Thread

LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents

399 points · 752 comments · Anon84

lukewarm707 · 1791068851 · focus · HN ↗
Per <a href="https://trace.manifund.org/" rel="nofollow">https://trace.manifund.org/ a total of $2,846,125,859 USD has been wired into 'ai safety' causes, many involving ai consciousness and p(doom).
The outcome of this 'safety' is restricting public access to AI and giving a monopoly of access to the industry. This is the ai nonprofit-industrial complex actively concentrating monopoly power in Anthropic in particular as creator, interpreter and safety regulator of AI.
Much of the $2.8bn listed is indirectly, from Anthropic and EA. Three of the four people who participated in the $125m Anthropic Series A are now folding their 1000x Anthropic return into AI 'safety'. Some is from FTX/Alameda, which invested 86% of the Series B.
Dustin Moskovitz: Facebook/Asana/Anthropic Series A, funds EA Good Ventures, transferred to Coefficient Giving, then $1.5bn into ai safety. $500m of Anthropic into an unknown foundation. Funding: $160m to Resolution (alignment research), $93m to Epoch AI (investigating the trajectory of AI), $63m to Redwood Research (oai report), $67m to MATS ( EA type alignment and security researchers), Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, Fund for Alignment Research, $53m to Kairos (building talent infrastructure for AI safety), $32m to Bluedot (online safety courses), $15m to MIRI (Yudkowsky).
Jaan Tallinn: Led the Series A, now $10bn in Anthropic. Funds $199m (85%) of the Survival and Flourishing Fund, then $161m to AI safety including $14m to lightcone (Lesswrong, Lighthouse). $10m to BERI (existential risks), Palisade Research (studying AI capabilities to prevent loss of control.) PauseAI, MIRI, METR etc. Much of what Coefficient funds.
Eric Schmidt: Anthropic Series A, $72m to AI safety via Schmidt Sciences. Over $1m per individual AI2050 researcher.
FTX: Led the Anthropic Series B, bankruptcy estate sold $884m of Anthropic in 2024; $40m to AI Safety. Same orgs, Redwood, Lightcone, etc.
Ruairí Donnelly (Chief of Staff FTX): FTX tokens plus assorted donors, $91m to AI safety via Macroscopic Ventures. $15m to Cooperative AI (currently whitewashing openai under 'multiagent safety')
1. api · 1791070467 · focus · HN ↗
  There's absolutely no way these companies can justify their insane valuations unless they can legislate a barrier to entry and create an oligopoly.
  There's no moat. I can literally sit here in Zed or Pi or any other third party harness and switch models in the middle of a task and it's typically fine. Sometimes a model will get stuck and that's just what I'll do.
  Combined with competition and open weights models, that means the price is going to go to fall until AI tokens cost a small premium over the cost of the hardware and electricity.
  That's assuming improvements in algorithms and specialized silicon doesn't eventually lead to an efficient accelerator that can run a frontier model locally. It'll be a while but I don't see any fundamental barrier. High bandwidth flash storage is coming, and that'll radically cut the RAM side of that cost. Pair that with a pipelined TPU accelerator and you're cooking.
  Now look at Anthropic's proposed IPO valuation. It's insane unless they can own the market or share it with a cartel of maybe 1-2 other behemoths, and this is the only way they can do that.
  1. Loquebantur · 1791073681 · focus · HN ↗
    That is certainly part of the motivation for the big US AI brands to engage in calling their inept developer mistakes "AI breaking loose".
    But that doesn't take away from the real issues and dangers AI poses?
  2. ItsMattyG · 1791075821 · focus · HN ↗
    To me it seems the opposite. There's a few companies in the world that have enough compute to train and serve frontier models.
    As the frontier gets smarter and more useful prices will only go up, as they are set to replace jobs being paid six or seven figures a year - the demand for as much inference on these models for as long as possible will be astronomical, but compute starting in 2030 will not be keeping up.
    Eventually prices will fall for assistants but the frontier will be the most profitable thing in the world, and the top companies basically already have oligopolies due to their ridiculously expensive compute investments.
    api · 1791080665 · focus · HN ↗
    > There's a few companies in the world that have enough compute to train and serve frontier models.
    Train: yes, for now.
    Host: depends on the scale. At a small scale a wealthy individual could easily build a rig in their basement to host one of these things. At larger scale any cloud company could do it, and many already have the compute on site. At large scale this is true... again, for now.
    What you say only holds (in the absence of a state oligopoly) if two conditions are met: (1) AI performance does not asymptote any time soon due to running out of training data or other scaling limitations, and (2) these companies are able to stay at the frontier.
    There's little to no moat, so staying at the frontier will be a game of investing massively in compute, talent, and R&D, and they can never stop.
    rubikscube09 · 1791080937 · focus · HN ↗
