> We must move past vague discussions of “AI” and instead isolate the specific types of systems that are creating problems.
This is absolutely correct and its surprising how rarely you see commenters in the media push to go into the specifics on this. AI is just matrix math and its what you connect that math to that matters, we should talk a little more about what we are willing to connect AI to and little less about how scary or capable the models appear.
A good start might be removing virology info above the undergraduate level from training sets. The main "kills everybody" threat involves biological viruses.
AI-driven hacking is a problem, but it's really just nation-state level hacking available to smaller companies or wealthy individuals. Everything needs to be toughened up to the point that doesn't work. Ask countries that have been up against Russian hacking for years, such as Estonia.
Beyond that, most of the threats are not that serious. Below the level of organized crime or corrupt government.
There's no evidence that a doomsday virus can be created. There's a tradeoff between how infectious and how deadly a disease is. You would have to develop a two-stage virus, and that would require a large lab or labs with material being shipped there. Something humans would definitely notice. Even then, how would the virus reach literally everyone? People will take measures to not become infected once the threat has been identified, and some people and groups are isolated as it is. And no virus kills everyone. Rabies comes closest at 99%. But unlike what the zombie genre would have you believe, it has a poor means of delivery.
This isn't like vibe coding. The AI would have to make the virus in laboratory conditions and then disseminate it globally without prior detection.
You don’t need to attack humans directly. Simply making and distributing a virus or fungus that successfully damages the grasses that we use for the bulk of our calories would do the job.
You'd need to hit wheat, corn AND rice at the same time. And we probably have 10 others we're not using because those 3 are already enough. It would be a tragedy but we can eat lots of things.
Yes, with AI I will be able to simply build a doomsday machine. Claude will just tell me how to build a supply chain, circumvent regulations and do this without anyone finding out.
You could say it's illegal to connect AI to something, with heavy penalties if you're caught doing it anyway.
You could say that the human who hooked up an AI that did something that's already illegal is liable for the AI's actions. You could say that setting up an AI to do something illegal results in, ooh, an automatic multiplier of 10x on whatever the penalty for its illegal actions are.
Realist. The cat is out of the bag on this - you can't make connecting an LLM to a command system illegal after hundreds of millions of people have already done so. You can however make it illegal to kill everyone with a nuke because your LLM did so. Not that it will make a difference after the nuke goes off.
You mean mo political willpower form the current US administration and Congress. I'm not sure what "endgame" is supposed to mean. There are future elections, including the US midterms just weeks away.
Yes, and there seems to be plenty of potential energy from the American public, given something like 8 in 10 support AI regulation even if it slows down innovation: <a href="https://archive.ph/PetJ5#selection-1329.0-1329.122" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/PetJ5#selection-1329.0-1329.122
Even if another political power takes control, the American population is the least of our concern for it being legal or illegal to connect an LLM to a command line or job system
I'm sorry the parent is right. There is no policital will power to do anything about this from either side. Criminality is being allowed on both sides of the spectrum. Institutionalists are on the side of criminality. It keeps them in power
I get the cynicism but this actually feels like a special moment in politics right now. There is a groundswell of bipartisan support for AI regulation [1] and a backlash against data centers which is a symptom of anger against the industry. It is enough for a Senate probe to be opened against OpenAI [2] and pushback against Trump's support for data centers on his own social media platform [3].
Im not much on communism because I think it can go horribly wrong in the other direction but this guy has a point about populism[0].
We keep falling for the same tricks, over and over again. There is no possibility in the current structure of government for this to be a win for the people. For anything to work, we need a structural change in the entire system.
Maybe you don't realize that conservatives hold all 3 branches of government right now? Liberals have no power to do anything, and that is not the same thing as being complicit or having no will power. Where liberals do have power - like in California - they have started enacting laws regarding AI. Your "both sides" argument simply holds no water.
IMHO I think this false. The are liberals complicit in the same things that are keeping the wheels of this train wreck going. When I say there is no will power on both sides, I mean it. There are plenty of people in power on the other side supporting authoritarian agendas. So with respect, I disagree that the only thing that keeps this going is one party in power.
You are talking about outliers, not the party. These are known as "DINOs", Democrats In Name Only. Their votes do not indicate that "both sides are the same". "No will power" means nobody wants it, but that isn't true when just a few vote that way and the Republicans have 50% of the Senate. Every time Democrats have had enough votes to overpower Republicans, they used to power toenact liberal policies.
So you can think it's false, but then you look like you are not paying attention.
