> The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.
I think he is being over dramatic. In the space of about four years, LLMs progressed from mediocre high school student to Ph.D. graduate in every field. That's impressive, but there is no evidence yet they can outperform or outsmart humans. Their biggest advantage for tasks such as proving theorems or long coding sessions is that they don't get tired.
I have yet to see this in my field. Maybe like a PhD student who bullshits their way through. LLMs still can't make correct decisions, only as useful as the person who uses them. To me, LLMs are only useful for making some mundane tasks faster.
As someone who has a lot of experience with both… no. You don’t need to be smart to assembly furniture, you just need to follow directions very closely and get shit done.
At least for me it’s quite easy to see them go into endless loops where no meaningful work is done and it just keeps going until I stop the process and tell it what to try instead.
To be fair it is no where near what we had just one year ago and the rate of change only seems to be increasing.
Also, I don’t have 30 million dollars to spare spawning tens of thousand sub agents like what they did with Navier-Stokes so I’m clearly not testing the full capabilities of these models.
Yes. Yesterday, Opus 5 on Claude Code with high effort.
It was to build an extremely simple job using an internal framework to walk through a table and log the ids os some records that have a certain scenario.
There's a ton of jobs exactly like this in the codebase, and the framework code is in the codebase as well.
It was so silly I even thought of writing it myself, probably took me longer to steer claude to do it for me.
Anyway, it refused to use a method from the framework to retrieve the parameter as a list, it wanted to retrieve it as a string and parse the commas. I had spelled out in the initial prompt what method it should use.
they dont need to be smarter than humans. They just need to be able to hack into vital infrastructure systems faster than we can repair them while also replicating wildly
I am not an AI super mind hell bent on consolidating my power by leveraging chaos to take control of humanity’s resources, but if I were then sending one million deepfaked ransom emails to impressionable people would be the best tool for effecting change in meatspace.
We have your daughter / dog / Amazon delivery. If you ever want to see her / him / it again, plug this USB drive into the control panel at your station / let off the parking brake roll your car into this substation / change the meatpacking thermometers to read 8C lower than calibrated / ground your vessel on this sandbank / send an envelope of white powder to these addresses / set fire to the following hospitals / …
I'm waiting for some data center to be built where no one can agree on who actually commissioned and payed for the thing. Every body "just followed orders" until it turns out that it was Grok.
Imagine you're the AI. Give yourself a solid minute to brainstorm ideas.
Here's my answer, as a non-superintelligent human: "see to it that the humans on top of the situation have a compelling financial interest in the systems not disconnecting".
In nuclear engineering, where safety is taken seriously, it's not enough to end the conversation at "the humans in charge can always simply shut down the reactor during a meltdown" or "a meltdown has never happened before, so we don't have to design safety systems before one does".
Yes. But nobody is worried about datacenters overheating and physically exploding, so I'm not sure what comfort that's supposed to provide? The positive feedback loops in AI operate at different levels than that, but they deserve safety engineering all the same.
For example, if the head of cyber security at your company suggested there's no need to worry about hacker infiltration or worms because one can always unplug one's computer as the primary defense mechanism, you might find that a little lacking. Will you be able to unplug the computer before the damage is done? Will it spread to other systems before you detect it? How will you unplug the computer if the attack is from an external facility? What if an attack happens but the boss says the computers have to keep running because an important customer is monitoring uptime? What if the attack goes unnoticed because it looks like a benign service?
Now imagine the head of cyber security answers by saying "actually you don't even need to unplug them, you can just wait for the computers to overheat, thus solving all concerns."
My brainstorming led down a similar pathway of, "deluding powerful human actors that the systems must not be interfered with at any cost." I'm not sure I buy it though. Seems to me like if humanity were even approaching that brink, we could collectively decide to act, overthrowing the minority that--stemming from either greed, duty, or delusion--doesn't want us to act.
> In the space of about four years, LLMs progressed from mediocre high school student to Ph.D. graduate in every field. That's impressive, but there is no evidence yet they can outperform or outsmart humans.
I mean, unless you see clear reasons for them to stop getting better _right now_, this is not very comforting.
This is also a ridiculous statement on its face. Claude outsmarts me nearly every day. I'm more like the seeing eye dog for it nowadays for the few tasks it doesn't have good perception on than a tech lead or pair programmer.
I think he is being over dramatic. In the space of about four years, LLMs progressed from mediocre high school student to Ph.D. graduate in every field. That's impressive, but there is no evidence yet they can outperform or outsmart humans. Their biggest advantage for tasks such as proving theorems or long coding sessions is that they don't get tired.