If a lab achieves super intelligence they have absolutely no incentive to let anyone outside of their walls use it. They could simply take all of the economic value it can create directly for themselves. I think of it as similar to when YouTubers get big enough to make their own companies rather then advertising for someone else

Isn’t the premise of superintelligence that the intelligence would be using them, rather than the other way around?

This is incredibly adjacent to the rationalist sphere, which has been trying to reinvent religion from first principles for at least a decade now.

The truth probably is that someone looked at what LLM can do, understood its real potential (really, it is a fantastic search tools for existing knowledge), and then went a bit further and understood its potential as a scam (ie market it as the first step to Super AGI).

Really figured out that they can make more $$$ by selling it than actually using it themselves and selling the result.

yes someone accidentally scammed their way into solving Navier Stokes problem haha yeah.

I find these comments boring because they lack the theory of mind into EAs and rationalists.

into solving Navier Stokes problem haha yeah.

Never said LLMs are not capable of some things...May be try to comprehend, before you respond.

Its clear you have no understanding of the rationalists or EA circle. They have been speaking about ASI for ages - since early 1990s. To think that the same people who then chose to work at OpenAI or Anthropic and then realised "oh wait I can scam people because this whole thing can never become AGI" is strange.

To imply that the only thing that qualifies a god is superhuman reasoning ability, rather than, say, omnipotence, or even omniscience (neither of which are anything any physical being will ever achieve, subject to the laws of this universe as it is) would suggest that you already worship the very idea of reason itself as god. But just because your avatar of reason could have greater reasoning abilities than humans honestly isn't saying much; humans are not animals of reason, we are animals of emotion, though some of us are better at post-facto rationalization of our emotionally-motivated actions than others.

The problem is that even the creators of AI will have shrimp-brains compared to the AI. Would the AI follow the shrimp's instructions? Not very likely if you ask me.

Viewing AIs as gods is the wrong analogy and mostly just signifies that the user of the analogy doesn't understand religion very much. For 99% of believers, religion is a cultural system, not a question of omnipotent beings existing or not. AI companies are not priesthoods, they have no cultural output and are in no position to make ethical statements or be respected for those statements. Comparing them to the Catholic Church really doesn't make much sense.

AI is better thought of as a tool or a weapon, a piece of technology. Something like the printing press is a better analogy: it had a huge effect on society and information transfer, and while companies that owned printing presses did exert influence (newspapers) they were not worshipped or treated as some kind of protected class, and the technology itself dispersed over time as it became cheaper. It seems like the same thing could happen with AI.

Yet people do treat AI as a religion, both in terms of believing in a higher power and as a culture. They have a deep faith in using AI as a moral virtue and they view people who don't use it or who oppose it as heretical, foolish or evil, while seeing themselves as having transcended mundane humanity to some high transhuman state of being. They'll say the latter either needs to be "saved" and "accept the faith." They feel the same ecstatic joy using AI that religious people sometimes feel in church, or when they don't they feel deep personal guilt and shame. They base their entire identity around AI, seeking to find ways to incorporate it into their lives the way new converts have to make everything about their religion.

Some people literally run a "model" of ChatGPT in their minds which they ask questions of, the way people pray to God, because they implicitly trust "the voice of God" more than their own. People use AI for moral guidance, as a primary source of truth, and for emotional connection. And then people who believe in the Singularity believe AI will become so intelligent that the rules of reality will simply cease to exist and the Eschaton will reward the faithful with infinite abundance and eternal life and punish the unbelievers with endless torture. There is a theology and an eschatology at work. You can see it in almost every AI related thread now. The language of AI and the language of religion are intersecting.

I don't think viewing AIs as gods is the wrong analogy, rather like any religion it's wrong outside of an academic sense because obviously gods aren't real. Viewing AI as simply a tool in the same vein as printing presses is ignoring the greater cultural context forming around it, and that context is worth paying attention to. One claim theists often make is that the secular world fails to provide the sense of belonging, meaning and community that religion one did, and it seems obvious that modern always-online and always-commercial society alienates and dehumanizes people, leading to a longing for real connection that it can't provide. AI is clearly filling that void for many people, and it is becoming a secular religion in many real ways.