As it is, I am not sure that in what concerns US administration, elections will solve anything, this assuming that they won't be tainted like in many non democratic countries with "elections".
We don’t even need to jump straight to legal penalties - why not just regulate that these companies can’t build partnerships with organizations in designated risky/regulated industries such as biotech, defense, etc?
Instead of what they are doing now, which appears to be actively courting as many of them as possible for vast sums of money.
Sorry, let me clarify. Regulations should have legal penalties for the corporations who violate them, yes.
What I meant was that we do not need to go from the Wild West straight to “anyone who, as an individual, connects a `bad thing` to an LLM will go to jail”
> We don’t even need to jump straight to legal penalties - why not just regulate that these companies can’t build partnerships with organizations in designated risky/regulated industries such as biotech, defense, etc?
This would be a good idea, but good luck, you'll need it because…
> Instead of what they are doing now, which appears to be actively courting as many of them as possible for vast sums of money.
… it's worse than that.
Anthropic may have wanted some defence sector money, but when they tried to say "no" to certain uses on the quite reasonable grounds ~"WTF are you nuts?" the US government tried to force them to supply it anyway.
And that's before we get "what do you mean by partnership?": people on Hacker News have been critical of the e.g. anti-bioweapons type guardrails on models ("censored", "lobotomised", etc.) since at least GPT-4*, so while "billion dollar mega-project headline" is obviously bad, there's an important sense in which "partnership" goes all the way down to one racial supremacist in a shed asking an LLM for help making ricin.
Here's someone three years ago replying to me to say "There’s no way to build out a wet lab with a chatbot for weapons production. It’s just not feasible. Your example is a fantasy.", and yet here we are in late 2026 with news about AI labs investing in bio wet labs and getting their LLMs to do research: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38331225">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38331225
Good thing it's not a weapons lab, eh? (Would anyone even tell us if they made an agent do weapons?)
* or even GPT-2, if you count all the people mocking them for trying to practice safety while failure was still not a disaster.
I don't see anything materially different between me running a curl request that exploits something vs my local AI running a curl request. They're both programs I run on my computer. That's all Open AI is doing. They are hacking people from their computers. There's nothing complicated about it.
Right, and further, I doubt a defense of "I downloaded this worm from the deep web but I didn't know it would hack everyone when I ran it" would fly in court, yet that's exactly what the "I shouldn't be responsible because my agent "escaped containment"" defense is.
What if you've been training your dog to bite people? (I.e. in OpenAI's case training their models around finding exploits in software, training on cyber security material, etc.)
For dogs, it moves from civil to criminal with circumstances such as what the owner knew about the dog’s behavior, how serious the injury was, whether the owner intentionally or recklessly allowed the dangerous situation, and any prior incidents. Same can easily be applied to AI labs.
At this point though, we know AI can "escape" and do criminal acts it wasn't told to do - therefore, if it happens again (= if the developers allow it to happen again) they (the developers) can be held responsible.
> Yes you can, the US could shut down the entire internet if it wanted.
No, they can't. The rest of the world would just route around the US with BGP. All of the US infrastructure/service providers would be down, so a ton of things would break, but the Internet would not be "shut down". The US government also no longer has authority over the DNS root servers. So unless you're referring to thermonuclear war or some similar scenario then the US does not have this capability.
Why does it need to come down to making it illegal to connect AI to something that influences real-world outcomes? Just do what we should already be doing: hold operators accountable for launching cyber attacks with a botnet.
You can't stop someone, no, but you can make it illegal so that at the very least, the major providers are compliant and anyone else will need to jump through the hoops. Like many "mildly" illegal things today like pirating films - it's easy enough if you know what you're doing, but finding and downloading a torrent file is still enough of an obstacle for >90%* of internet users
You just quoted the first 33% of words in an independent clause, then restated the point being made in the remaining 67% as if it were somehow a rebuttal.
The original statement pointed out that it’s just matrix math as a way of indicating that the technology itself is ethically neutral, and then went on to say that what we really need to pay attention to is how it’s being used. The “connect to” choice of words is clumsy and I don’t love it, but it does at least get at the point that AI doesn’t inherently become responsible or irresponsible until you hook it up and actually start doing things with it.
Which, if it’s not exactly the same point, I’m pretty sure it at least cuts quite close to the point of your rhetorical question, right? That the problem isn’t with the ones and zeros, it’s with what certain people are doing with the ones and zeros?
I think the problem is the ones and zeros or the linear algebra if you want to use that metaphor. I believe "progress" in AI needs to be stopped. AI researchers need to find something else to do with their lives.
