sohois
16hr ago
Which part? "Next week" was more a figure of speech than a definitive prediction, "soon" would be more accurate. But it seems a difficult bet to judge purely using Trump's statements
sohois
1d ago
I see. I'm not sure what this prediction does for x-risk beyond the simpler "finance bubble bursts and labs collapsed" thesis. Why does adding in a further step where the labs are bought out decrease risk? Indeed such a situation seems like it would increase risk somewhat. In the former scenario, development stops and nothing replaces it, while in the latter there is still big company financing, even if it is reduced by accountants. Plus, the big, founder led companies like X, Meta, and Amazon could easily push big funds past the protests of their shareholders.
But as I mentioned in my first response, these big guys are already invested. Google, X, and Meta are in the race, Microsoft is somewhat there (I don't think anyone knows the precise details of OpenAis weird corporate structure and ownership) and even in China the likes of Alibaba are already players. I would guess in the event of a bubble bursting taking out Anthropic and OAI, Musk or Google would simply push ahead
sohois
1d ago
Trump's opinions are as changeable as the wind, so I wouldn't read anything long term into any of his statements. He'll talk to someone with a different opinion next week and come out with something completely different (but still senile).
The Chinese reaction certainly seems like a misplay from Amodei though. I felt like all his anti-China rhetoric was mainly an appeal to bring republicans onside (contrary to some of the posts below), completely forgetting that the CCP can also read. Their reaction is pretty rational to the language used in his proposals. Has it done long term damage? I doubt "it's over", but safetyists will definitely need a much more careful approach in future
sohois
2d ago
First the big tech companies need to demonstrate any kind of competency in building good models for that to be a concern.
Google very briefly caught up with 2.5, but has been a joke since then. Microsoft is all in on OpenAi. Apple have failed to do anything in that arena. Amazon seem happy just to be a cloud provider for other models. Musk is uncertain, he seems to flit between safety and acceleration depending on whatever he sees on Xitter that day. And then there's meta, who at least got a model that could appear in leaderboards this time, but no one's betting on those chumps
sohois
5d ago
I'm not sure what was vague about the above post, unless you have an aversion to clicking on links? The case itself is pretty lengthy and not something easily summarizable in a few sentences.
As for how it destroys the argument: marketing depends on having some control of the narrative. As I said in another post, even though there were so many third parties involved in these reports, you could kind of make a case that somehow OpenAI (or Anthropic in their cases) is still directing what is being said.
But in this case, the revelations were completely out of the control of OpenAi, and they actively took steps to hide this information, even going so far as to mislead congress when asked about events like this.
And unlike the example of solving of Navier-stokes, this was a largely identical issue to the HuggingFace incident. So we now have clear proof that agents were escaping OpenAI's controls, gaining internet access, and forming secret communities to collaborate on cheating. And all of this was deliberately hidden by OpenAI and only found out by completely independent researchers. Thus, any marketing argument has to reconcile the fact that they went out of their way to hide incidents despite the fact that they are apparently using this evidence to boost their stock price or whatever.
sohois
6d ago
The problem with the weak argument is that it is, well, weak. It demonstrates nothing, particularly given we can already assume that every corporate communication ever made is being spun to portray the corp in a more positive light.
Indeed, we actually know one of the methods that OpenAI used to try and spin the METR evaluation more positively: they heavily restricted the scope to prevent any of the details of the German wiki collusion coming to light. Which also raises the other critical weakness of the marketing argument, in that many of the recent safety scandals have come to light from third party sources. METR, the UK's AISI, and a couple of independent researchers for the collusion stuff. Now, given METR's links with the wider AI ecosystem, it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that they could have been influenced to present things in a certain way and thus aren't fully independent, but it would be a much larger leap to suggest this of a UK gov organisation, and an impossible leap to suggest that of a couple of randos.
sohois
6d ago
The "it's all just marketing" people need to reckon with the fact that they were rushing to declare the same thing over the Hugging Face incidents, only for the German wiki revelations to completely destroy that argument.
That was a different company obviously, and it doesn't preclude future incidents from being leaked for marketing purposes, but it should still lead to a serious adjustment in beliefs on what is and isn't marketing
It's not really falsehood singular though, is it? How do you square the infallible word of God with the dozens if not hundreds of factual errors contained within the Bible?
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