I'll go a step further, they aren't just pretending, they are blackmailing the country. The sane response would be "we don't negotiate with terrorists, and you will face criminal and financial penalties for damages caused."
> and you will face criminal and financial penalties for damages caused.
I don't understand why this isn't talked about more.
We don't need a slowdown. Just double down on prosecuting crimes.
Let the companies take the risk. If they feel confident and they're right they win market share. If they don't feel confident, they can not risk it and slow down. If they feel confident and they get it wrong, they should be sued to kingdom come. That alone should disincentivize reckleses behavior like letting models run crazy with large amounts of compute which leads to them escaping sandboxes.
This performative "our internal modles are so crazy powerful" song and dance is getting old, especially with no real concrete explanations.
It's not talked about because the media frames AI as having agency on its own, which it does not. This talk from these companies of 'losing control' (no control was lost... Companies failed to monitor the workings of their agents) is meant to convince people the ai systems have wills of their own
The AI company's goal is to make ai agents a separate subject of the law so the CEO and executives who would normally be held accountable get to go Scot free.
> If they feel confident and they get it wrong, they should be sued to kingdom come.
The argument that they’re making is that if there is a catastrophic mistake then there may not be a “kingdom come”.
I don’t know enough to evaluate if it’s a genuinely held belief or not, but that’s the argument being made by many scientists and engineers at the labs.
Many researchers have quit. The number of workers in the field who've warned the public that the field is a potent danger is quite unprecedented: I can't think of any other field with as many insiders turned critics. Why haven't they all quit?
Many people find power, prestige, the public spotlight or money so compelling that they'll keep on pursuing the thing even if they know the way they're going about it is morally wrong, almost like an addiction.
The leaders and workers of the labs aren't picked at random from your friends and neighbors: they've chosen to pursue what they foresaw (correctly, IMHO) as the most powerful new technology. In other words, they're probably self-selected for being unusually attracted by power.
An analogy: some serial killers know what they're doing is morally wrong and it pains them to be doing something very wrong. (Others have no conscience and don't care if it is wrong or not.) Even most of the ones that know what they're doing is wrong cannot stop killing because apparently killing is an extremely compelling experience to them. Often they're relieved when they get caught. Maybe Sam and Dario would be relieved if the government shut down their companies and prohibited them from starting new AI companies.
That quote comes from someone that has never tried to get law enforcement to pursue a case. Local or state police are completely unequipped to respond. And FBI is unlikely to get involved unless damage is high six figures. We had an incident where we had a ton of evidence pointing to a past employee. It would have been an incredibly easy case for the FBI. They didn't have the resources to handle it. And this was a case that was gift-wrapped with a bow for them. Imagine a case where we didn't have evidence, or an idea of who it was ....
> you will face criminal and financial penalties for damages caused
Even with where we're at right now, if people involved with the HF or Ruby Gems attacks faced legal consequences, the industry would get a lot more conservative very quickly. And unlike social media, section 230 doesn't apply, and there aren't any free speech concerns.
The HF and Ruby Gems attacks came from safety testing, where the AI providers attempted to understand what negative consequences could arise if someone subverted their safety protections. Don't you worry that legal consequences would disfavor safety testing and thus create more rather than fewer problems?
Those attacks happened due to sheer incompetence and negligence, starting from a woefully insufficient "sandbox" and OAI employees ignoring every issue that popped up along the way.
If there were actual consequences perhaps they would've not been so laissez-faire with their testing and would've done it in a properly controlled environment rather than the absolute joke of a system they set up.
If they were really worried about the models of the future, they should be accelerating their hardening efforts. They should be trying to speed up progress as much as possible so that all vulnerabilities can be patched before China gets there.
There's a world where the labs WANT Open Source AI to cause a disaster.
Pacing the frontier just means giving bad actors an opportunity to create an AI disaster which would force an extreme response by governments. Which they seem to be begging for.
Dario's big scary example was AI that can hack the internet. Why aren't the labs calling on the government to help harden everything? Why are Anthropic's Glasswing and OpenAI's Daybreak still commercial endeavours?
To me, the only real risk of AI is hacking. Why all of this commotion about existential risk? Seems like a distraction.
Hacking the internet includes things like "hacking banks", "hacking power plants", "hacking water treatment plants", and "hacking cars". How about "hacking vote counting machines"?
Hardening everything is in fact part of the answer. Getting stuff disconnected from the internet that shouldn't be connected is also part.
you will face criminal and financial penalties for damages caused.
No you won't. The US president, yesterday:
U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday likened critics of artificial intelligence to "very negative forces" bringing up scenarios that will not happen, and said he wanted to make sure that the U.S. remains the industry leader.
"We're leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins," Trump told reporters at his Ireland golf course, when asked if the AI industry should slow down or be more regulated.
No. That kills competition. I want everyone to be competing on the open playing field they are right now, with losses socialized as minimally as possible. There's nothing fundamentally special about LLM companies that would warrant nationalizing them.
I'll do you one better: each state gets a direct share. So, not nationalized in the sense of getting put behind a faceless bureaucracy forever; states collectively have control and benefit directly from success.
No, Altman is saying this exactly because he wants to avoid regulation.
This is a common tactic in any industry. Say that you will self-regulate, but then a decade or so later everybody wonders why anyone thought it was a good idea to allow an industry to make their own rules.
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