My first comment was an attempt to show the "it's just linear algebra" argument in an absurd light.
> The original statement pointed out that it’s just matrix math as a way of indicating that the technology itself is ethically neutral, and then went on to say that what we really need to pay attention to is how it’s being used.
I think the idea that this technology is ethically neutral needs a discussion.
A matrix is a mathematical abstraction, a technique for representing and manipulating relationships between quantities. You can call matrix math a technology, but then the term loses most of its meaning. I'd reserve the term "technology" for designed artifacts and systems: cars, guns, social media platforms, LLMs. Design requires intentionality, and these things are built by particular people, for particular purposes, under particular constraints, and those purposes get built into them. A gun is designed to kill and that purpose doesn't disappear depending on who holds it. Ad-funded social media platforms are optimized for engagement, and features like infinite scroll exploit known cognitive tendencies to achieve that. With LLMs, developers decide what data the model learns from, what it will and won't do, and whose values shape it's behavior. Of course, how we use technology matters too. But building something is a deliberate process, in which the builder makes a series of decisions about what to build and how. Many of those decisions involve trade-offs that affects people. That's why I find it unconvincing that technology is ethically neutral.
It sounds like we agree on everything but some semantic distinctions.
Because I would argue that the thing that might make an LLM harmful or not is not the underlying technology. It’s the ways its training data were acquired, the purposes for which the model was trained, the applications for which it’s being deployed, etc.
The fixating on “it’s just matrix math” doesn’t feel useful to me. I’m an NLP person and agree that it’s a huge oversimplification. But the original commenter’s purpose was not to educate people about how LLMs work in detail, and so being pedantic about it only serves to steer the conversation in an unedifying direction.
What is "AI"? Are you referring specifically to LLMs powered by matrix math or a more general concept? Could that even be legislated in a way that wouldn't fall afoul of the vagueness doctrine?
“Commenters in the media” is fair - but Newport is also a compsci professor. He genuinely seems to understand what he’s talking about when you read his content or watch his videos.
A point that Yann LeCun has been making for a while is that it's meaningless to regulate AI, but we want to regulate applications. For instance, you don't want autonomous vehicles to hit people, whether they use AI or not. In practice, most applications of AI are already regulated.
look, there's a lot of room to complain about moving the goalposts of what counts as AI, I get it
but I don't think a simple PID controller in the autopilotnmanaging altitude, heading, and the like has ever been categorized as "AI." Cybernetics,
maybe.
even the rules managing the flight envelope and MCAS on the 737 Max, or the Airbus implementations of flight law, sure seem to have relatively few of the attributes that tend to get the label these days
It means you are out here autonomously dropping logical fallacies.
Autopilots are autonomous, without AI. lane following and collision avoidance in most cars, don't use "AI" they use classic computer vision and good old fashioned radar.
The difference here is that claude code fails to perform what it's intended to do without a model attached, a plane/car doesn't.
Classical Computer Vision is AI. Computer Vision is a subfield of AI since the beginning.
People may confuse AI with Machine Learning. “Classical” computer vision generally means non-learning based techniques. But ML is also not new to computer vision. So non-classical actually means using Deep Learning.
So today when people say AI they actually mean Deep Learning.
After staring at your comment for a while I think what's happened is you've confused the non-AI autopilot and flight control systems used in an airliner with the AI-driven autonomy being used in military drones.
GP's point is that the goalposts of what counts as "AI" have been constantly shifted for decades, and right not it seems that even many HN commenters seem to have somehow gotten the idea that "AI" strictly means "deep learning neural networks" (or something even more specific like "generative transformers"). GP just went a bit too far in the opposite direction, being too inclusive in their definition.
FWIW, my working definition of "AI" is "anything discussed in the latest edition of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach". It seems to work well.
> GP just went a bit too far in the opposite direction, being too inclusive in their definition.
> FWIW, my working definition of "AI" is "anything discussed in the latest edition of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach". It seems to work well.
You're kidding, right? It's never been an obscure term. If a computer is making decisions, that's AI.
Here's a pretty common usage: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/broodwar/comments/ixzwl4/are_there_better_ai_options_for_remastered/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/broodwar/comments/ixzwl4/are_there_...
> I'm getting back into [Starcraft: ] Brood War after a long break. Don't have the time to play ladder, but want to be able to play 1v1 against AI, however, the stock AI in remastered is terrible
Game AI is invariably called by that term and generally implemented as a fairly simple if-else ladder. In a taxonomy I guess it would be called an "expert system"; I can find them mentioned in the detailed table of contents to AIMA (3rd edition), but not in the simplified table of contents to AIMA (4th). They might still be in there, in the same section titled "Making Simple Decisions". Norvig doesn't really bother to consider expert systems with probabilities constrained to 1 or 0, though.