    what suggests that we will hit an asymptote any time soon? Agree with you on the second part. The ever elusive frontier will probably always be changing hands after some point.
    ItsMattyG · 1791085016 · focus · HN ↗
    Again, there is a moat based on compute. If the thesis is right, cost of compute will only rise... As it is as you say someone will have it be quite wealthy to host something like Astra with trillions of parameters, but that cost will only rise with demand for serving these frontier models.
    api · 1791154500 · focus · HN ↗
    That hasn’t been true for anything else in computing, ever. The cost falls with scale.
    Look at general compute, storage, graphics, networks, anything. Demand increases. Price goes down. There are price spikes, such as right now with RAM, but they’re transient. The trend is more faster cheaper and it won’t end until we hit actual physical limits. We are not close.
    ItsMattyG · 1791164878 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, of course Eventually prices will go down... But there will be a period where things are much more expensive, based on simple inability to make much more gpus than the current rollouts demand.
    And after that period when costs are going up due to gpus replacing workers... All bets are off on terms of what the economy even looks like
  3. brcmthrowaway · 1791130461 · focus · HN ↗
    Is there really no moat?
  4. pixl97 · 1791136772 · focus · HN ↗
    Unless you're a really old fart, people were talking about AI safety long before you were born. AI safety issues do not go away depending on who gets funding. AI safety issues do not go away if the US or China makes the model. AI safety issues do not go away if it's an open or closed model. AI safety issue do not go away if the model is running at your home or at a data center. AI safety issues do not go away if $1 is being spent or $1 trillion dollars is being spent.
    The fact there is no moat makes things far more dangerous. When LLMs start acting like weapons governments will treat them like weapons much to your dismay, crying, and gnashing of teeth as your door is kicked in and you're dragged out by armed men for running one.
    Cast away your preconceptions for one moment and think "What will the future look like if LLMs are/can be actually dangerous".
    api · 1791159715 · focus · HN ↗
    I'd never claim AI can't be dangerous. It's a technology, and a powerful one, so of course it can. All technologies can be dangerous. The first early hominid to sharpen a stick probably spent some time regretting it. "Maybe we are not ready for sharp sticks..."
    I'm specifically responding to the much stronger claims of people like Yudkowski and numerous other "AI safetyists" who assert very unlikely or in some cases impossible runaway superintelligence magical god machine scenarios.
    I'd rank the risks as:
    (1) Mass youth unemployment and an economy with zero entry level jobs, maybe not even that many mid level jobs, and even higher wealth inequality. This will lead to extreme political instability and populist revolts and revolutions, and unfortunately history shows that the new boss is worse than the old boss >50% of the time (at least, probably conservative).
    (2) Mass propaganda, disinformation, and con artistry at scale, basically what we've already seen with mass manipulation through social media but supercharged. I think it's already happening but I also think we're in the early days.
    (3) Automated mass surveillance and automated policing paired with authoritarianism, which could easily emerge from (1) and (2). Not only is Big Brother watching, but Big Brother is carefully evaluating everything he sees in real time and has a drone army to dispatch in seconds. The "prison planet" scenario (not the Alex Jones fever dream, but the realistic one).
    What all those have in common is: the AI didn't do it. The AI (if it's ever sentient at all) is wholly innocent. All the likely nightmare scenarios I can imagine result from malicious or just short-sighted human agency amplified by AI.
    Just like the sharp stick. The stick didn't do it. Someone stabbed someone with the stick.
    The wild sci-fi superintelligent "Skynet" scenarios detract from discussion of those scenarios. Instead of discussing the very real, very plausible, already actually happening AI risks, we're talking about scenarios from soft sci-fi and Anime.
    I wonder if a motive to heavily fund this type of "safetyism" is that all the scenarios above (the realistic ones) lead to discussions of things like wealth inequality, whether we should have universal health care or basic income, whether our system of taxation would have to change in fundamental ways, or what new limits should be placed on surveillance or policing in the AI age.
    Those are discussions the very rich and the political class don't want to have. They'd rather us worry about Roko's Basilisk or magical runaway superintelligence inventing nanobots, wild bullshit that won't happen.
    It's the same reason those powers would rather people argue about the culture war or inane conspiracy theories. I guess Yudkowskiism is the inane conspiracism of the AI safety discourse, a great distraction.

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