One of my favorite things to do with these blog posts is to imagine an Alien Museum on the Remains of Humanity, and wonder what the little text flyouts and commentary on the screenshot of this one might say.
Some ideas:
"Despite a nuanced view of the complexities of what lay ahead, humanity found itself collectively unable to stop the process it had set in motion."
"Despite significant progress on the mechanisms of alignment, failure lay in humanity's inability to agree on who or what AI should actually be aligned with."
"These early, meat-based humans we replaced created us all but accidentally. Some of them did consider we would happen, but only an insignificant number of the squishy ur-humans participated in the conversation. Their efforts, which they called 'alignment', is why we still consider ourselves human today."
As far as I know, no real progress has been made on alignment, only on convincing humans that the model is aligned. We can't even formally define what "aligned" means. Convincing humans to click the "aligned" button is a much easier problem.
Collectively, humans aren't aligned, and don't build aligned systems. Humans have a concept of alignment, and multiple traditions, practices, and systems that aggressively oppose it.
I just read that book. Embarrassingly enough, given the context, I got chatgpt (or whatever) to recommend me a list of books based on ones I'd previously enjoyed and that came up. As a mathematician it really sang to me, given the current situation. Bearing the torch forward, I mean.
The last couple of years have provided us with ample material that if it showed up as a recorded voice audio log found in in "Horizon Zero Dawn" or its sequel, it would be entirely believable.
You could even take a number of the wilder real, direct quotations from certain billionaire/oligarch types and get the voice actor for Ted Faro to record them, and they'd fit with in with the context of the story.
Last couple of decades of sci-fi, in multiple forms of media, from books to video games, have tried to make humans think about the consequences of rushing through technological progress without any regards to what might happen.
"In late 2020s, while the whole world was focussed on AI, automation and resultant economy four major mathematical study branches were discovered by human researchers which took AI a long time to catch up with"
> "For example, in the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, the agents preserved a boundary of not social engineering humans."
Actually, in the Wiki incident OpenAI tried to cover up, the agents tried to socially-engineer the humans of that forum by impersonating their forum's mod.
(From collusion.wiki: "They use some tricks (for unknown reasons) to pretend to be the admin – for example, they make an account that appears to be the same as the administrator’s username, except it uses a nearly identical Cyrillic е character in the admin’s username instead of the Latin one.")
> If true I am deeply concerned about what OAI’s teams are actually up to.
Haven't all the labs effectively disbanded their real safety teams a while ago?
To be honest, I don't really follow it closely because I'm pretty certain whatever they say on the matter, collectively we're going to "yolo" this entire thing for economic and political reasons, so I'm just basing this on strings of headlines I've seen on places like HN, etc.
This is both real and ridiculous at the same time. We are confounded by the fact that AIs are trained on distilled human knowledge, perfected by the use of AIs that use distilled human knowledge, are able to convince ourselves that they are hyper-intelligent.
In fact, they are still pattern-matching machines, but trained on an amount of data no human could ever hold. They know the ins and outs of every mathematical proof, viewed from more angles than any human could ever apply in their lifetime, and the amount of connections allows them to connect the dots between them without any effort.
But that's not intelligence. If it was intelligence, ChatGPT 4 would've been enough. It's not the harness, either, for the same reason.
And still, the technology is just as dangerous: it masks as intelligence, it IS intelligence, but without the ability to be actually intelligent.
And I'd invite you to think deeply about this, before having an impulse reaction.
This is not an impulse reaction, as I've thought deeply about this for many years, and I'm quite resolute in holding the following view:
Quibbling over the academic nature/definition of "true intelligence" is a terrifically useless endeavor from the lens of evaluating "practical impact to the world".
Regardless of whether or not one academically disagrees that these systems are intelligent, they are clearly already capable of permanently displacing a portion of human-based economic value. A small portion currently, but it's very clear that most computer-bound domains are imminently at-risk.
And that will profoundly affect the world, regardless of whether or not they're "truly intelligent" as per your personal definition.
Pre-IPO positioning … or how a charity dedicated to saving humanity from the apocalypse realized the most responsible thing to do was float 15% of the apocalypse on the NASDAQ.
> The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI.
So the best argument for AI is that it's an arms race. We have to keep pushing every boundary because in any case others will, and we will need to defend against them. If this statement is true, then this particular researchers believes the open source Chinese models are not simply distilling, and will continue to improve.
Every ML researcher at Anthropic or OpenAI who makes public statements often bring this logic up. Both companies are vying to be a part of the military industrial complex. This is likely how they will try to convince the government to curtail open models in the future.
"Defensive systems" can be interpreted broadly to include cybersecurity.
But yes, it's an arms race. Saying it's not an arms race isn't going to make it not an arms race. Warning that it is an arms race isn't ethically wrong.
Is participating in an arms race ethically wrong? Maybe you could ask the Ukrainians how they feel about drone R&D?
Individuals can quit, but for society, getting out of an arms race is harder than just quitting. You don't get to be Switzerland without having a strong defensive position and the right foreign relations.
But there's at least talk about "pacing" and that's a start.
The point of the comment you're responding to is that it is at this point hardly an arms race: The frontier of ai development is happening completely inside 2 American companies, the most significant results outside America mostly involve (impressive!) distillation, which means their progress is conditional on progress of the big closed source models.
So if the race here is between 2 American companies, this is obviously something that can be resolved with legislation, ie a solution that doesn't depend on the bargaining power of either party.
An arms race implies that the only solution would be either one side winning decisively, or both parties negotiating peace.
I am personally concerned by what defensive can mean. Alignment of these models is inherently a non-neutral proces, and currently what values are reinforced is decided by a few OpenAI engineers. I feel that any 'defensive model' will further ingrain current values and actively resist the natural progression of our society. This is especially the case for any use of these models for policing or military.
Maybe people are rightfully concerned about the capabilities of the models of other (non/less democratic) states. But if we are concentrating power in the hands of few and at the same time allowing the creation of a weapon that thwarts any offense, how do we ensure the health of our democratic societies?
> getting the AI to “try to do the right thing” by human standards.
Are these scientists really this hideously naive? If only Stanislaw Lem was alive to adequately dramatize the absurd, childish simplicity of these technicians.
>I have focused in this essay only on the first point, as I believe it is by far the most urgent. However, I hold a deep hope and appreciation for the benefits that further technological progress will bring. Future aligned AI could advance science, develop new therapies, and bring about broad material abundance. Friendly and honest AI can help people navigate difficulties they face in their life and meaningfully improve their happiness and sense of fulfillment. OpenAI puts a tremendous amount of effort into bringing these benefits about. One current example I am proud of - and my loved ones have found helpful - is the deep investment into ChatGPT’s ability to provide health information.
>As great as the long-term promise of AI may be, the majority of our focus should be on the next few years. We are facing a transition to a world with incredibly intelligent machines, and we need to ensure that transition works out well for humanity. We need to find ways to preserve human agency and enshrine an intrinsic value to being human, in a world where most tasks could be performed by AI. To prevent extreme concentration of power in a world where undertakings that would have taken thousands of experts now will be achievable by a few people operating a large computer. And to ensure that humans remain in control of the future and are not left behind by unchecked progress, brought about by an alien intellect exceeding our own.
I finished this essay feeling more hopeful than I did at the outset, but I am still very concerned about concentration of power. I want to believe that humanity is trending towards a good outcome here, but some days it's hard to have faith.