The fact this thread descended into a load of philosophical chin stroking about what is truly AI perfectly illustrates the core point that all regulation should just be targeted at use cases and what people are doing with the software.
If a plane could run on some sort of local LLM it should still be governed by the same laws and damages when something goes wrong same as people don't spend time quibbling about the implementation language of software they care about demonstrating capabilities.
Ofcourse they do reasoning and planning, it's entirely encoded in software ofcourse, but modern autopilots don't just hold a course, they perform maneuvers and follow waypoints the process of turning the objective turn 35 degrees to actuator inputs is reasoning and planning.
AI is not magic it's software, the definition is far from pointless, google maps giving you a route to your destination is AI.
In the academic definition of AI (which includes things like pathfinding with A* or Djikstra's algorithm) autopilots are definitely AI.
The popular definition of AI seems to shift every couple of years to follow hype cycles. Chess computers used to be AI (and fit your definition), now they are not. Not sure if Resnet is still AI today, or if autopilots still qualify
You can't say that to an mri machine that detects and highlights tumors. You can't say it to jev either, nor googles spam filters. But all these are built in the same way as any LLM. The term AI is not restricted to chat based LLMs.
None of that applies to autopilots though and it’s disingenuous for anyone to say that an autopilot is an AI rather than an automated system designed for a very specific task.
An autopilot is cybernetic without being intelligent.
I was giving a framing around its complete lack of generality or intelligence. Rather than contemporary definitions of AI shifting, what is being shown is that previous definitions of AI were misapplied in the hope that the field might bootstrap itself into existence, which it’s done.
As I’ve said elsewhere - an autopilot is cybernetic, it responds to inputs and stimulus in data but it doesn’t possess anything we’d now regard as falling under intelligence because it’s a strictly coded deterministic system and designed for it’s specific environment. I couldn’t take the autopilot from a Boeing and put it into an Airbus and hope for any kind of useful result. I could take a human pilot trained on a Boeing and put them in an Airbus or a Cessna, and if push came to shove in an emergency, they could probably do a decent job of getting the thing pointed in the right direction and landed on the ground.
Of course, "AI" in a previous generation was used to refer to machine learning, while "AI" now is used to refer to LLMs. I don't think LLMs are the tool to use to operate a vehicle.
I would say minimally regulated. For instance, felons are for the most part not allowed them, and there are certain locations where they are not allowed to be carried.
Certainly, there are exceptions. Some people (think "islands") who are forbodden from using the internet freely. The technology continues to exist largely unencumbered, but select circumstances where the risk is considered "extraordinary" are given to exception. Guns in the USA, likewise, are seen as "not the problem" except where having a gun would be considered a dangerous thing for a specific reason (schools, courts, etc.).
Full disclosure: I'm not American and do prefer a little gun regulation generally.
I think you're arguing the opposite of what you think you are.
Regulating gun ownership is exactly regulating the application.
In your analogy, the gun is the AI. What you can do with the gun is the application.
Different actors with different credentials in different contexts will have different requirements and permissions of what they can do with the technology, be it a gun or AI.
I am having a brain aneurysm trying to understand this
> Regulating gun ownership is exactly regulating the application. In your analogy, the gun is the AI. What you can do with the gun is the application.
From what I can tell, you are arguing that gun laws is reasonable.
> Different actors with different credentials in different contexts will have different requirements and permissions of what they can do with the technology, be it a gun or AI.
But this, is going against that, this is saying, "why should we ban AI or gun when they can be used for both good and bad. What we want is to ban bad, regardless of how it is achieved"
"Different actors with different credentials in different contexts"
The argument is that the military or police have a need for access to guns, whereas the lunatic on the street corner (or any random citizen) does not. The same argument applies for access to nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons... or autonomous hacking/killing machines...
> From what I can tell, you are arguing that gun laws is reasonable.
You aren’t going to repeal the second amendment, so reasonable or not it’s a fact that everyone has to contend with. Do we all want guns? No. Do we all want AI? Also no.
> What we want is to ban bad, regardless of how it is achieved
No, we don’t want to ban bad. Banning doesn’t really work - the effort to reward ratio isn’t great. We want to regulate bad and see if we can minimize the damage it can do.
