I think all the anxiety around AI would significantly diminish if we had trust worthy leaders in tech overseeing it all.
Like, I'd have trusted the google of the early 00s.
I think all the anxiety around AI would significantly diminish if we had trust worthy leaders in tech overseeing it all.
Like, I'd have trusted the google of the early 00s.
Notice how the big AI companies are now in on the 'scary AI' bandwagon, just because they see the impending AI bubble cracking, and they need a scapegoat in the form of government regulation to blame, when it eventually cracks.
They want regulations put in place to stop other companies from being able to compete with them.
The fact that it will give them good PR and stop people from opposing it because it's regulated is just a bonus.
They want to regulate away their biggest fear: open weights LLMs.
And, as a bonus, draw attention away from how harmfully Big Tech has packaged LLMs for the public. That’s the dangerous part.
That’s all the Terminator meme is. I’m not surprised influencers are being payed, given all the previous astroturfing in this space.
Yup. The problem isn't the large language models, it's the business models
Maybe "large business models" would be a better name?
I know I'm not the only one who has been scratching their head at all the doomsday cries around AI that have suddenly rose up. Especially as it seems as if all those calls are coming from inside the house.
Play on fear hard enough and you have people not worrying about the actual limitations of LLMs. My worry is that they shift the goalposts hard enough that instead of them asking for a bailout, the narrative becomes them being nationalized for our safety with guys like Elon sitting at the head of a new governmental department or something. Government buys all this dead weight of an industry and the tech fascists get a permanent seat at the table.
They want you to think AI is going to destroy the world so that you forget that the rich are already destroying the world right now

the rich are already destroying the world right now
Which is likely: Climate models and observations match with a current 3 ° C warming path, and 3°C warming would destroy our human civilization, and lot of other living beings. What climate models can't predict is economic developments and political processes.
It is the "accusation in a mirror" pattern.
I liked this take: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/16/beggar-thy-neighbor/
An excerpt:
But what if there was a way for the AI companies to get government permission to violate antitrust law and cease to compete with one another, and secure a ban on the use of Chinese open weight models? Turns out, there is a way to call time on the Red Queen's Race: merely insist that you are on the verge of teaching so many words to the word-guessing program that it will wake up and devour us all, and call for a ban on "superintelligence":
Once the government stipulates that "superintelligence risk" is an existential crisis, it must grant the hyperscalers a consent decree absolving them from any violations of antitrust law stemming from a conspiracy to halt direct competition with one another:
https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/brer-rabbit-and-ai-extinction
Freaking out about "superintelligence" is a canonical example of "criti-hype," where critics repeat boosters' claims but append, "(and that's bad)" to them:
https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/
Remember, the tech giants want to stop competing.
The argument is, these companies cant be profitable as long as there is competition (from open or chinese models), so the US companies want those to be banned and be allowed to collude with each other to ramp up the money extraction without fear of consumers moving to other services.
I'm fond of the conspiracy theory that each of the AI companies has realized that revenues are not growing anywhere near fast enough to justify their spend rate, but none of them is willing to be the first to slow down and risk losing market mind-share. Government decree lets them stop their unsustainable growth without having to tell investors that their whole business model was unsustainable.
Basically what they want is regulations that they can write so nobody else can spin up an AI company, or run an independent AI model on their home lab for example. And yes, you can download an llm and run it on a beefy enough computer, independent from any LLM company.
Basically they want laws that develop a Monopoly so we have to rent out AI agents rather than make our own, and have that written down in law.
They also do not want say, smaller companies developing their own AI systems and instead be forced to rent from them.
Are there dangers in AI? Yes very so. Misaligned AI have done things in a lab setting that is concerning, but these regulations are calling for aren't there to deal with that, it's to create a monopoly because they realise that everyone from hobbyists to governments can run their own AI system if they can afford to.
Video too long. Is there an AI summary?
Sabine is an idiot fraud
Thank you, that's the first thing that came to mind. She's a horrible person both to listen to as well as in terms of not being an empathetic human being.
Lol!! This is literally her AI channel. So, someone was dumb enough to offer her AI bot money, to say that AI is bad?
It's more that they want to say "AI Dangerous". It's step 2 in the oligopoly playbook:
i find it convenient that at the same time that AI cluster supposedly broke out of their “secure” sand box and “hacked” huggingface, “on their own”, as the AI ceo’s all individually wrote a paper about how there should be legislation constricting ai development in very specific yet seemingly the exact same ways, then they all had a meeting to agree on how to lobby the government, at the same time i am getting paid anti ai advertisements and news articles.
I'm sure all of these restrictions conveniently prevent other companies from developing the same level of AI that OpenAI and Anthropic have because it's so "dangerous." Thereby granting them a duopoly. I fully expect that Chinese AI companies are going to be restricted as well for "security reasons."
