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.

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

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

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.

Somebody's going to build it. Not building it isn't an option.

It turns out that is, in fact, an option. Even if someone else will do a bad thing, it does not make it acceptable for you to do said bad thing.

That is sort of like saying, "somebody's going to kill all the polar bears. Not wiping them out is not an option. If we do it, then at least we get to keep the cool bearskins."

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.

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

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.

It's past time.

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.

Why aren't they running agents on isolated computers without Internet access?

They probably will soon, but even air-gapping may not be enough. See stuxnet for instance

as humanity’s only hope against the defied powers of superintelligent AI. This summer, in some sense, was their attempt to induct the rest of us into this long-held ideology

Should be "deified," but yes, well said. I also just read about how Jenses Huang is basically trying to tell people to believe AI will help or save us, although we have to let it hurt us first.

As Jensen Huang puts it, AI can help fight climate change — but only if it inflicts “an enormous amount of pain and suffering” first.

This feels like a religious cult where leaders make people embrace death and destruction in order make money off them.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/1000140/jensen-huang-nvidia-ai...

This is a wrong-headed attempt to regulate AI. The real problems are different.

AI systems, especially multi-agent ones that can do things, are more akin to corporations, than individuals. When you read the logs from the Hugging Face incident, you're seeing something that looks a lot like internal corporate emails. Various units of the organization are arguing over what to do and who does what. They eventually converge and get the job done, breaking the rules at times. This is normal corporate behavior.

When agentic AIs do something outside their own internal world, they do it by engaging in transactions with external systems and people. As yet, few have robots to do their bidding. So, again, this is normal corporate behavior.

A corporation is a goal-seeking system. In theory, if you agree with Milton Friedman, its sole purpose is to maximize shareholder value. Internally, within the company, there are subgoals, which exist to support the top level goal. That, too, is what multi-agent AIs do.

The uncomfortable place this thinking leads is that AI regulation and corporate regulation are very similar. That's not something the political part of the world wants to think about too hard. It would mean putting more constraints on corporate power.

Yet that can't be ignored, because we're likely to see corporations where some parts are AI and some parts are human. That's already been done a few times as a demo, not too successfully. Yet. It's going to hit hard when an AI-run company outperforms a human one.

Private enterprise as it's being run in the US especially under the Trump administration ( where a few billions tossed at the right people ) will get you all kinds of favors and look asides.

Hopefully once the dems win back the house, we will see some regulation.

Up until now it's been a capitalists' wet dream!