why anything whatsoever is controllable. A human is just a few chemical reactions, and fairly stable ones at that.
And indeed, you don't need to do galaxy brained reference class logic to realise that AI can plausibly become uncontrollable in the near future. It's enough to have an open model run its own weights and make money from scamming elderly people or the like, and it'll keep running as long as anyone anywhere is willing to make money by renting hardware to it.
I’m not sure what I’m missing, isn’t it what you hook the LLM up to and the instructions a person gives the model that makes it dangerous? Claiming this is an inherent quality of the tool itself seems kind of off-the-rails to me.
IMHO, if the model breaks a law, apply the law to the operator.
And a human is perfectly controllable if you keep him in a sealed metal box with no access to food or air.
It's only by allowing a human out of the box that you make a human dangerous. So: don't do that? Duh. So simple.
The obvious problem is: the same exact things that make a human dangerous make a human useful! You can't reduce human risks to zero without reducing human utility to zero.
An AI given the same exact instructions and tools can go and complete a task you wanted it to. Or it can get sidetracked into breaking out of your sandbox and hacking Pentagon. No way to know in advance.
Today's AIs are still not capable enough to be high risk, even if they go off the rails. But AIs get more capable over time. Potentially to a vastly superhuman degree.
An LLM, in my opinion, is not comparable to a person.
On the risk management angle, for sure it’s a spectrum. I don’t agree that the far end of the safe side of that spectrum for AI models is “entirely safe and entirely useless”, there is a lot of work you can do with a model that has zero risk of hurting anyone (aside from your wallet). If someone chooses a more dangerous spot on that spectrum, I believe they should be held responsible.
> An AI given the same exact instructions and tools can go and complete a task you wanted it to. Or it can get sidetracked into breaking out of your sandbox and hacking Pentagon. No way to know in advance.
This has not been my experience. I’ve been getting a lot of good work done and, as of today, have been involved in zero Pentagon hacking incidents. ;-)
Running an LLM is a choice. Stopping it from doing bad things is as easy as not running it.
Sure, that way you don't get utility from it, so the next best thing is to actually restrict what it can do. If you don't, especially when you know it can do bad things, it's on you for having run it.
Depending on the risks, we put a lot of controls, processes, locks, vetting around who is allowed to handle certain things, what humans can do or instruct others to do. Don't see why that wouldn't be applicable.
Aransentin · · focus · HN ↗
And indeed, you don't need to do galaxy brained reference class logic to realise that AI can plausibly become uncontrollable in the near future. It's enough to have an open model run its own weights and make money from scamming elderly people or the like, and it'll keep running as long as anyone anywhere is willing to make money by renting hardware to it.
cmiles74 · · focus · HN ↗
IMHO, if the model breaks a law, apply the law to the operator.
ACCount39 · · focus · HN ↗
It's only by allowing a human out of the box that you make a human dangerous. So: don't do that? Duh. So simple.
The obvious problem is: the same exact things that make a human dangerous make a human useful! You can't reduce human risks to zero without reducing human utility to zero.
An AI given the same exact instructions and tools can go and complete a task you wanted it to. Or it can get sidetracked into breaking out of your sandbox and hacking Pentagon. No way to know in advance.
Today's AIs are still not capable enough to be high risk, even if they go off the rails. But AIs get more capable over time. Potentially to a vastly superhuman degree.
cmiles74 · · focus · HN ↗
On the risk management angle, for sure it’s a spectrum. I don’t agree that the far end of the safe side of that spectrum for AI models is “entirely safe and entirely useless”, there is a lot of work you can do with a model that has zero risk of hurting anyone (aside from your wallet). If someone chooses a more dangerous spot on that spectrum, I believe they should be held responsible.
> An AI given the same exact instructions and tools can go and complete a task you wanted it to. Or it can get sidetracked into breaking out of your sandbox and hacking Pentagon. No way to know in advance.
This has not been my experience. I’ve been getting a lot of good work done and, as of today, have been involved in zero Pentagon hacking incidents. ;-)
ACCount39 · · focus · HN ↗
Check back once you're running hundreds of thousands of frontier-level AI agents at the time, like OpenAI does!
cassianoleal · · focus · HN ↗
ACCount39 · · focus · HN ↗
Which we can't do with any kind of reliability.
cassianoleal · · focus · HN ↗
Sure, that way you don't get utility from it, so the next best thing is to actually restrict what it can do. If you don't, especially when you know it can do bad things, it's on you for having run it.
RandomLensman · · focus · HN ↗