this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2026
188 points (80.9% liked)
Technology
88146 readers
2335 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Ed Zitron’s podcast “Better Offline” recently talked about this. There is a small tech community called the Rationalists who believe AI super intelligence is inevitable and it will either accelerate humanity to new heights or kill off the species. These rationalists are actually a very prominent faction within tech and the AI industry. Apparently the language used within top AI firms is largely about the immense danger posed by AI super intelligence if any other group or company were to achieve it first. This creates an echo chamber that makes the people in the industry kind of lose their mind and misinterpret the capability of LLMs.
Everyone outside that faction recognizes that LLMs are just unreliable cloud software with limited use cases and that there’s no evidence LLMs could actually lead to any kind of intelligence.
Edit: Please, someone stop me from commenting on an AI post next time I’m tempted. I’m so tired of people replying, arguing with opinions I don’t have, based entirely around a hypothetical technology that doesn’t exist yet. LLMs make slop. Thats it. They hacked a company after weeks of 100s of instances being run, using old exploits published online. San Francisco will be underwater from climate change before LLMs can do anything more.
My Problem is: Even if your take on AI is true, we give an unreliable piece of software access to the internet and more and more systems and infrastructure. Even if it is not a malicious AI, it can be so unreliable, it might kill us by incompetence. a Sme can be said about some presidents...
LLMs are not intelligent. They lack morals, knowledge, and intent. The only remote risk of extermination is if a company with absolute impunity and endless resources told an LLM to hack the nuclear weapons and if knowledge of how to do that was already published online and processed as training data.
LLMs cannot do anything new, they can only regurgitate information thats already been stolen.
Or if the military put an LLM in charge of nuclear weapons. But surely nobody would be stupid enough to do that!
That is simply counter-factual. LLMs can absolutely do things that have not been published before, and they can access knowledge that is not in their training data through RAG. Intelligence is debatable, but reasoning models can reliably imitate "thinking" to a degree, and recursive self-improvement might lead to an autonomous advancement of intelligence. That LLMs allegedly "only regurgitate information" is simply wrong.
You're confusing morals, knowledge, intent, and intelligence with capability. An atomic bomb has no will of its own either.