polishTar

I heard someone use the analogy of "If Magnus Carlson played me at chess, I wouldn't be able to predict the moves he'd play since if I could I'd be at his level. He'll consider things I didn't and even though I don't know the route he'll take to win, I can be certain he will beat me." (not an exact quote).

We're not going to be smarter than a superintelligent AI. The things we conceive it doing if it were given a malicious task (bioterrorism, killer nano-machines, pure fusion bombs sidesteping the non-proliferation bottleneck of Pu239, etc) are likely not the full set of things it can do to harm us. I don't think it does us any favors to dismiss the risks here.

Even the things we can conceive of are very scary, to me at least.

Influencing change is more complicated than that.

We live in a society that has systems of market competition between companies and economic/military competition between countries. There's not just one country working on frontier AI, and not just a few companies in each country either. The incentives of these systems ensure AI advancement will happen quickly from here on out, no matter what, absent governmental action.

An individual researcher leaving the company does nothing, other than give their seat to someone else who likely doesn't share their same concerns.

Alternatively, using the influence they do have in their position to directly try to advance AI safety research, advocate for govt action, and make public arguments attempting to persuade the public to pressure the govt to act when they otherwise wouldn't be inclined is far more likely to impact things for the better.

The people of hacker news seem to really want this to be some sort of conspiracy. It's quite interesting to see.

"It's deliberate sabotage by Amazon", "It's retribution by Hegseth for embarrassing the DoW", "It's a brilliant marketing scheme by Anthropic", "It's because of the govt is considering investing in OpenAI and so they're crippling any competitors".

It's never just "a very poorly formed regulatory action in response to increasingly capable models".

Look - it's WAY more fun to just call Dario a goober than engage with the actual substance of the essay. Duh!

Sure, this may be the most important invention ever with near certainty to reshape society over the next few years, but meh. We should probably just immediately dismiss the concerns of anyone working on it without addressing their arguments at all. It's easy, we can justify ignoring their warnings by saying they're self-interested or too self-important or whatever.

Life is more fun when you live it with your eyes closed! You should try it out too.

Or, slightly more direct: .1kW*h/GB * .125GB/s * 3600s/h = 45kW

Those are some goofy numbers. Obviously incorrect.

That’s an internet argument. The legal issue being debated in actual courts has never been “does Facebook have the technical capability to remove content”.

But Google is willing to host their content in search, right?

They're just not willing to pay since there's no revenue benefit to search hosting it. It seems like Danish media doesn't like this and has chosen to withhold their content, which is their right of course, but it seems strange to contort that into a claim that Google is doing censorship.

That's a bit revisionist. Network effects were obvious when Google acquired Youtube. Google Video had the edge technically, but it didn't matter because Youtube had the users/content and Google saw that very clearly in their user growth before they made their offer.

Municipalities are generally preempted from regulating matters of statewide concern. In CA, the state decided to have the CA DMV regulate operational safety and the CPUC regulate the commercial service. Individual cities are prevented from enacting local laws that encroach upon state authority.

Oracle Chrome, Ha! I wouldn't even be surprised if that's exactly how it plays out.

Ah, you're right. I was wrong to say "public domain".

It would be more correct to say Quake III Arena was released to the public as free software under the GPLv2 license.

Fast inverse square root is now part of the public domain.

Also, even if this weren’t the case you can’t sue for damages to other people (they’d need to bring their own suit)

For enterprise, Google has something called Vertex AI which has a strict privacy policy but you have to pay just like any other typical cloud service.

Presumably Gemini 1.5 will be available there soon.

what do you mean?

If you've ever used a VR headset you'll know the weight is extremely important when it comes to comfort. This isn't just a random marketing metric.

A lot of patent trolls are very small companies though