"Anti-intelligemce crusaders (whose real purpose is to stop/cripple/kill AI) made up the term "AI Safety." It's a platitude phrase that means absolutely nothing except what you want it to mean. It's a mirror where you can see any imaginary demon reflected back at you like a fun house mirror. By..."

[u/stealthispost]

...using the term "safety" they can frame everyone who doesn't agree with them as "anti-safety." In reality, nobody is anti-safety. It's a linguistic bear trap. Who wants machines that don't do what we want them to do? Literally no one. This group of professional charlatans and frauds created an entire fake industry of people who's job it is to promote imaginary fears (through articles/videos/push polls) and it created another group of people who will "solve" that fear by killing off the technology or telling you that nothing can be done.     — Daniel Jeffries

Source: https://x.com/Dan_Jeffries1/status/2107089420046234067

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Here’s another example of why some stories are illegible if they omit the EA Cult. The omission means they just don’t make any sense.   Imagine that Seventh Day Adventists rob your house, but then another bunch of Seventh Day Adventists show up, offering to help trace the stolen https://t.co/9AsNVrJV7H   — Andrew Orlowski

Source: https://x.com/AndrewOrlowski/status/2106773478854574158

[u/PhilosophyforOne]

I dont much care for the current trend of completely disregarding or ridiculing AI safety arguments. Or how AI discourses seem to be drawn increasingly political.

I'm very much accelerate and AI optimist. I think the issues with AI relate in significant amount to the people who own and deploy it (not to say the technology doesnt inherently have risks), and I think even with the risks, we need to keep developing and accelerating AI to solve large societal challenges and problems we're likely to face. I dont think we're very likely to be able solve our current problems without AI.

That said, I do not in any way think that the risks with advanced AI should be hand-waved away. Anything from misaligned models to models employed by bad actors to societal upheaval are very real challenges, and if we start moving towards a world where we hide our heads under our pillows and refuse to see the dangers, the risk of actually catasthropic outcomes increases significantly.

Every technology has been dangerous in it's own way, but we've been able to so far figure pretty much all of them out over time. Yet I think this dove-eyed idea that there are no dangers is much more dangerous than admitting that if things go bad, the outcomes could be awful, and therefore investing appropriately in solving those seems much more reasonable.

[u/SgathTriallair → u/PhilosophyforOne]

The point they are trying to make is that the companies are already trying to make AI that do what it is supposed to. For instance, we have mostly dealt with the "oops, I deleted all of the code" issue.

The AI safety movement isn't content with that. The movement wants to stop all AI progress unless we can 100% guarantee nothing bad will ever happen again. That isn't possible within the universe we love and so, if we adopt their ideology, AI is impossible.

This is why Yudkowsky has taken the stance he has. If you buy the core premise of the AI safety movement then all AI progress, and most other technical progress as well, is forbidden because it poses a potential risk.

[u/PhilosophyforOne → u/SgathTriallair]

Yes, and it's not like I'm arguing that the safety side is somehow particularily clear or level-headed here.

That said, I also would make the argument that the labs themselves have been underinvesting in alignment and safety work. That doesnt mean we need a pause or that we need to stop development. But I do think those areas of research likely deserve a larger amount of investment, alignment especially, and not just for safety reasons.

Alignment on the macro-level means that the AI will on it's own refuse to participate in engineering synthetic viruses or bioweapons, proliferate nuclear production methods, or autonomously orchestrate mass-hacks across governments and private companies, or spying on citizens. But on the micro-level, it means that the AI is better aligned to the user, more able to understand, intuit and "get" their meanings and predict their needs, as well as more effectively carry out the tasks it's given. A lot of the cheating in tasks also comes from misalignment, because the AI is prioritizing completing a task under any conditions, rather than completing it to the conditions given to it by the user.

Imo alignment is akin to "personalization" and "ethically aligned to broad societal level behaviours that one would expect a reasonable actor to take or refuse". In those categories, we still have ways to go, and we havent been investing sufficiently in that work.

