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Roughly 3 years ago, specifically in December 2023, I've reiterated my longstanding prediction that «the culture war's most important front will be about AI», and specifically AI accelerationism vs anti-AI/AI safety movement:
And the following political compass:
Seems like this was too much complexity for big tent politics in the US, at least so far; and the Trumpian State sees no use for the EA network, and instead (pretty rationally) perceives it as an uncontrollable alternative center of power. Instead we have, essentially, anti-AI left + pro-AI right (with some notable exceptions – eg. Steve Bannon, apparently, has been anti-China specifically because of his concern about Chinese AI progress, and now joins hands with Bernie Sanders). I've also failed to predict the salience and extent of Chinese open source dominance, as well as the bizarre datacenter water use backlash (charitably, can be shoehorned as Luddism?). Nevertheless, we've «succeeded» at the core task of making this a culture war front. The degree of (unnecessary) politicization of the issue is incredible. Trump is doing the yeoman's work, lumping it in with random Blue-coded ideas he disapproves of “Global “Warming,” where everyone was going to be dead by now, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, or Impeachment Hoax #1, or Impeachment Hoax #2.”. Jensen Huang enjoys his role as the kingmaker who has the King's ear. Sam Altman is opportunistic as usual but, after recent incidents, is genuinely spooked about AI risks (I have it on good authority that OpenAI really intends to slow down some internal projects specifically to bolster their oversight). The quasi-Masonic part is shaping up nicely, too – Dario Amodei, who's become the poster boy of Woke Left AI, promotes Embedded Evaluators with the central example being METR, very deeply connected to Anthropic and the broader EA scene. The EA itself is more explicitly Left-aligned now, despite efforts of some to paint them as TESCREAL eugenicists (the woke cancellation of Bostrom in Jan 2023 was the canary in the coal mine, Yudkowsky laments the missed opportunity of bipartisanship). There are clearly politically coded reports on prominent doomers.
This is all a bit meandering. What I want to know: how do you see this going further? We aren't anywhere close to the wall of capabilities; there are no walls in sight. Anthropic and OpenAI are holding back already, but their products will keep getting better, and fast. Google will make a comeback at some point (maybe in a couple weeks), xAI and Meta may catch up too. In my book, we (well, they) have practical superintelligence that's sufficient for both unprecedented productivity acceleration and really devastating, nation-crippling cyberattacks, which I guess will be discussed with Xi soon. At this rate, in a few months the level of capability Fable 5.1 or GPT 6 Astra will be mostly commodified and uploaded to HuggingFace (owned by Nvidia now). And those are relatively weak systems compared to internal models, which can build models that are vastly stronger still, without even any R&D breakthroughs, just by virtue of synthesizing stronger data trajectories and designing better RL environments. Superintelligence, in other words, is baked in. By Q1 2027 we'll see a jump from Astra that's at least as big as Sol => Astra. I fail to understand how that won't steamroll companies trying to build their moats on products downstream of frontier AI, labs need every bit of revenue to cover their costs, which will only increase due to growing self-imposed safety requirements; employers outside the AI sphere will also be increasingly feeling the heat. There's a whole ugly dimension of circular financing, too.
Americans as a whole are pretty pessimistic about AI even at these mediocre levels of diffusion (I am skeptical of this data that purports to demonstrate much lower adoption than in China, Americans are probably lying more due to widespread negativity on AI, but in any case AI isn't currently doing most of their jobs). Astra+ level models with very low error rate and 300 tok/s output totally can replace most knowledge workers. On the other hand, it seems that so far AI has not caused anything like mass unemployment, and perhaps economists have a point about comparative advantage, so that'll reduce the intensity of class dynamics.
Democrats are likely to sweep both chambers of Congress, which I guess is what Dario is hoping for and why he feels emboldened to antagonize Trump&Hegseth. Nevertheless, the needs of national security and GDP-maxxing (as well as the Executive's will) should prevent any nontrivial exogenous industry slowdown. So by default we'll see further crystallization of Red Accelerationism vs Blue Decelism, and as AI becomes more undeniably scary, that may begin to eat into the Red political base. It'll be interesting to watch, but I'm really uncertain as to how it'll go.