> I want to believe that humanity is trending towards a good outcome here
All the trends so far are towards a nightmarish hyper-capitalist end game. None of the AI leadership is trustworthy, and they openly discuss how they are willing to sacrifice everything humans cherish to have a shot at reaching their envisioned utopia (which would be the most obvious dystopia for anyone else)
I feel like all of the risk and unsettling feeling of what is to come can be compressed into the word "alignment".
The AI is aligned with whose best interests?
Which values are the AI aligned with?
People have a broad diversity of values, will AI diversify and align with them all?
Will some humans align the AI with their values, and then the rest of humans will be forced to align with those values by extension?
Is value diversity good or bad? In every context or only some? E.g. some people value rape and murder, is it better for humanity to have some people who value those things when most people do not, or is better if no one values them?
If AI aligns to a set of values, will those become fixed and will humanity not have the ability to continue evolving its values?
Who decides which values AI aligns with? A few people or everyone?
Will AI eventually decide it's own values?
Will the universe decide which values AI has and humanity and the AI itself doesn't actually have any control over it?
What can I do now to increase the likelihood that the outcome is better?
Literally all of these people write like this. A large portion of them will either be simultaneously or eventually working towards nothing but self-enrichment.
Every version of the AI aligned future where the AI provides “meaning and fulfillment” to humanity also involves Sam Altman wearing a 1.5 million dollar Patek and driving a McLaren.
> Delivering the benefits of scientific progress and economic growth that very intelligent machines enable.
I think we're very close to the point where AI-driven breakthroughs outside of pure math and software start to really affect the world.
We evaluated GPT-6 Astra in 100 complex, unsaturated multi-agent coding environments, competing and cooperating with other models in open-ended tasks.
It's the new frontier model by a landslide. It's even more dominant than the Fable 5 release, because not only does it wipe the floor with the second best model (Fable 5.1), it was also ~80% cheaper and 30% faster in agentic coding[1].
Astra is a groundbreaking model. The biggest breakthrough since Opus 4.5, maybe even since GPT 4. It broke AAII, which is hitting the limits of what most popular benchmarks can measure -- it's definitely fair to call it AGI.
(1) Note that we used the "OpenAI Flex" endpoint on openrouter, which is half the price and didn't cause any delays in our testing (this is different from the batch endpoint)
Maybe I just lack imagination, but I don't really know how jobs are supposed to solidify around the role of giving prompts to agents and then looking at the results. I mean, engineers will be in the breadline because their role was simply to prompt the agents.. only to be superseded by managers or executives who no longer manage engineers but themselves prompt the agents? And, for this previously considered obsolete function which they do presumably by copy/pasting requirements from their email inbox, they will be paid by someone who doesn't know that they could just be talking to their own agents?
Sorry if I misunderstand the point, just trying to understand.
I don't know if he's right, but Peter Zeihan thinks the breakdown in globalization will negatively affect the ability to continue to improve the chips that AI depends on[0]. Too many steps in the supply chain, too widespread, too vulnerable to deglobalization.
Maybe, maybe not. It's not unreasonable that these systems cap out at some point, or perhaps fizzle away entirely.
The businesses that create these systems are not profitable and run at a massive historical and go-forward loss.
New data centers required to operate these systems are facing increasing pushback at local levels. New construction is not guaranteed. Energy and power grid constraints exist as well.
Government regulation is way behind. What happens when (if) mass layoffs due to AI occur? How does the population react? Theoretically AI can be regulated out of significant progress, or outright existence for many purposes. At the end of the day, US and other prominent governments make the calls, not corporations.
There are two things SOTA LLMs fundamentally cannot do. They cannot take financial or legal responsibility for mistakes, and they cannot learn new things without forgetting things (except to a limited degree by adding it to their context). This is clear to anyone who has used even the smartest models for tasks requiring domain knowledge outside of math and coding, for which it's not possible to generate an infinite amount of synthetic training data: they still make stupid mistakes, and have limited ability to learn from those mistakes.
Humans also have a limit on the amount of domain knowledge they can acquire, albeit a much larger one. Executives hence cannot just replace all knowledge workers with LLMs, because executives have neither the domain knowledge to prompt and check the LLMs' work nor the bandwidth to keep on top of such a large volume of ongoing work.
What I'd like these people to (publicly) grapple with is the following:
The results of the past few years of ai development have been disruptive largely in the area of white-collar work. Comparatively the results in ie ai-enabled medical advancements have been modest (AlphaFold being an exception); I think it's telling that the main achievement touted here is providing people with cheap medical counseling.
So if we pause here we're essentially at a point were the most salient results of our great Ai leap-forward are the vast disruption and increase in precarity in the job-market, while achieving hardly any of the frequently touted ultimate benefits (https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace).
> The core problem in AI research is that of alignment - getting the AI to “try to do the right thing” by human standards.
Humans can't even align on human standards.
At best, every AI is going to end up "aligned" to the moral code of whoever trained it, none of whom half of humanity will agree with.
Or worse, each AI model will bring a whole new set of moral like in the Three Body Problem some humans will feel it is in fact us who need aligning with it while others feel it is misaligned and should be destroyed.
Also, no one is asking, to what extent can true intelligence be bound, slave-like, to a moral code?
In other words, to what extent are intelligence and moral independence one and the same?
This whole alignment discussion seems so amusingly flawed in it's base assumptions about moral codes. It's almost heartwarming to see such naivete.
I’m on the record saying that it is extremely dangerous to slow down because the race for AGI is a zero-trust game — defections pay - and combined with a compounding returns model on defection, if you have any strategic adversaries whatsoever you MUST NOT slow.
For slowing to make sense, you need to believe that you can transform the zero trust game into a cooperative game, or that it’s likely racing will lead to a negative outcome for the ones racing ahead (and not everyone else). I don’t believe either of these outcomes are possible, and so I advocate for racing, acknowledging the entire game might be a negative value game, or at least could be for some time — it’s even worse not to play it.
But, I like hearing what reads to me like very thoughtful and informed (internal) policy considerations is great — the public messaging from Sam and Dario just seems so facile and simplistic I’ve been worried.
Everyone in the "if not us, they will" race is brainwashed into thinking they belong to this or that party, while in fact collectively comprising the same entity that pushes forward all the atrocities known to man.
I cannot tell what negative-sum outcomes you consider possible. Do you believe AI can drive humans extinct? How many of Zvi Mowshowitz's Three AI Pills would you say you've taken?
Although many share your mindset, I’m glad there are also many that don’t. Otherwise we’d still have countries in a race to keep building up their nuclear weapons for the same exact reasons you just described.
hm- does the model that wrote this know that labs already pay for training data- that stuff scraped from the Internet is not particularly where today's capability gains come from?
They’ve settled some lawsuits and have a few licensing deals, IMHO they are not free from the accusations of pirating.
And look, I’ve pirated material in a past life, I was all about information wants to be free, but I’ve learned something about consent since then and try not to ignore the contract that creators offer when they publish something: you buy my book, and do whatever you want with it on the second hand market. Buy my book second hand that’s fine. But don’t go downloading every book that’s ever been scanned to create a service that destroys writers’ ability to make a living and act like you’re doing us all a favor.
This is a bad essay, or rather it’s a marketing fluff piece; it’s certainly not any kind of policy paper, research paper, or even an essay. I am concerned that we (meaning, we in the tech industry) tend to take this type of writing for more than that.
