Fuck AI

He quit, but it seems he's already drank the Koolaid.

He didn't quit because he realised how bad it is for the environment or because he woke up and realised all of these people are high on their own supply. He quit because the big scary machine is about to become really smart (for real this time) and turn on us.

So he quit, but he's still huffing his own farts about just how amazing this waste of resources is.

Was he working at the marketing department? This is such bullshit. LLMs ain't a path to superintelligence, it isn't even intelligence at all.

The reason the companies are focused on hacking is because there's a lot of open security vulnerability databases they can use to train on. They can also very easily setup automated test scenarios and have a very binary indication of the result of the hack. This made it easy for them to focus on, to have something new to report. Their models have been stagnant for a while now and investors were starting to wonder why they should keep putting money into it. The focus on security and hacking was a quick win to report something new and interesting sounding, so they can keep the grift going. They have played that card tho, so for the new models they will need to think of something new.

All the narratives around LLMs are so annoying. They call it "reasoning" when all they do is loop through the question and answer twice. It isn't reasoning at all, that's just the label they put on it. They say the AI has "breached containment", like it had some kind of evil master plan and used its cunning to circumvent top notch security. In reality they have an LLM running in loops, trying random shit. Trained on Reddit users discussing how to get around the corporate firewall to keep shitposting and watching Hentai at work. With thousands of these agents, burning millions upon millions of tokens by random chance some interesting shit happened. Which is cool from a technical standpoint, but not quite the narrative they are putting on.

They have already figured out just dumping more compute and memory into the thing is running into diminishing returns hard (except Altman it seems). And customers have figured out the new models are much more expensive and don't really offer any real improvements. They've raided all of the data accessible to them, so that doesn't help. They try to aggressively scrape more from the internet, but people are blocking their bots and the internet is flooded by slop so the quality goes way down. Nobody has figured out how to actually get these models to improve in real significant and sustainable way. The public has soured on them and companies are figuring out there is no ROI and just burning massive amounts of money on AI doesn't help them at all.

But let's all be afraid for some kind of super AI taking over the world, because that's really what's happening right now...

No one knows what will happen. As always, predictions land all over the map. In retrospect, we'll laud the ones who guessed right, and ignore all the rest. It will seem like "we were warned", but here in the before times, there's no way for us to know.

That said, there are more than enough reasons to stop AI right now, even if it never will "kill us all". We don't need the scaremongering, and spreading it risks us looking like Chicken Little.

The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.

That would solve a lot of my concerns to be fair.

I occasionally think about American intelligence agencies, and how they have employed SEVERAL HUNDRED THOUSAND people over the last ~80 years of well documented war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In all that time, the total number of whistleblowers who have exposed those crimes is in the double digits... The number of "heroes" who genuinely possess enough empathy and moral character to stand up to goliath, and sacrifice their lives to defend the innocent, is something like 0.0001% of the population.

This isn't just proven with intelligence agencies. It's proven throughout the history of war. Over 500k troops were deployed to Vietnam, and literally tens of thousands of them engaged in war crimes like the rape, torture, or murder of civilians; no more than a few hundred of them actually put their lives on the line to stop the crimes when they had the chance; time and time again, more often than not, the "free" and "democratic" government supposedly "for the people" persecute those whistleblowers and destroys their lives, because they are criminals protecting fellow criminals. Think about how many millions of Israeli's have gone through the IDF in that time, and how many of them have publicly opposed the genocide...

Considering the reality of history, the very concept of relying on humans to oppose their leadership and the status quo to do the right thing is genuinely psychotic; just full blown delusion and mental illness relying on a rounding error.

Our systems are nowhere near resilient or capable enough of protecting us from human nature. Most of them aren't even resilient or capable enough to defend us from the most unlikable, incompetent, sociopathic, moronic, criminals imaginable; if they are wealthy they are likely to succeed.