Thread

AI companies in race to demonstrate their model most threatening to humanity

441 points · 399 comments · ljewalsh

chasd00 · 1790595720 · focus · HN ↗
I’ve never seen CEOs work so hard to make the public aware of how dangerous and out of control their flagship product is. It makes me automatically assume they’re scheming about something else like regulatory capture to protect their market.
1. hellweaver666 · 1790597785 · focus · HN ↗
  I have a theory... the call to slow down is not because of the true danger of LLM's but because they can't actually deliver the General AI they're promising in the near future. They will use their "caution" to justify their failure to deliver (and then when this excuse is played out they will blame regulation, energy costs or a million other things).
  1. mofeien · 1790599155 · focus · HN ↗
    When, in the past three years, has model progress seemed to decelerate to you, indicating some limit?
    The Statement on AI Extinction Risk is more than three years old, signed by the three CEOs: <a href="https://aistatement.com/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk" rel="nofollow">https://aistatement.com/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk
    They have been warning about AI extinction risk for years, and AI progress has only been accelerating.
    nsagent · 1790600627 · focus · HN ↗
    It's pretty telling that even with RL post-training the big labs have essentially made little progress on the hallucination rate of models. The issue is fundamental to the current paradigm, contrary to humans.
    GPT-6 Astra (max) has a hallucination rate of 51% and Claude Opus 5.5 (max) has a rate of 59% according to Artificial Analysis [1].
    AA-Omniscience Hallucination Rate (lower is better) measures how often the model answers incorrectly when it should have refused or admitted to not knowing the answer. It is defined as the proportion of incorrect answers out of all non-correct responses, i.e. incorrect / (incorrect + partial answers + not attempted)
    Full speed ahead like an idiot savant trying a thousand different possibilities, though half of which are without basis in reality.
    [1]:<a href="https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience#omniscience-hallucination-rate-tabs" rel="nofollow">https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience#omnisc...
    epihelix · 1790606885 · focus · HN ↗
    That benchmark doesn't mean what you think it means. (See the test description that you quoted.)
    A score of 51% means that out of the total answers the model failed to answer correctly (out of 6000 questions in the benchmark), 51% were factually incorrect rather than non-attempted or uncertain.
    This doesn't mean that Astra hallucinated 3060/6000 answers in the benchmark! (The hallucination rate could be 51% in that scenario only if Astra failed to answer a single question correctly.)
    If the model failed to give a correct answer to only 100 out of the 6000 questions, but gave a hallucinated answer to 51 of those rather than expressing uncertainty, that would also give a hallucination rate of 51%.
    It's a useful metric, but not what you're looking for here. The "Score" or "Accuracy" benchmarks are more what you're after.
    (The frontier models still generate hallucinations on this hard set of problems, but it's not as bad as you think.)

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