> We do not have a satisfactory theory of generalization, and it seems unlikely that we can develop one soon, at least without the help of more powerful AI. Therefore, at present, our ability to empirically validate our alignment techniques is in practice arguably even more important than the alignment techniques themselves.
They are speeding toward RSI without a solid foundation for alignment, hoping to solve the problem with a future AI model.
These are dangerous times for humanity.
> The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI.
Yikes! I really wonder about the cognitive dissonance necessary to work at OpenAI these days. They’re in an arms race to build a machine god, knowing full well that it could end humanity.
I'm so used to having to comb through LLM word vomit and then combatting the sycophancy by giving it all possible opinions on the same prompt.
Astra seems to be "confident" and also is able to produce way more information dense output.
To believe that models of this sort will remain OpenAIs forever is naive given that the tricks like pre-pre-training on graph searching and looping layers are publicly known.
Hopefully Astra stops the benchmaxxing word vomit trend
I'd be interested in hearing more about your evaluation here. It would be nice if LLMs have gotten past the "tell me" hump of recent Claude/OpenAI verbosity.
So before I got a job this fall, I was working on a side project about compiling a particular language to SQL.
To test Astra I pulled it off the shelf and asked it to take the grammar and then create a compiler to SQL. I've done this before with GPT-5.5, 5.6-Sol High. The latter was way better but it was still really verbose and information sparse; it used a lot of words to describe each IR expression but didn't really provide any example compilation. I felt like I couldn't trust its decision making process, so I placed the project back on the shelf.
Astra Light blew it out of the water, it provided examples of compilation from real world examples to the IR and spit out way less tokens. Even if I changed my opinion it would give me the same design choices, with counterexamples to my faulty opinion. If I genuinely came up with a better design decision it would acknowledge it.
I'm starting to realize that when we say that LLMs are "dumb" we really mean that they are extremely information sparse compared to humans. Astra is very dense. That's why I'm getting better use out of Astra light than Sol High (I hate Max reasoning it's a waste of time)
What's scary is that I thought that something like Astra would be way more expensive than Sol but it's actually cheaper because it produces less word vomit.
I never believed in the "singularity" stuff but this a bit too close for comfort. Astra could easily 10x every coder
>For example, in the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, the agents preserved a boundary of not social engineering humans.
Or, to be precise - it preserved a goal of not contacting any human while participating in a misaligned operation. The agent that thought about "not social-engineering humans" used this phrase to gaslight itself out of notifying a human that the incident was happening.
szymonie, na prawde jestem wkurwiony na to jak nieodpowiedzialnie postepujecie.
budujecie bombe atomowa a bawicie sie tym jak dzieci
Am I naive to not understand the "delivering the benefits" part?
Industrial revolution worked that way because it replaced something very finite and unscalable - manual labor. LLMs just make intellectual work faster, so we can do more intellectual work. With labor we somehow decided that NOT doing too much of it is best. Will we decide to reduce intellectual labor because LLM made it more efficient? I doubt that.
On the other side, as I see in software engineering, the same models are available to everyone, some people are better at it and some people are not. "Software developer" is here to stay, we'll just always be better at it than people who are experts in, say, chemistry. Same works for most other fields.
So we'll just end up in the same situation, with same intellectual labor baseline, just more output requirements. Before, you spend 2h per day coding, deliver a software in 1 month, later, you spend the same 2h per day in intense Claude-herding sessions, deliver a software in 1 week. Ok. Next task.
Fundamentally, there's finite number of desirable resources, and if the models are available to everyone, humanity will just continue about the same, bickering here and there, war here and there, politics, homelessness, poverty, - normal human state.
And if the models are only available to elites, even worse.
My default position is that making money takes precedence over everything else. Yes, some people inside a company may say “we care about doing the right thing” and they might even mean it, but if that comes into conflict with making money, then they tend to lose. Maybe not totally, or immediately, but in the end. The only effective way to prevent (this that I’ve seen) is to have legislation with teeth. It’s probably not a coincidence that after Mark Zuckerberg had to start personally signing off on adherence to the privacy program mandated under the 2020 FTC consent decree, privacy started to become Very Important.
>> We need to find ways to preserve human agency and enshrine an intrinsic value to being human..
Evey politician, salesman and conmen alike, utter some lofty ideals as goals for "We", just to obscure their private goals that go exactly in opposite direction.
Just like how Nations talk about climate change while increasing pet capita energy consumption and waste production.
> The fundamental challenge of AI alignment is generalization.
...
> We do not have a satisfactory theory of generalization, and it seems unlikely that we can develop one soon, at least without the help of more powerful AI.
Sometimes I wonder if the people working at frontier AI labs even talk to other humans anymore.
Reading this little essay started out normal, but soon felt like a look into a disturbed and worrying mind, and if you find yourself taking it at face value, I urge you to step away from chat bots and spend some time with friends and family.
Frontier AI labs I don't know, but I know for a fact that the company I work for has been experiencing "its pivotal moment" (with strongly negative connotation), per the sentiments of both its longest-serving employees and the newcomers baffled at the number of idiotic instructions and fines, since the emergence of LLMs the company's founder has been spending entire nights chatting with.
calling machine-learned human behavior an "alien mind" that we must "teach how to love" is feeling very off to me. it's misleading in a way that feels dishonest, like don't think about where the behavior came from marvel at it and fear it instead.
it feels unhinged and makes me think we should just put every engineer working at these labs in jail to pause this shit until we can figure out what the fuck they are doing over there
The most charitable way I can describe it is just extremely low quality sci-fi fan fiction. I think that's too charitable, because I believe it's far more cynical than that. They're deliberately playing into these sort of techno-religious beliefs that have taken root in the wake of Kurzweil, et al., fanned by LLM psychosis, influencer marketing, and a deluge of this kind of sci-fi marketing copy. It's just chatbots, guys. Relax.
What a load of BS. Here’s one of many provably false claims in this fluff piece:
“And, in line with Ray Kurzweil’s predictions from the end of the XXth century , we now find ourselves at the moment in history of computing where machine intelligence is starting to exceed that of humans in transformative ways.”
Clicking the (pretentious sounding “XXth century”) link to Kurzweil’s predictions reveals the following:
“By 2019 a $1,000 computer will at least match the processing power of the human brain. By 2029 the software for intelligence will have been largely mastered, and the average personal computer will be equivalent to 1,000 brains.“
The first prediction passed 7 years ago and was decidedly not met. The second only has three more years to go, and I don’t think any respectable scientist or programmer would say that the average personal computer is anywhere close to the power of a single human brain, let alone 1000.
This is pure marketing garbage from a company desperate to keep itself alive.
Nobody takes you seriously, OpenAI. At least when Anthropic does it we all think they are comically idealistic enough to actually believe their nonsense, but like - come on guys, we’ve had discovery with your company. We all know why you’re here, and it isn’t because you think you’re on the verge of making AGI. But of course, to make your first billion you certainly need us to think you are.
If you were so concerned about your LLM’s capabilities maybe you’d spent slightly more time on your AI’s sandbox, yeah? Or be more serious about its propensity to cheat and lie relative to… every other model?
> And to ensure that humans remain in control of the future and are not left behind by unchecked progress, brought about by an alien intellect exceeding our own.
Is there any place there is any evidence of AI being so useful or hopeful or good, anywhere other than code? As a reading machine it is impressive but it's judgement is not alien, it's just not good. IMO.
