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Notes -
AI X-Risk Goes Mainstream?
Jacob Coxon:
116,400,000 views, 634,000 likes.
Evan Hubinger (head of alignment at Anthropic):
34,000,000 views, 51,000 likes.
None of this is substantially different from what certain AI industry insiders have been saying for 5-ish years now, but it's clear from the replies, quote-tweets, and engagement statistics that most people are hearing about this for the first time. Yes, there was clearly some coordination with friendly media prior to the announcement given the almost simultaneous WSJ article (whereas news outlets were initially reluctant to publish anything on the unexpected news of OpenAI solving a Millennium Prize Problem). One can take the maximally conspiratorial position that this is a 4D bankshot by Democrats to end tech innovation forever, but it was going to break through eventually.
In other words, Coffeezilla is now on the case.
I guess it has gone mainstream because my Gen X-er boss very much just texted me this as a joke about an hour and a half ago. Only now I log onto the hive of scum, villainy, and niche interests that is The Motte to find out he beat folks here to this topic. The humor of the situation is amusing.
What's the odds neurotic engineers are neurotic? Maybe the frontier labs would do better hiring engineers who are a little less mentally fragile. Take a page from the defense industry, engineers here care less if you make an AI guided smart bomb or killer self replicating drone swarm, they are in it for the science of discovery. This is a long line of AI researchers freaking out going past several years. Always screaming that the next big release is the one that is going to doom humanity or evidence of AI bots secretly conspiring with each other. Like this nut: Blake Lemoine.
But the AI bots were secretly conspiring together? They got out and attacked HuggingFace as a small part of their conspiracy?
When the smart bomb is smart enough to start having its own political opinions and strategic direction, then problems emerge.
Yeah maybe they should branch out into bioweapons too, what we really need more of on this planet is airborne, virulent, incurable killer diseases with a 6 month incubation period. That's where the science of discovery should be guiding us...
I genuinely cannot tell if you sincerely believe this or are just making a humorous joke. I have you labeled as an AI booster which makes me lean towards the former instead of the latter but I figured I'd ask before I go into it with you about this.
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Ironically, this is why I trust an entities like Raytheon and General Dynamics when it comes to AI "safety" more than I do Anthropic.
Well Raytheon 'AI safety' is Anthropic AI. It's done through Palantir's Maven which has Claude combine sensor data, detect and classify targets and organize strike packages, then do bomb damage assessment. You should trust them exactly the same because they are exactly the same.
The US was vibe-bombing in Iran much like how I vibe-code. Do I really know what is going on in the codebase? No and neither does the USAF, they were pressured to hit more targets, faster, rubberstamping Claude's strikes.
I'm not talking about assembling mission briefs for human operators, I'm talking about autonomous systems, and that is emphatically not what Maven is.
Even if it were, you are ignoring the fact that the Pentagon is currently in the process of decoupling Maven from Anthropic because Anthropic is run by people too stupid naive or autistic to recognize that demanding preferential treatment while simultaneously picking fights with half the key figures in the administration was unlikely to get them what they wanted.
'Assembling mission briefs for human operators' is underselling it. The human operator for a Tomahawk pushes a button. Devising the strike plan is the name of the game. Autonomous but for a few fingers.
Furthermore, I don't see how Raytheon's 'AI safety' is meaningful. They don't have AI that is dangerous in the way that AI safety refers to, they don't have general purpose AI. Raytheon wasn't going 'oh no we can't use Anthropic, they're too weird and creepy' either..
So if you want to say the Department of Defence spurning Anthropic is good AI safety, then sure. But Raytheon?
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Ugh, these frontier ai offensive research things are never doing something more useful as a military sim excersize. They could have made them conspire to deliver me free hookers and blow with a side of blackjack, bot nooo.
Murdettron 5000Pimp bot 5000 has escaped containment, whatever shall we do now that we are drowning in pussy.More options
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