reducesuffering

According to HN of the last year, "marketing stunts." Remember when Mythos preview was announced only 6 months ago

"It's just marketing" HN mostly told us

"If you ask actual AI researchers, they rate the chance of an existential threat from AGI pretty low as of 2026.

All this is, understandably, frustrating and confusing for anyone trying to understand just how scared to be."

Meanwhile it links to an article stating: "The closest thing to a public debate about the existential threat of AI is surveys of AI researchers. The most recent, published last week, asked 1,580 researchers what probability they put on AI causing human extinction — or a permanent, severe loss of human control, which is not the same outcome. The median was about 10%, up from 5% two years ago. The middle half of the responses ran from 1% to 25%, and 12% said zero."

Personally if half of AI researchers have 1-25% chance all humans being massacred or having zero agency over our lives, and only 12% of them think there's no chance, I would be very worried!

“I believe there’s about a 50% chance we all die because of the development of smarter-than-human AI systems, and that our actions over the next two to 10 years will determine the outcome.”

There are a gargantuan number of extremely intelligent AI researchers, Turing Award winners, and the lab CEOs saying the same thing. They are the ones closest to understanding the technology.

Where there’s smoke there’s fire.

Imagine having a "stop gambling assistance" section of your fking AD to promote gambling to people

"we regulate the passive exploitation of people to supplement taxes in a regressive manner."

I was convinced by this for a full 30 seconds before I realized there are millions of advertisements for the state lotteries. They aren't just regulating a market that will exist with or without the state, they are actively promoting and encouraging it

Astonishingly simplified. There is far more evidence for the health improvements from ample amount of strength training and aerobic cardio exercise. Good luck lifting 3x and running 3x a week on "low carb".

Amongst acquaintances I see low carb adherents. I wonder why they are always the ones woefully less fit than the serious athlete acquaintances. Amongst serious athletes there is no low carb proselytizing lol.

For sure it can help people who don't exercise and thus don't use much carbs in the first place. But that is far from ideal health, and thus the ideal diet.

Exactly. HN has had an utterly terrible prediction record for AI. So many dismissals of capabilities and existential risk, even this year, that get proven wrong within a month.

You're probably not aware that all of the "science fiction" about AI from LessWrong written 5-20 years ago has come true and our present AI environment reflects that. It wasn't science fiction, it was prescient.

While unfortunate, these are not personal issues. By promoting AGI capability progress, you risk the lives of billions of all of us.

Yes, but clearly that's not what Zitron was implying. The rest of his thread's commentary makes that clearer. He's saying:

OpenAI is going to implode soon. They would have to raise an unfathomable amount of money, it's literally never been done and is so much it won't happen. That's why they're going to collapse.

He could have predicted that OpenAI would raise an unprecedented amount of money and are not going to collapse. He clearly believed differently.

"Based on estimates of their burn rate and historic analyses, I hypothesize that OpenAI will collapse in the next 12-24 months unless it raises more funding than in the history of the valley and creates an entirely new form of AI." - Ed Zitron (Jul 29, 2024)