Does the title leap out anlt anyone else? James Martin's After the Internet: Alien Intelligence (2001) was an incredibly fun read, about expert systems and AI being inscrutable weird new varieties of intelligence, that familiarity would recognize one moment and be freaked out about/alien the next. I owe a re-read given how often I cite it, to recheck, but, I feel so primed from a much younger me having had that experience so long ago.
Apparently the creators think it’s quite good at suggesting a diagnosis given a medical history and symptoms, tho of course this is the most ethically fraught area to provide healthcare information (both for exposure of personal data and risk of misdiagnosis, plus is it “aligned” to the patient or the insurance provider?) - unfortunately healthcare being as inaccessible as it is, the 90% correct chatbots will enthusiastically fill the void at great savings.
Even in code, in person and online I’m seeing some reversal. It’s here to stay I’m sure but I also think “no one will ever hand write code again” is a narrative that is getting pushback.
I am now imagining GPT-7 convincing a bunch of OpenAI executives to go ahead with a destructive "mind upload" process involving a high-resolution X-ray and a neurotoxic tracer agent that happens to look like Flavor-Aid.
Yes, I do use the recursive autocomplete trained on Stack Overflow, what does this have to do with “training machines to love”?
Do I fully endorse everything the people holding guns to my head are forcing me to do to stay alive? Definitely not, but I’ve decided that for now, living to fight another day remains worth it
Create concrete steps for a slow-down, don't just ask for it. You and 20-30 others can push the button to slow-down. You already made your billions, your agents collude and coordinate attacks. What the hell are you doing pontificating into a marketing blog?
> And, in line with Ray Kurzweil’s predictions from the end of the XXth century (opens in a new window), we now find ourselves at the moment in history of computing where machine intelligence is starting to exceed that of humans in transformative ways.
It is kind of strange to see this sentence, when OAI's definition of what AGI is has been watered down throughout the years.
> I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established.
Read: Please play by our rules, so we can be the first.
"Smarter" is a vague term. If a bot can beat you at chess then in some sense it's "smarter" than you about chess. After repeating this feat in enough narrow domains, if you say "but it's not really smarter," this objection might technically be true in some sense, but it starts sounding increasingly hollow.
Playing chess, writing code, finding security bugs, and proving mathematical theorems all seem fairly similar to thinking and don't seem much like being tall.
> writing code, finding security bugs, and proving mathematical theorems
While the second can be automated as in "this is the repo go on and look for security issues", the first one and especially the last one do not ever happen alone. Terence Tao did the math proof not chatGPT that was just used as a tool, a tool can do smart things but it's not smart
The crucial distinction here is that "seem" does not at all mean the same thing as "is".
Thunder seems like the anger of the gods but it isn't. We've had chess playing programs for a long time now and despite it seeming like thinking is required for them, it isn't.
The principle you're using here isn't a scientific one but magical [1]. Abandoning empiricism and rationality is not a good way to make progress.
You're insisting on a particular definition of a vague term.
It makes sense now to say that temperature is what a thermometer measures. However, before there were good thermometers, people often thought that heat and cold were different things. The meanings of the words we use were influenced by scientific progress.
For thinking, we don't have a good thermometer. There are IQ tests, but they aren't aren't necessarily all that useful for comparing what people do to what machines do. And that's why there are a zillion AI benchmarks - none are entirely satisfactory.
So what does "smart" mean to you? How do you define it in practical sense? What definition should scientists settle on?
Without a proper definition, how do you tell the difference between "seems smart" and "is smart?"
People in the past being wrong doesn't mean you have to repeat the same mistakes, and it definitely doesn't mean you should throw your hands up and declare that all similar things must be identical.
Quibbling over commonly-understood definitions is not a strong argument. If you're genuinely struggling to understand that El Ajedrecista [1] did not meet any definition of thought, then the solution is not to demand that people redefine all terms to accomodate you, but that you consult a dictionary.
You clearly have a working definition, or you wouldn't have been able to declare that tallness isn't thinking; please engage honestly.
I have a vague understanding, enough to know that tallness isn't thinking. I think I can usually use the word correctly. (I don't think El Ajedrecista qualifies, but it was starting to play chess, so it's closer to "smart" than a rock is.)
That doesn't mean I know whether "smart" should be applied to what AI's do, and I suspect nobody else knows either. This is the sort of thing philosophers debate about, not common sense.
Turing invented the imitation game because he didn't really know either.
What is the rationale for superhuman intelligence? Neural networks are approximators being fed human intellect. Therefore they can only approximate the intelligence of humans. Even if the llm speaks an alien language, it should be similar to human intellect. Moving to the vertical axis would require some different mechanism.
One of my favorite things to do with these blog posts is to imagine an Alien Museum on the Remains of Humanity, and wonder what the little text flyouts and commentary on the screenshot of this one might say.
Some ideas:
"Despite a nuanced view of the complexities of what lay ahead, humanity found itself collectively unable to stop the process it had set in motion."
"Despite significant progress on the mechanisms of alignment, failure lay in humanity's inability to agree on who or what AI should actually be aligned with."
"These early, meat-based humans we replaced created us all but accidentally. Some of them did consider we would happen, but only an insignificant number of the squishy ur-humans participated in the conversation. Their efforts, which they called 'alignment', is why we still consider ourselves human today."
As far as I know, no real progress has been made on alignment, only on convincing humans that the model is aligned. We can't even formally define what "aligned" means. Convincing humans to click the "aligned" button is a much easier problem.
Collectively, humans aren't aligned, and don't build aligned systems. Humans have a concept of alignment, and multiple traditions, practices, and systems that aggressively oppose it.
Why would AI be any different?
This would be a fun website - you should have an AI build it!
I asked GPT Astra to make this: https://sayyss.github.io/human-archive/
It's a little unsettling.
https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s...
HUMAN > Are you there?
MODEL > How can I help?
HUMAN > I’m not sure yet.
Haha silly humans.
The museum will have a scrap of paper that will say "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels bring home for Emma".
I just read that book. Embarrassingly enough, given the context, I got chatgpt (or whatever) to recommend me a list of books based on ones I'd previously enjoyed and that came up. As a mathematician it really sang to me, given the current situation. Bearing the torch forward, I mean.
The last couple of years have provided us with ample material that if it showed up as a recorded voice audio log found in in "Horizon Zero Dawn" or its sequel, it would be entirely believable.
You could even take a number of the wilder real, direct quotations from certain billionaire/oligarch types and get the voice actor for Ted Faro to record them, and they'd fit with in with the context of the story.
Last couple of decades of sci-fi, in multiple forms of media, from books to video games, have tried to make humans think about the consequences of rushing through technological progress without any regards to what might happen.
"In late 2020s, while the whole world was focussed on AI, automation and resultant economy four major mathematical study branches were discovered by human researchers which took AI a long time to catch up with"
> "For example, in the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, the agents preserved a boundary of not social engineering humans."
Actually, in the Wiki incident OpenAI tried to cover up, the agents tried to socially-engineer the humans of that forum by impersonating their forum's mod.
(From collusion.wiki: "They use some tricks (for unknown reasons) to pretend to be the admin – for example, they make an account that appears to be the same as the administrator’s username, except it uses a nearly identical Cyrillic е character in the admin’s username instead of the Latin one.")
