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It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

96 pointsby 2h agocalnewport.com
20 comments
51m agoHN ↗

100%. First stealing content from creators and pirating TBs of books. And now this. Baffles my mind that these labs can just get away with their 'rogue' agents trying to hack into other systems.

Imagine if a human did that. FBI would be knocking on their door.

Why are there zero consequences for these labs?

47m agoHN ↗

Why are there zero consequences for these labs?

Because they are seen as at the forefront of the next revolution in society and they’re not adversarial towards the US government.

Bluntly: anticipated net huge positive for the US as a whole.

35m agoHN ↗

not adversarial in obvious ways

but they are literally trying to build a superpower that exceeds the impact of the atomic bomb in an extragovernmental manner.

22m agoHN ↗

Somebody's going to build it. Not building it isn't an option. Would you rather the Chinese built it? The Russians? The Europeans? The Indians? A loose coalition of random hackers on the Internet, like the ones who build Linux?

19m agoHN ↗

At least random hackers seem to have codes of ethics.

16m agoHN ↗

Well, they'd presumably be different hackers than the ones who work on Linux. We don't know what would motivate them. Maybe they'll do it because they consider the next stage of man's intellectual evolution to be too important to leave up to a couple of American companies and the Trump administration. Maybe they'll do it for the proverbial lulz.

17m agoHN ↗

Logical fallacy, of the worst kind.

Firstly artificial superintelligence is a science fiction, it does not exist and it cannot be built using existing technology.

Second, plenty of stuff is possible to build, and is not built for one reason or another no matter how powerful. We never built our nukes in space for example. And there is exactly one reason why nukes in space was never built, and that reason is that we agreed not to.

13m agoHN ↗

Firstly artificial superintelligence is a science fiction, it does not exist and it cannot be built using existing technology.

By what authority do you claim this? Your school of thought has a really shitty track record of late.

11m agoHN ↗

The same authority that allows me to claim that teleportation transporters, hyperdrives, and holoemitters do not exist and cannot be built using existing technology.

15m agoHN ↗

It is sad to see how many times this narrative will continue to work. Across generations, humanity learns no lessons at all.

14m agoHN ↗

I'm being descriptive, not prescriptive. The "narrative" isn't intended to "work," except as a statement of fact.

13m agoHN ↗

Yes?

What's wrong with what the Chinese have already built? It's not theoretical in that case. GLM, and Kimi are running on my infra right now, and that's something that I can never do with OpenAI's models.

As for the others, what would be wrong about European AI? I'm not European, but I find them to be a continent of fine people, with strong ethical values, there's no reason they can't take the lead on this piece of technology while the US deals with its rather more pertinent electoral and healthcare issues.

19m agoHN ↗

but they are literally trying to build a superpower that exceeds the impact of the atomic bomb

Yes, it's a Great Power competition right now, much like the Space Race, Atomic Bomb, etc.

7m agoHN ↗

they are literally trying to build a superpower that exceeds the impact of the atomic bomb

I think people (the government, powers that be) have given away what they really think by their actions. There are few that take this seriously. The “exceeds the impact of the internet” view has much more support based on investment, but the “danger” aspect does not based on actions. If this was a company making novel prions or whatever that were outside regulation but obviously dangerous, government would be all over them. What regulation we do see is much more power grab than mitigating real danger

11m agoHN ↗

The argument for copyright violation is very weak. Yes, AI training reads much copyrighted material. So do researchers of all types. That's why there are academic libraries. A copyright violation only exists if what comes out is a close match to what went in. That's happened, but it was considered a bug and was fixed a year or two ago.

5m agoHN ↗

The argument might be weak if you base it on the current laws, but what they've done is 100% against the spirit and purpose of why the laws were created.

3m agoHN ↗

Most academic libraries are notoriously protective of their IP and researchers are definitely in copyright violation if they don’t pay significant fees for access.

Of course that is terrible, but it is one of the worst examples you could have given to make your point.

7m agoHN ↗

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.