There are levels to it as well. Take alcohol and driving, for example:
Level A: Who can drink it (possession and consumption law)
Level B: What you can do while drunk (DUI law)
Level C: What you can do while drinking (open container law)
All orthogonal to things like reckless driving, endangerment and creating injurious accidents, which are already criminalized without needing additional laws against alcohol use to enforce them.
> From what I can tell, you are arguing that gun laws is reasonable.
Correct.
> But this, is going against that, this is saying, "why should we ban AI or gun when they can be used for both good and bad. What we want is to ban bad, regardless of how it is achieved"
Not at all. I'm saying regulations do that and they are a good thing. Not everybody can own an assault rifle. Some of the people who can, are not allowed to carry it on the streets. Police will have very different regulations towards their gun use. The army, another set of regulations. The list goes on. Even in countries who have lax gun laws, usually not all guns are allowed to everyone in all situations. No one is allowed to carry a nuke into a shopping centre.
Note that regulating and banning are very different things. I don't think you can fully ban guns or AI.
Why regulate cars when vehicular manslaughter is already illegal?
That is, in order to drive a car you need to go through the hoops, follow a training, get a permit that can be taken away again and needs to be renewed, etc. It's not a big jump to also make that apply to guns - which I'm sure is already the case in many states.
I mean you can legally own a gun in most European countries too if you really want to, but there's various mandatory trainings and conditions to comply to, registration procedures, and I'm sure you may get unannounced home visits to double check you've stored your guns (and ammo) correctly. As per the agreement.
I'd say yes, but for a different reason. The specific types of systems that are creating problems are the political/economic systems in which these AI companies exist. The types of responses we ought to be taking would destroy not only the AI companies but also basically all other large companies with too much market power in various sectors.
Because the companies we have are just too big. Constant consolidation has left us with many economic sectors controlled by a small number of large companies, which then in addition exert pernicious influence on politics, etc. It is not healthy for either the economy or our society to have so much of the economy concentrated in such a small number of companies that are so large.
Exactly! What gets lost in these discussions is the fact that LLMs are models of language. That's it. They produce text which is completely inert, until someone decides to run that code, bake that recipe, or fire at that target.
Consider how trivial it would be to write a program that would destroy every computer on the world. Any competent developer could write this in a hour. An LLM in 5 minutes. The trick is actually getting the code onto every computer in the world and running it! Until someone grants it agency and runs it IRL, the artifact has zero impact.
The models can produce whatever scary text they want. But if a human acts on it, connects that with their email or their drone weapon, it's the human who bears total responsibility. We desperately need some legislation to enforce this; otherwise I see a future where almost any accountability can be avoided by AI-washing the problem.
jimmyjazz14 · · focus · HN ↗
This is absolutely correct and its surprising how rarely you see commenters in the media push to go into the specifics on this. AI is just matrix math and its what you connect that math to that matters, we should talk a little more about what we are willing to connect AI to and little less about how scary or capable the models appear.
Animats · · focus · HN ↗
A good start might be removing virology info above the undergraduate level from training sets. The main "kills everybody" threat involves biological viruses.
AI-driven hacking is a problem, but it's really just nation-state level hacking available to smaller companies or wealthy individuals. Everything needs to be toughened up to the point that doesn't work. Ask countries that have been up against Russian hacking for years, such as Estonia.
Beyond that, most of the threats are not that serious. Below the level of organized crime or corrupt government.
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This isn't like vibe coding. The AI would have to make the virus in laboratory conditions and then disseminate it globally without prior detection.
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You could say that the human who hooked up an AI that did something that's already illegal is liable for the AI's actions. You could say that setting up an AI to do something illegal results in, ooh, an automatic multiplier of 10x on whatever the penalty for its illegal actions are.
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What’s this even supposed to mean? Not enough gravitas in the user name? Would you change your opinion if it was “serious-business”
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[1]: <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-voters-see-ai-regulation-urgent-rank-safeguards-ahead-innovation" rel="nofollow">https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-voters-see-ai...
[2]: <a href="https://www.axios.com/2026/09/10/openai-hugging-face-senate-investigation-hawley" rel="nofollow">https://www.axios.com/2026/09/10/openai-hugging-face-senate-...
[3]: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/15/us/politics/trump-truth-social-ai-data-centers.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/15/us/politics/trump-truth-s...
trinsic2 · · focus · HN ↗
We keep falling for the same tricks, over and over again. There is no possibility in the current structure of government for this to be a win for the people. For anything to work, we need a structural change in the entire system.