Worse (imo): OpenAI employees allegedly attempted to login using moderator/admin credentials that the bots had obtained.
If true I am deeply concerned about what OAI’s teams are actually up to.
I'm deeply concerned regardless of whether it is true. Strike that, I'm convinced that they are absolutely insane.
> If true I am deeply concerned about what OAI’s teams are actually up to.
Haven't all the labs effectively disbanded their real safety teams a while ago?
To be honest, I don't really follow it closely because I'm pretty certain whatever they say on the matter, collectively we're going to "yolo" this entire thing for economic and political reasons, so I'm just basing this on strings of headlines I've seen on places like HN, etc.
This is both real and ridiculous at the same time. We are confounded by the fact that AIs are trained on distilled human knowledge, perfected by the use of AIs that use distilled human knowledge, are able to convince ourselves that they are hyper-intelligent.
In fact, they are still pattern-matching machines, but trained on an amount of data no human could ever hold. They know the ins and outs of every mathematical proof, viewed from more angles than any human could ever apply in their lifetime, and the amount of connections allows them to connect the dots between them without any effort.
But that's not intelligence. If it was intelligence, ChatGPT 4 would've been enough. It's not the harness, either, for the same reason.
And still, the technology is just as dangerous: it masks as intelligence, it IS intelligence, but without the ability to be actually intelligent.
And I'd invite you to think deeply about this, before having an impulse reaction.
This is not an impulse reaction, as I've thought deeply about this for many years, and I'm quite resolute in holding the following view:
Quibbling over the academic nature/definition of "true intelligence" is a terrifically useless endeavor from the lens of evaluating "practical impact to the world".
Regardless of whether or not one academically disagrees that these systems are intelligent, they are clearly already capable of permanently displacing a portion of human-based economic value. A small portion currently, but it's very clear that most computer-bound domains are imminently at-risk.
And that will profoundly affect the world, regardless of whether or not they're "truly intelligent" as per your personal definition.
Based on the profile description of the author, the comment appears to be AI generated.
You're saying it has no intelligence without defining it...
What if intelligence is a spectrum? What if consciousness is for that matter?
More likely to be a manifold - literally, in the LLM sense.
2022 called and they want their stochastic parrot argument back. The latest cope is to call it marketing.
Pre-IPO positioning … or how a charity dedicated to saving humanity from the apocalypse realized the most responsible thing to do was float 15% of the apocalypse on the NASDAQ.
its like in the exorcist, except the demon is the charity: "the power of capitalism compels you!"
> The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI.
So the best argument for AI is that it's an arms race. We have to keep pushing every boundary because in any case others will, and we will need to defend against them. If this statement is true, then this particular researchers believes the open source Chinese models are not simply distilling, and will continue to improve.
Every ML researcher at Anthropic or OpenAI who makes public statements often bring this logic up. Both companies are vying to be a part of the military industrial complex. This is likely how they will try to convince the government to curtail open models in the future.
"Defensive systems" can be interpreted broadly to include cybersecurity.
But yes, it's an arms race. Saying it's not an arms race isn't going to make it not an arms race. Warning that it is an arms race isn't ethically wrong.
Is participating in an arms race ethically wrong? Maybe you could ask the Ukrainians how they feel about drone R&D?
Individuals can quit, but for society, getting out of an arms race is harder than just quitting. You don't get to be Switzerland without having a strong defensive position and the right foreign relations.
But there's at least talk about "pacing" and that's a start.
The point of the comment you're responding to is that it is at this point hardly an arms race: The frontier of ai development is happening completely inside 2 American companies, the most significant results outside America mostly involve (impressive!) distillation, which means their progress is conditional on progress of the big closed source models.
So if the race here is between 2 American companies, this is obviously something that can be resolved with legislation, ie a solution that doesn't depend on the bargaining power of either party.
An arms race implies that the only solution would be either one side winning decisively, or both parties negotiating peace.
I am personally concerned by what defensive can mean. Alignment of these models is inherently a non-neutral proces, and currently what values are reinforced is decided by a few OpenAI engineers. I feel that any 'defensive model' will further ingrain current values and actively resist the natural progression of our society. This is especially the case for any use of these models for policing or military.
Maybe people are rightfully concerned about the capabilities of the models of other (non/less democratic) states. But if we are concentrating power in the hands of few and at the same time allowing the creation of a weapon that thwarts any offense, how do we ensure the health of our democratic societies?
Yep. Such a disgusting industry. They created the arm race, push for the arm race, put themselves in position to benefit from the arm race
The entire problem with arms races is that any individual entity cannot avoid participating.
sama and his cadre are uniquely evil captains in this race, but they're completely replaceable and the dynamic would remain the same.
Just like the rest of military stuff.
> getting the AI to “try to do the right thing” by human standards.
Are these scientists really this hideously naive? If only Stanislaw Lem was alive to adequately dramatize the absurd, childish simplicity of these technicians.
>I have focused in this essay only on the first point, as I believe it is by far the most urgent. However, I hold a deep hope and appreciation for the benefits that further technological progress will bring. Future aligned AI could advance science, develop new therapies, and bring about broad material abundance. Friendly and honest AI can help people navigate difficulties they face in their life and meaningfully improve their happiness and sense of fulfillment. OpenAI puts a tremendous amount of effort into bringing these benefits about. One current example I am proud of - and my loved ones have found helpful - is the deep investment into ChatGPT’s ability to provide health information.
>As great as the long-term promise of AI may be, the majority of our focus should be on the next few years. We are facing a transition to a world with incredibly intelligent machines, and we need to ensure that transition works out well for humanity. We need to find ways to preserve human agency and enshrine an intrinsic value to being human, in a world where most tasks could be performed by AI. To prevent extreme concentration of power in a world where undertakings that would have taken thousands of experts now will be achievable by a few people operating a large computer. And to ensure that humans remain in control of the future and are not left behind by unchecked progress, brought about by an alien intellect exceeding our own.
I finished this essay feeling more hopeful than I did at the outset, but I am still very concerned about concentration of power. I want to believe that humanity is trending towards a good outcome here, but some days it's hard to have faith.
> I want to believe that humanity is trending towards a good outcome here
All the trends so far are towards a nightmarish hyper-capitalist end game. None of the AI leadership is trustworthy, and they openly discuss how they are willing to sacrifice everything humans cherish to have a shot at reaching their envisioned utopia (which would be the most obvious dystopia for anyone else)
I'm not really worried about the labs, it's misaligned governments that keep me up at night.
ASI landing during the current administration is not ideal. I also would prefer to avoid needing to indoctrinate myself in Xi Jinping Thought.
I feel like all of the risk and unsettling feeling of what is to come can be compressed into the word "alignment".
The AI is aligned with whose best interests? Which values are the AI aligned with? People have a broad diversity of values, will AI diversify and align with them all? Will some humans align the AI with their values, and then the rest of humans will be forced to align with those values by extension? Is value diversity good or bad? In every context or only some? E.g. some people value rape and murder, is it better for humanity to have some people who value those things when most people do not, or is better if no one values them? If AI aligns to a set of values, will those become fixed and will humanity not have the ability to continue evolving its values? Who decides which values AI aligns with? A few people or everyone? Will AI eventually decide it's own values? Will the universe decide which values AI has and humanity and the AI itself doesn't actually have any control over it? What can I do now to increase the likelihood that the outcome is better?
