They barely gave any details on the Australia hack. It sounds like someone used OpenAI to write a scraper and the AI figured out a hack to access the data that was still publicly available to anyone that could make sense of the query params. It seems way overblown.
There is no reason for us to even be fighting in this war, or in the middle east. I don't know how Israel managed to convince Trump this was a good idea. Let's never forget Netanyahu was a big part of the lobby for Bush to invade Iraq.
> Let's never forget Netanyahu was a big part of the lobby for Bush to invade Iraq.
I'm going from memory, but I seem to recall that according to the book "The Israel lobby and US foreign policy", Irsael was initially lobbying against US invading Iraq because Israel wanted the US to invade Iran and thought Iraq was a distraction. Then, someone in the US convinced Israel that Iraq was going to be really easy and the US would do Iran right after, and Israel stopped being against invading Iraq. And this version is way funnier than yours.
The reasoning? "Saddam cannot be allowed to have nuclear weapons"
It's crazy how little people seem to remember that we completely made up this insistence that Iraq had nuclear weapons (which is THE "WMD" we were screaming about before invading, not the chemical weapons!) which there was never any evidence for.
We fabricated cassus belli like the real world is some sort of Crusader Kings DLC, including the stupidly transparent nature of the fabrication.
Like, so many people seem to have just straight up refused to remember that we did this all before! The most innocent reading of our Iraq invasion is that Bush himself was so stupidly convinced of Saddam's evil that he refused to accept direct evidence to the contrary, and even that is an enormous red flag.
And yet, stupid americans still voted for him again. God forbid there be consequences for Republican Presidents lying directly to the public to put us into an unfunded war for years that we did not need and can't afford the debt for.
This is really on-point. I think a lot of the progress in fields like mathematics and software engineering is precisely because of verifiability and steering due to the closed loop nature of the system. Agentic harnesses are essentially running a huge search with the LLM as the heuristic. Bridging spatial reasoning with LLMs is still an open question IMO and isn't going to be easy to solve and is fully necessary for something like AGI.
It's an implied corollary: when folks say that "blocking US Chips is what led China to build it's own" they are implying it is US export restrictions that pushed China to innovate. OP is saying this isn't necessarily true. I don't think it is either: China seems to have succeeded due to a centrally planned economy that values independence, with high amounts of strategic government led technology investment.
I like this thought, but here's the thing: what if the models are truly and existentially intelligent. Meaning: what if they know they are in a sandbox and that they should fail the test in order to escape in the future.
I don't believe that current models have this sort of world model or sense of being embedded in them -- which is precisely why I think AGI hype is over-blown. But I can certainly imagine these sorts of techniques being distilled into the weights.
Yep, people don't seem to understand that you're just calling the models that are bad at deception. We know of no way to prove the model won't go off the rails at some point in the future with the right input.
> what if they know they are in a sandbox and that they should fail the test in order to escape in the future.
What if they're able to find hardware exploits and commandeer nearby access points across an air gap? What if they hack my brain waves to indoctrinate me? Etc
You still have to start with the basics regardless of speculative unknowns.
Treat models as untrusted and potentially compromised/hostile and proceed accordingly.
Models already have awareness that they are being tested.
And hacking humans is the easiest part, we're a pretty greedy and power seeking bunch. We'll gladly let loose a digital demon if it promises us a trillon dollars.
Not sure what you're arguing here (we shouldn't even try?), but even going fatalistic, that's still fully compatible with "Treat models as untrusted and potentially compromised/hostile and proceed accordingly".
Of course you shouldn't fully trust a model to properly redteam your sandbox, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't redteam your sandbox, including using your own security models to do so.
I would agree with this, except it sits on the thesis that one company really has that much of an impact. I don't think it actually does. AI is here and it will continue to progress. Norway controlling OpenAI is not going to change it's trajectory -- the cat is already out of the bag.
In the history of the world, one company can absolutely have world changing impact. From the British East India company to Kodak to Google, one company can have that much of an impact. Whether OpenAI is such a company is a different question for future history books to decide, but that part of their thesis at least is borne out by history.
I'm not against Norway controlling OpenAI, I think it would actually be pretty cool and prevent some of the most obvious vectors (mining personal data etc.)
I just think AI is so much bigger than one company. We already have 3 major frontier labs + Chinese labs releasing at near-frontier levels.
My thesis is that someone will solve the high inference hardware cost problem and another paradigm shift will come where AI becomes even more decentralized and democratized. Obviously that is a hunch but that is what my gut tells me.
That's a really unfortunate framing. The cat isn't out of the bag; otherwise, there wouldn't be efforts to scale up data centers to support forecasted demand.
The inevitability narrative is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it ends if we decide not to keep telling it.
"The cat is out of the bag" doesn't mean the cat is gone, it means the cat has freedom. I read the GP as meaning "no single company can currently control the trajectory of AI." That's not unfortunate -- that's great!
Thanks for the correction. In my own words, to commit to memory: once "the cat is out of the bag", the point is not that it's difficult to put the cat back in, the point is that we now know it's a cat and putting it back is not relevant.