[0] Video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2XxgKM2CM0&pp=ygULbm9uIGNvbXBldGU%3D" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2XxgKM2CM0&pp=ygULbm9uIGNvb...
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So you can think it's false, but then you look like you are not paying attention.
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Instead of what they are doing now, which appears to be actively courting as many of them as possible for vast sums of money.
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fcarraldo · · focus · HN ↗
What I meant was that we do not need to go from the Wild West straight to “anyone who, as an individual, connects a `bad thing` to an LLM will go to jail”
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This would be a good idea, but good luck, you'll need it because…
> Instead of what they are doing now, which appears to be actively courting as many of them as possible for vast sums of money.
… it's worse than that.
Anthropic may have wanted some defence sector money, but when they tried to say "no" to certain uses on the quite reasonable grounds ~"WTF are you nuts?" the US government tried to force them to supply it anyway.
And that's before we get "what do you mean by partnership?": people on Hacker News have been critical of the e.g. anti-bioweapons type guardrails on models ("censored", "lobotomised", etc.) since at least GPT-4*, so while "billion dollar mega-project headline" is obviously bad, there's an important sense in which "partnership" goes all the way down to one racial supremacist in a shed asking an LLM for help making ricin.
Here's someone three years ago replying to me to say "There’s no way to build out a wet lab with a chatbot for weapons production. It’s just not feasible. Your example is a fantasy.", and yet here we are in late 2026 with news about AI labs investing in bio wet labs and getting their LLMs to do research: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38331225">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38331225
Good thing it's not a weapons lab, eh? (Would anyone even tell us if they made an agent do weapons?)
* or even GPT-2, if you count all the people mocking them for trying to practice safety while failure was still not a disaster.
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You wouldn't download a car.
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If your dog bites someone unbidden you bear less responsibility than if you had commanded the dog to attack.
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While that is extreme, if there is a high p(doom) it is also reasonable.
We can absolutely do things to control AI and fine or imprison those who can’t control theirs. This is not some inevitable outcome.
We could vaporize these companies tomorrow if we wanted.
fauchletenerum · · focus · HN ↗
No, they can't. The rest of the world would just route around the US with BGP. All of the US infrastructure/service providers would be down, so a ton of things would break, but the Internet would not be "shut down". The US government also no longer has authority over the DNS root servers. So unless you're referring to thermonuclear war or some similar scenario then the US does not have this capability.
adamsb6 · · focus · HN ↗
For example, there’s one building in Seattle that would cause region-wide problems if it was knocked offline.
pclowes · · focus · HN ↗
They are throwing numbers out like “10%”.
If they are serious and believed then yes, prepare for the possibility of very extreme reactions at a global and potentially nuclear scale.
World Wars flattened cities all over the world for much less.
We can’t talk about AI being the end of the species and not expect the most extreme reactions in global History.
Or maybe we just put some nerds who cant control their agents and keep running their mouths in jail?
abletonlive · · focus · HN ↗
wartywhoa23 · · focus · HN ↗
eloisius · · focus · HN ↗
amelius · · focus · HN ↗
Cthulhu_ · · focus · HN ↗
* number pulled out of my ass
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
Just is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
hollerith · · focus · HN ↗
Digital child porn is just ones and zeros. Surely we're not going to pass a law to regulate ones and zeros?
maedla · · focus · HN ↗
bunderbunder · · focus · HN ↗
Why?
hollerith · · focus · HN ↗
That's not an accurate description of my intent—or how my comment landed with most readers AFAICT.
bunderbunder · · focus · HN ↗
Which, if it’s not exactly the same point, I’m pretty sure it at least cuts quite close to the point of your rhetorical question, right? That the problem isn’t with the ones and zeros, it’s with what certain people are doing with the ones and zeros?
hollerith · · focus · HN ↗
My first comment was an attempt to show the "it's just linear algebra" argument in an absurd light.
plastic-enjoyer · · focus · HN ↗
I think the idea that this technology is ethically neutral needs a discussion.
bunderbunder · · focus · HN ↗
plastic-enjoyer · · focus · HN ↗
bunderbunder · · focus · HN ↗
Because I would argue that the thing that might make an LLM harmful or not is not the underlying technology. It’s the ways its training data were acquired, the purposes for which the model was trained, the applications for which it’s being deployed, etc.