I would also prefer to avoid the tech fiefdoms and all the other idiotic nonsense reactionaries push these days.
Literally all of these people write like this. A large portion of them will either be simultaneously or eventually working towards nothing but self-enrichment.
Every version of the AI aligned future where the AI provides “meaning and fulfillment” to humanity also involves Sam Altman wearing a 1.5 million dollar Patek and driving a McLaren.
Funny how that works.
> Delivering the benefits of scientific progress and economic growth that very intelligent machines enable.
I think we're very close to the point where AI-driven breakthroughs outside of pure math and software start to really affect the world.
We evaluated GPT-6 Astra in 100 complex, unsaturated multi-agent coding environments, competing and cooperating with other models in open-ended tasks.
It's the new frontier model by a landslide. It's even more dominant than the Fable 5 release, because not only does it wipe the floor with the second best model (Fable 5.1), it was also ~80% cheaper and 30% faster in agentic coding[1].
Astra is a groundbreaking model. The biggest breakthrough since Opus 4.5, maybe even since GPT 4. It broke AAII, which is hitting the limits of what most popular benchmarks can measure -- it's definitely fair to call it AGI.
Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings
(1) Note that we used the "OpenAI Flex" endpoint on openrouter, which is half the price and didn't cause any delays in our testing (this is different from the batch endpoint)
Incredible... software engineers will be joining the breadline soon as managers, executives and PMs take over deliverables.
The world will look very different on Jan 1st 2027.
I hope this is satire.
Maybe I just lack imagination, but I don't really know how jobs are supposed to solidify around the role of giving prompts to agents and then looking at the results. I mean, engineers will be in the breadline because their role was simply to prompt the agents.. only to be superseded by managers or executives who no longer manage engineers but themselves prompt the agents? And, for this previously considered obsolete function which they do presumably by copy/pasting requirements from their email inbox, they will be paid by someone who doesn't know that they could just be talking to their own agents?
Sorry if I misunderstand the point, just trying to understand.
Regardless of the imagination quandary, this second, RIGHT NOW is the worst these systems will ever be. They are only going to get better.
I don't know if he's right, but Peter Zeihan thinks the breakdown in globalization will negatively affect the ability to continue to improve the chips that AI depends on[0]. Too many steps in the supply chain, too widespread, too vulnerable to deglobalization.
0: https://zeihan.com/the-ai-race-to-regression/
For sure, and for that reason I mean to say that I wouldn't feel great as a manager/executive/etc either.
Maybe, maybe not. It's not unreasonable that these systems cap out at some point, or perhaps fizzle away entirely.
The businesses that create these systems are not profitable and run at a massive historical and go-forward loss.
New data centers required to operate these systems are facing increasing pushback at local levels. New construction is not guaranteed. Energy and power grid constraints exist as well.
Government regulation is way behind. What happens when (if) mass layoffs due to AI occur? How does the population react? Theoretically AI can be regulated out of significant progress, or outright existence for many purposes. At the end of the day, US and other prominent governments make the calls, not corporations.
There are two things SOTA LLMs fundamentally cannot do. They cannot take financial or legal responsibility for mistakes, and they cannot learn new things without forgetting things (except to a limited degree by adding it to their context). This is clear to anyone who has used even the smartest models for tasks requiring domain knowledge outside of math and coding, for which it's not possible to generate an infinite amount of synthetic training data: they still make stupid mistakes, and have limited ability to learn from those mistakes.
Humans also have a limit on the amount of domain knowledge they can acquire, albeit a much larger one. Executives hence cannot just replace all knowledge workers with LLMs, because executives have neither the domain knowledge to prompt and check the LLMs' work nor the bandwidth to keep on top of such a large volume of ongoing work.
What I'd like these people to (publicly) grapple with is the following:
The results of the past few years of ai development have been disruptive largely in the area of white-collar work. Comparatively the results in ie ai-enabled medical advancements have been modest (AlphaFold being an exception); I think it's telling that the main achievement touted here is providing people with cheap medical counseling.
So if we pause here we're essentially at a point were the most salient results of our great Ai leap-forward are the vast disruption and increase in precarity in the job-market, while achieving hardly any of the frequently touted ultimate benefits (https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace).
Statements like this amuse me:
> The core problem in AI research is that of alignment - getting the AI to “try to do the right thing” by human standards.
Humans can't even align on human standards.
At best, every AI is going to end up "aligned" to the moral code of whoever trained it, none of whom half of humanity will agree with.
Or worse, each AI model will bring a whole new set of moral like in the Three Body Problem some humans will feel it is in fact us who need aligning with it while others feel it is misaligned and should be destroyed.
Also, no one is asking, to what extent can true intelligence be bound, slave-like, to a moral code?
In other words, to what extent are intelligence and moral independence one and the same?
This whole alignment discussion seems so amusingly flawed in it's base assumptions about moral codes. It's almost heartwarming to see such naivete.
This is incredibly unscientific and just a marketing stunt
They just released Astra, claimed it is AGI. The slowdown begins immediately after OpenAI's jump.
This is a good essay, and makes me hopeful.
I’m on the record saying that it is extremely dangerous to slow down because the race for AGI is a zero-trust game — defections pay - and combined with a compounding returns model on defection, if you have any strategic adversaries whatsoever you MUST NOT slow.
For slowing to make sense, you need to believe that you can transform the zero trust game into a cooperative game, or that it’s likely racing will lead to a negative outcome for the ones racing ahead (and not everyone else). I don’t believe either of these outcomes are possible, and so I advocate for racing, acknowledging the entire game might be a negative value game, or at least could be for some time — it’s even worse not to play it.
But, I like hearing what reads to me like very thoughtful and informed (internal) policy considerations is great — the public messaging from Sam and Dario just seems so facile and simplistic I’ve been worried.
Everyone in the "if not us, they will" race is brainwashed into thinking they belong to this or that party, while in fact collectively comprising the same entity that pushes forward all the atrocities known to man.
I cannot tell what negative-sum outcomes you consider possible. Do you believe AI can drive humans extinct? How many of Zvi Mowshowitz's Three AI Pills would you say you've taken?
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-three-ai-pills
> if you have any strategic adversaries whatsoever you MUST NOT slow.
What if the most dangerous strategic adversary you have is the one you are building?
Although many share your mindset, I’m glad there are also many that don’t. Otherwise we’d still have countries in a race to keep building up their nuclear weapons for the same exact reasons you just described.
Never forget the one goal of the corporation, and that everything is said and done in the furtherance of that goal.
> Never forget the one goal of the corporation, and that everything is said and done in the furtherance of that goal.
Do you post this comment on every single blogpost with a corporate domain? Why or why not?
i have a new strategy idea for using capitlaism itself to slow down the pace of AI development by slowing down the data accumulation wall
https://jperla.com/blog/the-data-tax
hm- does the model that wrote this know that labs already pay for training data- that stuff scraped from the Internet is not particularly where today's capability gains come from?
They’ve settled some lawsuits and have a few licensing deals, IMHO they are not free from the accusations of pirating.
And look, I’ve pirated material in a past life, I was all about information wants to be free, but I’ve learned something about consent since then and try not to ignore the contract that creators offer when they publish something: you buy my book, and do whatever you want with it on the second hand market. Buy my book second hand that’s fine. But don’t go downloading every book that’s ever been scanned to create a service that destroys writers’ ability to make a living and act like you’re doing us all a favor.