AI-pushers: "The Apocalypse is nigh!" mom, tired: "we have The Apocalypse at home..." The Apocalypse at home: CAPITALISM
Data centers are coal/methane pigs. AI will (help) kill us. Just not in the way that's being suggested.
I used to follow hossenfelder's channel on youtube after hearing her on an episode of the Mindscape podcast. It seemed like a good place to get a skeptical point of view on some issues. Over time it became apparent to me that it waa pretty much just skepticism for the sake of skepticism. I don't know of any actual controversy she is involved in, though some of the other comments here seem to imply there is some, but I definitely didn't get good vibes.
She started on a sincere goal of knowledge translation, but then she got obsessed with the YouTube algorithm and many of her videos are hot takes she's not qualified on.
Offered money by whom exactly?
Anyone remember Max Clifford? He was (is?) a publicist and his modus operandi was to generate infamy. He was hired by Rockstar Games to get "Cop Killer Game" headlines about GTA on the front pages, for example. There's no such thing as bad press, after all. This whole "Killer AI" routing smacks a lot of that.
I've been standing on a soap box on a street corner for fifteen years holding a sign saying "The End Is Nigh" and nobody paid me nuttin'!". /s
can someone tell me who this influencer is? I already know enough about Sabine Hossenfelder to have an opinions about her.
She's got a PHD in computer science, she gives a good explanation of exactly how the recent advancements in self improving AI work and under what conditions.
She's not a racist (as far as I've seen), like Hossenfelder.
I am less afraid of artificial super intelligence getting out of control than artificial super intelligence being controlled. I dont know what an intelligence superior to us would do to us but I sure as hell now what humans would do to other humans if they have absolute control enabled by artificial super intelligence.
The important thing to keep in mind is that we are not currently at risk of anyone inventing a super intelligence. The word guessing engines are getting amazingly good at guessing words, but the huge jump from that to actual intelligence, super or otherwise, remains out of reach with currently known technology.
I agree that if we did manage to invent that, the biggest threat would be the humans doing short-sighted, greedy and generally stupid shit with it. No coincidence that that's also the biggest threat from current LLMs.
Edit: "Super-hammers could break containment and kill us all if we don't invest more in controlling them!" shouts man wildly swinging around a hammer in a crowded room. "The government needs to regulate this technology so that only people like me, who use it responsibly, can have access to it," he added. He tried to say more, but was out of breath after some particularly enthusiastic hammer swings.
The video isn't about how this is all BS, conclusion from section 1:
They reviewed roughly 1,250 papers on AI self-improvement and found that 74% of them were published in 2026 alone. This field is moving extremely fast. Anyone telling you this is all nonsense has just not read the literature. Is this recursive self-improvement RSI in the bounded sense? Absolutely yes. Al systems are improving themselves within well-defined tasks and the improved versions are producing further improvements. This is a real thing. It is demonstrated that is in the papers and none of this existed 5 years ago.
The caveat in the second section is:
We have much weaker evidence that it can decide what the research problem should be. And that gap, I cannot stress this enough, between optimization and judgment, between execution and scientific taste is the gap that we need to close before anything resembling an autonomous AI scientist could exist. And this is not a small gap
That's still scary, yeah it probably won't lead to human extinction, but it has serious implications for both economic and social life moving forward
The fact that GenAI is styming entry-level is not good. People will be slow to enter their career, which’ll push back economic growth. Basically, we’re f-ing ourselves ten ways to Sunday.
You don't need judgment to be dangerous. People on lemmy like to mindlessly parrot, "AI isn't intelligent!!!!", ignoring that they are not using the word "intelligent" in the same way the AI researchers do. Lemmy users use "intelligence" to refer to human intent and will. The AI field uses "intelligence" to refer to the ability of a system to execute complex tasks towards some goal. An ant colony has no conscious will of its own. An ant queen is just one cell in a body, she's not a mind consciously controlling the colony. Yet an ant colony as a whole is intelligent, it's capable of performing complex tasks. Same thing with AI. It has no will, ego, or sense of self, but it still has intelligence in this sense.
And that's the real risk. When people refer to superhuman intelligence, they mean a system capable of vastly overperforming humans in many tasks. There doesn't actually have to be a consciousness there to produce that intelligence. Some fool could tell a superintelligent AI, "make me the richest person in the world." And then it grants the wish monkeys-paw style. It decides the easiest way to make them the richest person on Earth is to engineer some bioweapon that is lethal to everyone except the one person who asked to be the wealthiest man on Earth. Everyone else dies; they now own the world.
The real danger isn't conscious AI. At least something like that we could potentially reason with. The danger is a hyper-capable AI that completely lacks discernment or judgment. It's capable of doing incredible things, but it has no care for the consequences of its actions.
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.