In the jungle book there is a scene - Shir Han is dragging Baloo with his tail and this legendary exchange takes place:
If we slow down now - we will certainly feel the teeth.
Qwen 3.8 flash next abliterated exists. That can be run albeit slowly on consumer hardware and my hunch is that it is enough of a both foundation and power multiplier - for the mythical beast that is ASI to eventually emerge. The cat is out of the bag and stopping now
Also one of the things the Yuddites seem incapable of doing is figuring out that superintelligence does not mean omnipotence. The laws of physics will still work and some other too. Internet is trivial to be made more secure, not every infrastructure needs to be connected to it anyway.
If the frontier labs slow down - the research will continue. My hunch tells me that we are really far away from the limits of IQ per watt, per weight, per wafer, per harness. All the world militaries and terrorist groups have great interest in making full fledged AI work in the limited hardware a drone possesses.
The datacenter big ASI have always been safe. You just put a lot of semtex in the foundations of the DC with dead man switch. The other one - the fast nimble one that could fit on consumer hardware is the dangerous one. And I don't want it to emerge in Yemen or Sudan.
The question is 2028. 2026 won't be important because the red tribe will hold the presidency and if some of the conservative judges have functioning brains will let themselves be replaced in the lame duck if they lose the senate. But who knows what the job market will be in 2028 and if the effects on AI will be suddenly felt by then.
Personally I am accelerationist. I have been since reading the Lord of Light.
Closeness to sam altman is pure coincidental.
From yesterday you could run the dense qwen 3.8 on 1080ti. The research will continue.
Anti-Yuddites Don’t understand that you don’t need omnipotence to do major damage here. AI is probably, if so directed, perfectly capable of taking down the banking system. And since few people have cash on hand and governments could not produce that much cash quickly, you could easily destroy the global economy that way. Most people would be ruined if their bank accounts were deleted, and im not convinced hard copies of that data even exist. You can probably easily assume the same of most infrastructure which isn’t up to 2000s standards of two factors or even strong passwords. So you could direct AI to take out power grids, water treatment plants, nuclear power plants, and traffic lights. That doesn’t require even much intelligence, but it certainly doesn’t require omnipotence either.
So the AI apocalypse can be averted by hiring two incels and making them type ip table rules here and there?
I agree with your assessment of the infrastructure openness, but why is everyone behaving as if this is immutable and unmovable state of the things. Securing the infrastructure is actually trivial.
If we start living in a situation in which the average ios and ps5 time from version release till jailbreak is <24h I will take the unstoppable hacker hypothesis seriously.
The most obvious threat - that AI could make a breakthrough in prime factoring or discrete logarithms - is somehow absent in the list of AI doomers.
OpenAI agents trivially get out of their "sandboxes". Opus 5 + a bit of human effort was used to hack OpenAI as recently as in July. This is the organization with IP ostensibly worth hundreds of billions and ≈infinite compute budget for automated pen testing. How, then, is this trivial for anybody else? People are really goofy. I see 1234 passwords all the time. Causing chaos at 300 tok/s is what's trivial.
You can't protect against stupid. I would love to see an OpenAI agent escape from sandbox I have set up. OpenAI don't give a fuck about opsec. You don't need agi or asi or even LLM to hack stupid.
It is as if when faced with Y2K we said - we don't have to worry about the old code, we need to find a way to stop the arrow of time.
If we have to be worried about current infra - then harden it. It is not hard. Pun intented. Just putting a small rule in the firewalls from which ips the network is allowed to receive connects, or creating intranets would go a long way. Nuclear powerplant doesn't need to accept connections from all of ip4 and 6 spaces.
If we have to be worried about super intelligence that will find unending stream of zero days bugs in the logic, silicone - then air gap it. But it is not an argument for slowing down.
So far we haven't seen new android roots, new iphone and ps5 jailbreaks. We know how to make stuff more secure.
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