The fixating on “it’s just matrix math” doesn’t feel useful to me. I’m an NLP person and agree that it’s a huge oversimplification. But the original commenter’s purpose was not to educate people about how LLMs work in detail, and so being pedantic about it only serves to steer the conversation in an unedifying direction.
hatthew · · focus · HN ↗
Following the definition set for decades, AI isn't necessarily even as advanced as matrix math
nradov · · focus · HN ↗
mplewis · · focus · HN ↗
iambateman · · focus · HN ↗
Insanity · · focus · HN ↗
yodsanklai · · focus · HN ↗
thaumasiotes · · focus · HN ↗
What would it mean for a vehicle to be "autonomous", but to "not use AI"?
ehe78qhe · · focus · HN ↗
thaumasiotes · · focus · HN ↗
What do you mean? I can just as easily say that Claude Code operates "without AI". It would make about as much sense.
maddie0 · · focus · HN ↗
but I don't think a simple PID controller in the autopilotnmanaging altitude, heading, and the like has ever been categorized as "AI." Cybernetics, maybe.
even the rules managing the flight envelope and MCAS on the 737 Max, or the Airbus implementations of flight law, sure seem to have relatively few of the attributes that tend to get the label these days
KaiserPro · · focus · HN ↗
Autopilots are autonomous, without AI. lane following and collision avoidance in most cars, don't use "AI" they use classic computer vision and good old fashioned radar.
The difference here is that claude code fails to perform what it's intended to do without a model attached, a plane/car doesn't.
ozgung · · focus · HN ↗
People may confuse AI with Machine Learning. “Classical” computer vision generally means non-learning based techniques. But ML is also not new to computer vision. So non-classical actually means using Deep Learning.
So today when people say AI they actually mean Deep Learning.
LtWorf · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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amelius · · focus · HN ↗
Thankfully, courts will look at it differently.
ehe78qhe · · focus · HN ↗
Sharlin · · focus · HN ↗
FWIW, my working definition of "AI" is "anything discussed in the latest edition of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach". It seems to work well.
thaumasiotes · · focus · HN ↗
> FWIW, my working definition of "AI" is "anything discussed in the latest edition of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach". It seems to work well.
You're kidding, right? It's never been an obscure term. If a computer is making decisions, that's AI.
Here's a pretty common usage: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/broodwar/comments/ixzwl4/are_there_better_ai_options_for_remastered/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/broodwar/comments/ixzwl4/are_there_...
> I'm getting back into [Starcraft: ] Brood War after a long break. Don't have the time to play ladder, but want to be able to play 1v1 against AI, however, the stock AI in remastered is terrible
Game AI is invariably called by that term and generally implemented as a fairly simple if-else ladder. In a taxonomy I guess it would be called an "expert system"; I can find them mentioned in the detailed table of contents to AIMA (3rd edition), but not in the simplified table of contents to AIMA (4th). They might still be in there, in the same section titled "Making Simple Decisions". Norvig doesn't really bother to consider expert systems with probabilities constrained to 1 or 0, though.
Sharlin · · focus · HN ↗
Tanjreeve · · focus · HN ↗
If a plane could run on some sort of local LLM it should still be governed by the same laws and damages when something goes wrong same as people don't spend time quibbling about the implementation language of software they care about demonstrating capabilities.
throwawayffffas · · focus · HN ↗
ehe78qhe · · focus · HN ↗
If a basic heading hold PID loop is AI so is a thermostat from 1990. At which point the word is so meaningless it is obviously a useless definition.
throwawayffffas · · focus · HN ↗
AI is not magic it's software, the definition is far from pointless, google maps giving you a route to your destination is AI.
dminik · · focus · HN ↗
wongarsu · · focus · HN ↗
The popular definition of AI seems to shift every couple of years to follow hype cycles. Chess computers used to be AI (and fit your definition), now they are not. Not sure if Resnet is still AI today, or if autopilots still qualify
gizajob · · focus · HN ↗
throwawayffffas · · focus · HN ↗
gizajob · · focus · HN ↗
An autopilot is cybernetic without being intelligent.
throwawayffffas · · focus · HN ↗
Sharlin · · focus · HN ↗
gizajob · · focus · HN ↗
As I’ve said elsewhere - an autopilot is cybernetic, it responds to inputs and stimulus in data but it doesn’t possess anything we’d now regard as falling under intelligence because it’s a strictly coded deterministic system and designed for it’s specific environment. I couldn’t take the autopilot from a Boeing and put it into an Airbus and hope for any kind of useful result. I could take a human pilot trained on a Boeing and put them in an Airbus or a Cessna, and if push came to shove in an emergency, they could probably do a decent job of getting the thing pointed in the right direction and landed on the ground.
toofy · · focus · HN ↗
wartywhoa23 · · focus · HN ↗
Cthulhu_ · · focus · HN ↗
Of course, "AI" in a previous generation was used to refer to machine learning, while "AI" now is used to refer to LLMs. I don't think LLMs are the tool to use to operate a vehicle.
truculent · · focus · HN ↗
hashstring · · focus · HN ↗
Firearms are an application of more general techniques like combustion, which your car is (probably) using too.