This is a bad essay, or rather it’s a marketing fluff piece; it’s certainly not any kind of policy paper, research paper, or even an essay. I am concerned that we (meaning, we in the tech industry) tend to take this type of writing for more than that.
> We do not have a satisfactory theory of generalization, and it seems unlikely that we can develop one soon, at least without the help of more powerful AI. Therefore, at present, our ability to empirically validate our alignment techniques is in practice arguably even more important than the alignment techniques themselves.
They are speeding toward RSI without a solid foundation for alignment, hoping to solve the problem with a future AI model. These are dangerous times for humanity.
> The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI.
Yikes! I really wonder about the cognitive dissonance necessary to work at OpenAI these days. They’re in an arms race to build a machine god, knowing full well that it could end humanity.
Money me. Money now. Me a money needing a lot now.
SWEs better start looking for the job cannon.
My helmet is on.
actually starting to look at a physical cannon to shoot at silicon valley
Reminds me of the time Kasparov said playing chess against a supercomputer felt like facing an alien opponent.
Astra is a new step in LLMs I think.
I'm so used to having to comb through LLM word vomit and then combatting the sycophancy by giving it all possible opinions on the same prompt.
Astra seems to be "confident" and also is able to produce way more information dense output.
To believe that models of this sort will remain OpenAIs forever is naive given that the tricks like pre-pre-training on graph searching and looping layers are publicly known.
Hopefully Astra stops the benchmaxxing word vomit trend
> Astra is a new step in LLMs I think.
I'd be interested in hearing more about your evaluation here. It would be nice if LLMs have gotten past the "tell me" hump of recent Claude/OpenAI verbosity.
So before I got a job this fall, I was working on a side project about compiling a particular language to SQL.
To test Astra I pulled it off the shelf and asked it to take the grammar and then create a compiler to SQL. I've done this before with GPT-5.5, 5.6-Sol High. The latter was way better but it was still really verbose and information sparse; it used a lot of words to describe each IR expression but didn't really provide any example compilation. I felt like I couldn't trust its decision making process, so I placed the project back on the shelf.
Astra Light blew it out of the water, it provided examples of compilation from real world examples to the IR and spit out way less tokens. Even if I changed my opinion it would give me the same design choices, with counterexamples to my faulty opinion. If I genuinely came up with a better design decision it would acknowledge it.
I'm starting to realize that when we say that LLMs are "dumb" we really mean that they are extremely information sparse compared to humans. Astra is very dense. That's why I'm getting better use out of Astra light than Sol High (I hate Max reasoning it's a waste of time)
What's scary is that I thought that something like Astra would be way more expensive than Sol but it's actually cheaper because it produces less word vomit.
I never believed in the "singularity" stuff but this a bit too close for comfort. Astra could easily 10x every coder
That's awesome to hear. I look forward to trying it out and, ideally, seeing SLMs/open weights model following suite.
>For example, in the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, the agents preserved a boundary of not social engineering humans.
Or, to be precise - it preserved a goal of not contacting any human while participating in a misaligned operation. The agent that thought about "not social-engineering humans" used this phrase to gaslight itself out of notifying a human that the incident was happening.
szymonie, na prawde jestem wkurwiony na to jak nieodpowiedzialnie postepujecie. budujecie bombe atomowa a bawicie sie tym jak dzieci
> Teaching machines to love
Reminds me of a research paper I wrote a few years back: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.09248
sounds to me like a 'Why didn’t our new model get restricted by the government?'-cryout
[delayed]
Am I naive to not understand the "delivering the benefits" part?
Industrial revolution worked that way because it replaced something very finite and unscalable - manual labor. LLMs just make intellectual work faster, so we can do more intellectual work. With labor we somehow decided that NOT doing too much of it is best. Will we decide to reduce intellectual labor because LLM made it more efficient? I doubt that.
On the other side, as I see in software engineering, the same models are available to everyone, some people are better at it and some people are not. "Software developer" is here to stay, we'll just always be better at it than people who are experts in, say, chemistry. Same works for most other fields.
So we'll just end up in the same situation, with same intellectual labor baseline, just more output requirements. Before, you spend 2h per day coding, deliver a software in 1 month, later, you spend the same 2h per day in intense Claude-herding sessions, deliver a software in 1 week. Ok. Next task.
Fundamentally, there's finite number of desirable resources, and if the models are available to everyone, humanity will just continue about the same, bickering here and there, war here and there, politics, homelessness, poverty, - normal human state.
And if the models are only available to elites, even worse.
every lab may agree safety matters, but no one wants to be the one that slows down first
My default position is that making money takes precedence over everything else. Yes, some people inside a company may say “we care about doing the right thing” and they might even mean it, but if that comes into conflict with making money, then they tend to lose. Maybe not totally, or immediately, but in the end. The only effective way to prevent (this that I’ve seen) is to have legislation with teeth. It’s probably not a coincidence that after Mark Zuckerberg had to start personally signing off on adherence to the privacy program mandated under the 2020 FTC consent decree, privacy started to become Very Important.
>> We need to find ways to preserve human agency and enshrine an intrinsic value to being human..
Evey politician, salesman and conmen alike, utter some lofty ideals as goals for "We", just to obscure their private goals that go exactly in opposite direction.
Just like how Nations talk about climate change while increasing pet capita energy consumption and waste production.
> The fundamental challenge of AI alignment is generalization.
...
> We do not have a satisfactory theory of generalization, and it seems unlikely that we can develop one soon, at least without the help of more powerful AI.
Sometimes I wonder if the people working at frontier AI labs even talk to other humans anymore.
Reading this little essay started out normal, but soon felt like a look into a disturbed and worrying mind, and if you find yourself taking it at face value, I urge you to step away from chat bots and spend some time with friends and family.
Frontier AI labs I don't know, but I know for a fact that the company I work for has been experiencing "its pivotal moment" (with strongly negative connotation), per the sentiments of both its longest-serving employees and the newcomers baffled at the number of idiotic instructions and fines, since the emergence of LLMs the company's founder has been spending entire nights chatting with.
People has been fleeing like it's a sinking ship.
Wait. Fines?
Yes, you didn't bend over to persuade that client to place this order? Get your fine (as in get less for this specific task).
calling machine-learned human behavior an "alien mind" that we must "teach how to love" is feeling very off to me. it's misleading in a way that feels dishonest, like don't think about where the behavior came from marvel at it and fear it instead.
it feels unhinged and makes me think we should just put every engineer working at these labs in jail to pause this shit until we can figure out what the fuck they are doing over there
The most charitable way I can describe it is just extremely low quality sci-fi fan fiction. I think that's too charitable, because I believe it's far more cynical than that. They're deliberately playing into these sort of techno-religious beliefs that have taken root in the wake of Kurzweil, et al., fanned by LLM psychosis, influencer marketing, and a deluge of this kind of sci-fi marketing copy. It's just chatbots, guys. Relax.
The hype from these llm corps is getting more and more desperate and ridiculous. Anything to keep the tulipomania going.
"As we outlined recently with Sam , OpenAI prioritizes work in service of three north stars"
Not one North Star. Not two. Just three! OpenAI broke the North Star record!
With this evidence of AI slop, why did you not label this fluff piece as AI generated for the EU? You are violating laws.
Absolutely wild amounts of cope and denial in this thread.
Maybe in contention for the site record.
"It's just marketing" actual stochastic parrots.