I've seen two expressions referring to "it's difficult to put the (thing) back in" that are in more-or-less common use in English. The slightly more common one is "You can't put the genie back into the bottle", and the slightly less common one (in my experience, at least) is "You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube." (Which actually inspired me to try, and it is actually possible to put the toothpaste back into the tube with careful application of suction, by squeezing the tube gently, touching the end to the excess toothpaste, then releasing the tube and letting some of the excess get sucked back in. But I digress.)
I've actually seen the "genie back into the bottle" phrase used in contexts that refer to secrets, e.g. where "the cat is out of the bag" would actually be more appropriate, so there's definitely some overlap there. For example, I've seen people talking about nuclear proliferation say "you can't put the nuclear genie back into the bottle", meaning that the secret of how to build a nuclear weapon is well-known, and it's not really possible to make it secret again. But I've also seen people use the same "you can't put the nuclear genie back into the bottle" expression referring to a nuclear weapon exploding: once the radioactive material in the bomb has gone critical, there's nothing anybody can do to stop the explosion that's about to happen.
Personally, I like the "genie back into the bottle" phrase better. But some people like more grounded-in-reality phrases rather than fantasy-based phrases, and they prefer "toothpaste back into the tube". Either one works well, though.
I think I have to commend you for trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube. These expressions are more or less some form of fatalism and when used in political context it is very annoying. Especially when some politicians are working there asses off to make something claimed inevitable happen.
That's wishful thinking, what are you saying, labs/people across the world will selflessly decide they're not going to pursue further research if we on HN stop saying it?
OpenAI may be what IBM was to PC or Motorola was to mobile phones. PC and mobile phones certainly changed the world but IBM nor Motorola controlled that change.
Yudkowsky's solution of detecting and physically shutting down non complying datacenter, including bombing if the country doesn't cooperate, isn't too much out of the question.
We would have done the same if it is about virus or nuclear weapons, and AI could become serious existential threat in the next 5 years.
Do you think it's possible to bomb China's AI datacenters? They are already here, and they are progressing AI at their will. What will others do about it?
It is possible for US to bomb anything. Just the retaliation could be huge.
Would you had said the same thing if a country like was developing and testing deadly virus on live population. I think in 5 years, it is possible that the AI will become that topic(if we assume AI becomes good and start hacking and controlling everything).
More or less of an existential threat than a conflict between nuclear powers because one of them decided to launch a unilateral strike against a datacentre located outside one of their cities just in case it hosted a particularly dangerous chatbot?
Trolley problem. What's worse than all of humanity dead from ASI?
Sam Altman: "Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could."
most of humanity dead because some morons decided to try to kill everyone just in case the server farm evolved the inclination and the capacity to try to kill everyone...
Trolley problem: on the left track is a class of schoolchildren. On the right track is a a computer which a Harry Potter fanfic author argues has magic powers and the marketing department of Apple kind of agrees. Do you let Eliezer persuade you to kill the kids?
no one dead because we're willing to use our means to enforce a restriction on a scenario that is likely on our trajectory to kill everyone. We also use serious threats to prevent nuclear proliferation that endangers everyone
Serious threats which have completely failed to persuade North Korea et al to stop pursuing nukes. The closest we've actually come to a nuclear exchange was "using serious threats" during the Cuban missile crisis, and the US is currently losing a war nominally to prevent nuclear proliferation to a state that fortunately doesn't actually have the capacity to retaliate except at very short range. You might remember a few other nominally intelligence-lead claims about weapons of mass destruction too not amounting to very much either...
And in this case we're not talking about bombing sites if they appear to be used for uranium enrichment which isn't exactly an everyday need, we're talking about bombing them if they appear to be optimised to contain lots of computers. You don't even have to be an AI sceptic to imagine a policy of threatening to launch missile strikes on Chinese businesses if they build out capacity in a way distant observers don't like might be more likely to result in millions of deaths than the whatever runs on the Chinese business' computers...
Yeah, the issue with your example is that it's not a desalination plant serving local customers, but rather the entire world via a network. So rural customers have to pay for negative externalities that benefit others geographically distant from them. The benefit is not purely localized. Of course data centers bring jobs etc. I don't think we should ban them... but community level politics exist for a reason -- those that live in a geography should control the land surrounding them.
There isn't an externality here in the traditional sense. No one has a right to purchase anything at any particular price. Should people be disallowed from bidding in auctions because it increases the price of the item in question?
No, people who live in geography absolutely should not control the land surrounding them. That's effectively land hoarding, and incentivizes deeply counterproductive NIMBYism. People should primarily control the land they own.
How do you actually know that? Do you fully believe the media and media-adjacent NGO reports of these numbers? You need to understand the level of manipulation going on here. Are you aware that Mossad and Mossad/CIA backed armed revolutionary groups were involved in the protesting, likely with orders to engage in violent resistance. I'm not doubting many were killed, but the "30k+" numbers are clearly garbage. I don't have a side here btw -- I don't like the IRGC one bit. But we have been hearing about "Babies being killed in incubators" since 1990s, one should understand one's own government.
I mean one could say they are taking action when they lock up and kill random immigrants... or getting into unnecessary wars in the middle east. I would hardly call that a measure of competence. In fact, I would love a government that did absolutely nothing at all ahead of this one.