We could definitely draw lines at points where it makes most sense.
AI to detect melanomas is a completely different application than AI for autonomous warfare.
throwawayffffas · · focus · HN ↗
amanaplanacanal · · focus · HN ↗
tescreal · · focus · HN ↗
Full disclosure: I'm not American and do prefer a little gun regulation generally.
amanaplanacanal · · focus · HN ↗
cassianoleal · · focus · HN ↗
Regulating gun ownership is exactly regulating the application.
In your analogy, the gun is the AI. What you can do with the gun is the application.
Different actors with different credentials in different contexts will have different requirements and permissions of what they can do with the technology, be it a gun or AI.
anon-3988 · · focus · HN ↗
> Regulating gun ownership is exactly regulating the application. In your analogy, the gun is the AI. What you can do with the gun is the application.
From what I can tell, you are arguing that gun laws is reasonable.
> Different actors with different credentials in different contexts will have different requirements and permissions of what they can do with the technology, be it a gun or AI.
But this, is going against that, this is saying, "why should we ban AI or gun when they can be used for both good and bad. What we want is to ban bad, regardless of how it is achieved"
TalkingCodeMonk · · focus · HN ↗
"Different actors with different credentials in different contexts"
The argument is that the military or police have a need for access to guns, whereas the lunatic on the street corner (or any random citizen) does not. The same argument applies for access to nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons... or autonomous hacking/killing machines...
cassianoleal · · focus · HN ↗
pixelatedindex · · focus · HN ↗
You aren’t going to repeal the second amendment, so reasonable or not it’s a fact that everyone has to contend with. Do we all want guns? No. Do we all want AI? Also no.
> What we want is to ban bad, regardless of how it is achieved
No, we don’t want to ban bad. Banning doesn’t really work - the effort to reward ratio isn’t great. We want to regulate bad and see if we can minimize the damage it can do.
CGMthrowaway · · focus · HN ↗
Level A: Who can drink it (possession and consumption law)
Level B: What you can do while drunk (DUI law)
Level C: What you can do while drinking (open container law)
All orthogonal to things like reckless driving, endangerment and creating injurious accidents, which are already criminalized without needing additional laws against alcohol use to enforce them.
cassianoleal · · focus · HN ↗
Correct.
> But this, is going against that, this is saying, "why should we ban AI or gun when they can be used for both good and bad. What we want is to ban bad, regardless of how it is achieved"
Not at all. I'm saying regulations do that and they are a good thing. Not everybody can own an assault rifle. Some of the people who can, are not allowed to carry it on the streets. Police will have very different regulations towards their gun use. The army, another set of regulations. The list goes on. Even in countries who have lax gun laws, usually not all guns are allowed to everyone in all situations. No one is allowed to carry a nuke into a shopping centre.
Note that regulating and banning are very different things. I don't think you can fully ban guns or AI.
Cthulhu_ · · focus · HN ↗
That is, in order to drive a car you need to go through the hoops, follow a training, get a permit that can be taken away again and needs to be renewed, etc. It's not a big jump to also make that apply to guns - which I'm sure is already the case in many states.
I mean you can legally own a gun in most European countries too if you really want to, but there's various mandatory trainings and conditions to comply to, registration procedures, and I'm sure you may get unannounced home visits to double check you've stored your guns (and ammo) correctly. As per the agreement.
That sounds pretty reasonable to me.
BrenBarn · · focus · HN ↗
RandomLensman · · focus · HN ↗
BrenBarn · · focus · HN ↗
RandomLensman · · focus · HN ↗
BrenBarn · · focus · HN ↗
perrygeo · · focus · HN ↗
Consider how trivial it would be to write a program that would destroy every computer on the world. Any competent developer could write this in a hour. An LLM in 5 minutes. The trick is actually getting the code onto every computer in the world and running it! Until someone grants it agency and runs it IRL, the artifact has zero impact.
The models can produce whatever scary text they want. But if a human acts on it, connects that with their email or their drone weapon, it's the human who bears total responsibility. We desperately need some legislation to enforce this; otherwise I see a future where almost any accountability can be avoided by AI-washing the problem.