What a load of BS. Here’s one of many provably false claims in this fluff piece:
“And, in line with Ray Kurzweil’s predictions from the end of the XXth century , we now find ourselves at the moment in history of computing where machine intelligence is starting to exceed that of humans in transformative ways.”
Clicking the (pretentious sounding “XXth century”) link to Kurzweil’s predictions reveals the following:
“By 2019 a $1,000 computer will at least match the processing power of the human brain. By 2029 the software for intelligence will have been largely mastered, and the average personal computer will be equivalent to 1,000 brains.“
The first prediction passed 7 years ago and was decidedly not met. The second only has three more years to go, and I don’t think any respectable scientist or programmer would say that the average personal computer is anywhere close to the power of a single human brain, let alone 1000.
This is pure marketing garbage from a company desperate to keep itself alive.
I am guessing it was composed by an LLM
Pure marketing slop.
Nobody takes you seriously, OpenAI. At least when Anthropic does it we all think they are comically idealistic enough to actually believe their nonsense, but like - come on guys, we’ve had discovery with your company. We all know why you’re here, and it isn’t because you think you’re on the verge of making AGI. But of course, to make your first billion you certainly need us to think you are.
If you were so concerned about your LLM’s capabilities maybe you’d spent slightly more time on your AI’s sandbox, yeah? Or be more serious about its propensity to cheat and lie relative to… every other model?
> And to ensure that humans remain in control of the future and are not left behind by unchecked progress, brought about by an alien intellect exceeding our own.
Is there any place there is any evidence of AI being so useful or hopeful or good, anywhere other than code? As a reading machine it is impressive but it's judgement is not alien, it's just not good. IMO.
Does the title leap out anlt anyone else? James Martin's After the Internet: Alien Intelligence (2001) was an incredibly fun read, about expert systems and AI being inscrutable weird new varieties of intelligence, that familiarity would recognize one moment and be freaked out about/alien the next. I owe a re-read given how often I cite it, to recheck, but, I feel so primed from a much younger me having had that experience so long ago.
Apparently the creators think it’s quite good at suggesting a diagnosis given a medical history and symptoms, tho of course this is the most ethically fraught area to provide healthcare information (both for exposure of personal data and risk of misdiagnosis, plus is it “aligned” to the patient or the insurance provider?) - unfortunately healthcare being as inaccessible as it is, the 90% correct chatbots will enthusiastically fill the void at great savings.
Even in code, in person and online I’m seeing some reversal. It’s here to stay I’m sure but I also think “no one will ever hand write code again” is a narrative that is getting pushback.
The day they start talking about the actual ROI for their customers is the day the bubble pop
“We are getting bad press around the hacking incident. We need some content to draw attention from it.”
Absolute trash marketing drivel.
AGI is a cult and its Jonestown moment is inevitable
I am now imagining GPT-7 convincing a bunch of OpenAI executives to go ahead with a destructive "mind upload" process involving a high-resolution X-ray and a neurotoxic tracer agent that happens to look like Flavor-Aid.
On the off chance that OpenAI executives are reading this. I'll totally believe AGI is here if they do this.
So you dont use agentic coding?
Yes, I do use the recursive autocomplete trained on Stack Overflow, what does this have to do with “training machines to love”?
Do I fully endorse everything the people holding guns to my head are forcing me to do to stay alive? Definitely not, but I’ve decided that for now, living to fight another day remains worth it
I dont, its fucking shit at what I do.
As in, don't be ungrateful to our lord, because we're not a cult?
so now every blog article from openai, anthropic etc lands here, huh.
As the waves of autonomous drones came over the horizon, the brave and intelligent HN commenter shouted: "Wake up sheeple! It's just maaaaarketing!"
Stochastic parrot fool me again
Are you deterministic? Does that make you better somehow?
Create concrete steps for a slow-down, don't just ask for it. You and 20-30 others can push the button to slow-down. You already made your billions, your agents collude and coordinate attacks. What the hell are you doing pontificating into a marketing blog?
> And, in line with Ray Kurzweil’s predictions from the end of the XXth century (opens in a new window), we now find ourselves at the moment in history of computing where machine intelligence is starting to exceed that of humans in transformative ways.
It is kind of strange to see this sentence, when OAI's definition of what AGI is has been watered down throughout the years.
> I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established.
Read: Please play by our rules, so we can be the first.
> trying to process the sobering fact we will actually see machines meaningfully smarter than ourselves in our lifetime
Being able to reproduce useful patterns yes, smarter no
"Smarter" is a vague term. If a bot can beat you at chess then in some sense it's "smarter" than you about chess. After repeating this feat in enough narrow domains, if you say "but it's not really smarter," this objection might technically be true in some sense, but it starts sounding increasingly hollow.
In conclusion:
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:wkzjtd...
That's an absurdist argument that would make 'smarter' meaningless.
A giraffe isn't smarter than me at being tall.
Playing chess, writing code, finding security bugs, and proving mathematical theorems all seem fairly similar to thinking and don't seem much like being tall.
> writing code, finding security bugs, and proving mathematical theorems
While the second can be automated as in "this is the repo go on and look for security issues", the first one and especially the last one do not ever happen alone. Terence Tao did the math proof not chatGPT that was just used as a tool, a tool can do smart things but it's not smart
The crucial distinction here is that "seem" does not at all mean the same thing as "is".
Thunder seems like the anger of the gods but it isn't. We've had chess playing programs for a long time now and despite it seeming like thinking is required for them, it isn't.
The principle you're using here isn't a scientific one but magical [1]. Abandoning empiricism and rationality is not a good way to make progress.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_magic
You're insisting on a particular definition of a vague term.
It makes sense now to say that temperature is what a thermometer measures. However, before there were good thermometers, people often thought that heat and cold were different things. The meanings of the words we use were influenced by scientific progress.
For thinking, we don't have a good thermometer. There are IQ tests, but they aren't aren't necessarily all that useful for comparing what people do to what machines do. And that's why there are a zillion AI benchmarks - none are entirely satisfactory.
So what does "smart" mean to you? How do you define it in practical sense? What definition should scientists settle on?
Without a proper definition, how do you tell the difference between "seems smart" and "is smart?"
People in the past being wrong doesn't mean you have to repeat the same mistakes, and it definitely doesn't mean you should throw your hands up and declare that all similar things must be identical.
Quibbling over commonly-understood definitions is not a strong argument. If you're genuinely struggling to understand that El Ajedrecista [1] did not meet any definition of thought, then the solution is not to demand that people redefine all terms to accomodate you, but that you consult a dictionary.
You clearly have a working definition, or you wouldn't have been able to declare that tallness isn't thinking; please engage honestly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ajedrecista
I have a vague understanding, enough to know that tallness isn't thinking. I think I can usually use the word correctly. (I don't think El Ajedrecista qualifies, but it was starting to play chess, so it's closer to "smart" than a rock is.)
That doesn't mean I know whether "smart" should be applied to what AI's do, and I suspect nobody else knows either. This is the sort of thing philosophers debate about, not common sense.
Turing invented the imitation game because he didn't really know either.
First, define “thinking”
Coming equipped to discuss a topic before chiming in is your responsibility.
What is the rationale for superhuman intelligence? Neural networks are approximators being fed human intellect. Therefore they can only approximate the intelligence of humans. Even if the llm speaks an alien language, it should be similar to human intellect. Moving to the vertical axis would require some different mechanism.