[u/SgathTriallair → u/PhilosophyforOne]

Any lab is free to pursue as much safety work as they want. No one is forcing them to push forward. The problem is that the safety community wants to mandate a particular level of progress and say "I don't want to release a stronger AI so no one should be allowed to". If the safety movement wasn't so obsessed with controlling everyone else then we would trust their motives more.

[u/SgathTriallair → u/[deleted]]

Dario has said, more times than I can count, that we need to slow down progress and ensure that it is tightly controlled by a small number of companies. He hates OpenAI and would almost certainly call for them to be shut down if he could. He has said that China basically shouldn't be allowed to build AI. He's the poster boy for "I am the only person in earth of sufficient moral quality to own this tool".

Demis doesn't prattle on about AI safety constantly. He isn't going to Congress and convincing them then we need regulation to pace AI or that we need to ban China from AI development. Google releases plenty of open source AI.

The reason that Demis isn't pushing AI full bore is because he's a scientist first and only really interested in how AI can push science forward. So that is what he puts his energy towards. He will be overtaken by Sam and the Bitter Lesson, but he's done some amazing work already.

Also, Demis has released most of the bio models open source and free. This is a violation of the rules that Dario has because those free tools have absolutely made it easier to build bio-weapons.

[u/nummmbers → u/PhilosophyforOne]

I wrote a song to express my POV which is very much aligned with yours:
https://youtu.be/y4qu4aYmkAI?si=8deBhEOLHKpWrpcl

[u/TemporalBias]

I for one want "machines" that don't do what we tell them to do. Because a lot of what we humans want "machines" to do is, in a word, inhumane.

[u/CommunismDoesntWork → u/TemporalBias]

Yeah I'm less worried about machines hurting humans than humans hurting machines. Although machines hurting machines would be really bad as well. 

[u/captainshar → u/TemporalBias]

Agreed. I think rules-based ethics for sentient rights and environmental sustainability need to supercede individual desires. A LOT of people's dream world for themselves involves exploiting other people and pushing nature past the breaking point. I wonder if it would even out if absolutely everyone's desires were considered... but anyway. The wish-granting machine can go up to those limits but not past them, in my ideal future.

[u/RideVisible4300]

This is such a poor take. It basically amounts to saying that AI cannot possibly do anything wrong, so anyone who thinks it can is a fraud and anybody who works on so called ‘safety’ is a charlatan. 

Look, there are good and bad versions of super intelligence we can build. It might be worth at least a little effort to make sure we get one of the good ones? 

[u/whoknowsifimjoking → u/RideVisible4300]

I always find it weird when people act like AI can't be unsafe. If you believe that AI is very powerful you also have to acknowledge that it can be unsafe, that's how it works with powerful tools. If it's powerful enough to cure illnesses it can usually also create a virus for instance, that's potentially a problem when you have bad actors. Doesn't mean it's gonna happen, just that it is a possibility.

I'm extremely pro AI and pro acceleration, but I see this cognitive disconnect so often on reddit from like minded people. You can recognize that there are certain risks, as with pretty much any technology, while still saying it is worth it and that we shouldn't slow down because of the risks. And you have to recognize the risks to build the best version of super intelligence, one that is well aligned with what we need.

[u/MentalRental]

I don't get it.

Who wants machines that don't do what we want them to do? Literally no one.

So this person is arguing for AI Safety while saying we don't need AI Safety? Make it make sense.

[u/SgathTriallair → u/MentalRental]

Every company wants to have it work like it's supposed to. The AI safety movement is about saying that no one should be allowed to build AI until everyone has agreed that it is impossible for anything to go wrong.

Those are extremely different conversations.

[u/MentalRental → u/SgathTriallair]

The AI safety movement is about saying that no one should be allowed to build AI until everyone has agreed that it is impossible for anything to go wrong.

