8 pointsby rafaelc7 hours ago1 comment
  • allears7 hours ago
    It's interesting how Gates has tried to morph from the no-holds-barred owner of a predatory software company to some kind of elder statesman. I certainly didn't trust him back then, and I see no reason to trust him now. Whatever he's trying to accomplish with these portentious pronouncements, you can be sure that it all stems from (unenlightened) self-interest.
    • pyronite6 hours ago
      I'd prefer to see you and others who don't worry about these things attack the argument and not the messenger.

      It's frightening to be personally concerned about the possibility of this powerful technology getting out of control and to see little but conspiracizing in response.

      Do you have any thoughts on why the concerns of Bill Gates, Geoffrey Hinton, Eliezer Yudkowsky, et al. are wrong? It would make me feel better.

      • bigbadfeline4 hours ago
        > Do you have any thoughts on why the concerns of Bill Gates, Geoffrey Hinton, Eliezer Yudkowsky, et al. are wrong?

        Wrong about what? That machines can do a lot of a harm if they are attached to critical infrastructure without supervision? That's always been the case and it's overcome by security provisions which can tame any machine, smart or not.

        The people you enumerated aren't security specialists and they've never provided anything like a proper analysis of the security measures used by the perpetrators of hacking incidents - from prompts to harnesses to hardening to air-gaping, nothing is addressed. Moreover, they have glaring conflicts of interest, they belong to the already powerful who'd do anything to gain more power at our expense, they speak their stock portfolios, far from the whole truth.

        I'm pretty sure a few script kiddies, with their own tools and without any LLMs, could have achieved the same breaches given the same freedom from consequences in the same environment. That latter point is the crux of the problem, the perpetrators of the AI breaches acted like script kiddies with carte blanche to cause harm and blame it on their tools, therefore whatever measures stop script kiddies will stop the AI bros too, there's no need for more power.

        > It's frightening to be personally concerned about the possibility of this powerful technology getting out of control and to see little but conspiracizing in response.

        A sequential word generator can be secured, nobody has provided any proof to the contrary, all we hear is empty generalities like "frighteningly powerful", we cannot trust the word of the perpetrators, that's not a sound security practice.