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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 agree with @Shakes that there's a good chance that this is all just for show to build up hype around Anthropic, just like... basically everything they do. But if it's not, then we should throw every single person involved in prison for the rest of their lives. If they actually believe that AI has a 10% chance of killing us all, and research it anyways, then their willingness to roll those dice is a threat to the rest of us which we shouldn't ignore. There basically are no "oh shit we shouldn't do that" limits that such a person will ever respect.
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
I'm not sure it really destroys it, this is separate evidence of something else. But if you'd actually like to make the case of how it destroys it, go ahead instead of vague posting about it.
I'd say that #2 on their interpretation is functionally impossible. Software that has read-only permission CANNOT write. This is a hard binary restriction.
Furthermore I'd say that the Buckmaster revelations actually point to evidence of the marketing hypothesis. For the Navier-Stokes, OpenAI claims they zero-shotted the problem only to steadily walk it back in conversation with Buckmaster. Zero-shot became, 6-7 researchers working closely(including directing it) with the AI burning obscene levels of compute, and possibly even reading Buckmaster's chat logs. We went from marketing-hype answer to the more realistic answer under scrutiny. We have had no similar levels of scrutiny for the huggingface hack, we just have the marketing-hype answer. But we can see that OpenAI's default is marketing-hype answers first.
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