LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents
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LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
lukewarm707 · · focus · HN ↗
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')
api · · focus · HN ↗
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.
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
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.