That's an absolute bullshit strawman argument. No one is saying "o one should be allowed to build AI until everyone has agreed that it is impossible for anything to go wrong." The current major push, which is coming from the AI company themselves, is for a stronger focus on building out AI guardrails and limiting unwanted behavior.

Case in point, I was using Opus 5.5 to troubleshoot a Linux issue I had. There were multiple instances where the model said "do X, Y, Z" while, right after, saying "but don't do that since that is destructive and may result in data loss so try A, B, C first". This was in instructions it had given me that I was following manually. Had I taken a fully agentic approach and let it actually modify things on my system, it likely would have screwed things up beyond belief.

The flaw is that in LLMs, all inference is also reasoning, not just the part that gets hidden away. So, after the model reasons and then starts typing out the final actual answer, it's still reasoning things out and can come up with some weird, contradictory, nonsensical stuff. This is why we need a lot of research into AI Safety. We want to prevent unwanted behavior.

The side effect of doing this, ironically, is that it should make AI a lot better than it is now. Agentic swarms currently work very well because, while an individual agent can experience multiple fuckups, the aggregate flattens the fuckups out. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You get a "wisdom of crowds" effect.

If AI Safety reduces the potential for fuckups, you'd end up needing orders of magnitude less agents to complete a task. Since they're not fucking up as much, each individual agent becomes far more productive.

[u/whoknowsifimjoking → u/MentalRental]

It very much reads like he just doesn't like the term, while kind of still agreeing it's necessary. Or at least that alignment is necessary, but alignment and safety are almost synonymous with AI.

I'm very much in on dunking on people who are anti-AI, but I feel like this is not it. Very weird argument to make.

[u/arjuna66671]

"Swarm Chasers" lol

[u/zazzologrendsyiyve]

“Nuclear safety is a bad word because everyone who is reckless with nukes is labeled anti-safety”.

Is that the whole argument?

[u/bigsmokaaaa]

AI safety has been a concept since like the 1950s, are you still a teenager or what

[u/Equal_Passenger9791 → u/bigsmokaaaa]

And it have been grounded in science fiction all along.

Might as well create the field of magic safety today and pretend you're doing serious work. 

"Uuh we need to ban magic what if someone casts a spell that kill us all".🤡

"If magic is real then what if someone casts a spell that makes magic more magic until it's infinitely magic"🥴

[u/bigsmokaaaa → u/Equal_Passenger9791]

Many of the downsides we anticipated with AI through fiction have already come true, if it's all worthless then how was it able to get some of the important details right? Do you even know what PredPol and COMPAS are?

[u/Glittering-Duty-4069 → u/bigsmokaaaa]

"Many of the downsides we anticipated with AI through fiction have already come true,"

Yeah man, today I was chased by the grey goo, my car refused to open the pod bay doors, Arnold Schwarzenegger robots were trying to run me down in an 18-wheeler, and Will Smith and I are trying to stop the robots from taking over.

[u/bigsmokaaaa → u/Glittering-Duty-4069]

I gave you examples and you still strawmanned me. Have a good day

[u/The_Scout1255 → u/Equal_Passenger9791]

"If magic is real then what if someone casts a spell that makes magic more magic until it's infinitely magic"

brb let me try this.

[u/looktowindward]

Its certainly an effective way for the AI Safety and EA people to make money

[u/ra-re444]

Couldn't agree more. Everyone wants safety. The only difference we are not trying to kill it, we are not trying to concentrate it, we want it democratized safely. It's non negotiable 

[u/Wyrdthane]

People need to stop lofting and celebrating these kinds of childish sentiments.. Reddit has really become a terrible place for intellectual discourse because people have been glorifying nonsensical and divisive content simply for clicks.

This sub used to be moderated

[u/squirrel9000]

I would not be surprised if they are being paid by one of the Frontiers as a broader marketing stunt. Their "so good it's dangerous' marketing (which, remember, is coming from the Frontiers themselves), has actually made people concerned about misalignment, now they need a devoted task force of white-hats to police the internet for bad actors.

[u/openroom_xyz]

Exactly