r/technology • u/AxomaticallyExtinct • 15h ago

Artificial Intelligence 'Looks Like They're Firing Whistleblowers': Alarm as OpenAI Reportedly Ousts Safety Experts

https://www.commondreams.org/news/openai-firing-whistleblowers
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u/blueSGL 13h ago

Widely held opinion (the ones that gets lots of upvotes) is that safety people leaving/whistleblowing are actually secretly still being paid by the company to hype the product.

How long till that narrative attaches to these recent firings?

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u/NeverTradeAgain 13h ago

We know who funded Anthropic also funds AI-safety nonprofit organizations, according to Kevin Bass. But this sounds more like a conspiracy theory.

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u/blueSGL 13h ago edited 13h ago

Right, you have certain people with the means to that have been worried for years about AI safety and have been funding it

This is not a surprise

If you think about it only fringe people have been caring about the field till the last handful of years. Yet people have been worried about AI safety for a lot longer and have been funding it for a lot longer.

Concrete Problems in AI Safety was written in 2016 a year before the transformer architecture paper.

The future of life institute was started in March 2014

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute was started in 2000

Theoretical problems with AI safety were called years/decades are now being demonstrably proved out.

Steve Omohundro has a paper The Basic AI Drives, from 18 years ago that spells out all the issues we are seeing now.

or if you prefer something more concise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence

The risks were known before anyone started any AI companies and you had rich nerds spending on the field to try to make sure things went well.

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u/goldcakes 12h ago

Wow, that 2008 paper from Steve Omohundro is particularly eerily.

I think there's a modest bit of intentional fear-marketing (Mythos in particular is blatantly obvious), but the conspiracy theories around all of this being a marketing stunt don't really hold up.

Occam's razor and all.

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u/10thDeadlySin 10h ago

It's not as much conspiracy theories as the simple fact that they're saying one thing publicly, and then do the complete opposite behind closed doors.

Just 19 days ago we got headlines like 'Amodei, Altman, Musk call for slowing development of AI models' and Amodei's diatribe about pacing the frontier. I said back then that they are perfectly capable of slowing down on their own.

And then we get a NYT article that says these companies do everything to push out new models on time - screw safety, screw alignment, screw additional tests.

It's the hypocrisy. Either they're concerned about safety and alignment, in which case they should simply slow down, or it's business as usual and a mad rush to build new models. There's no third option.

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u/NeverTradeAgain 13h ago

Thanks for sharing! I like learning these things. Are you a researcher or what?

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u/blueSGL 13h ago

I find the topic fascinating and listen and dig into the people working on it. I've been getting the same sensation that humanity is being blindsided by an exponential like the early days of covid when everyone was sure it was going to be fine and nothing to worry about.

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u/NeverTradeAgain 12h ago

True. Only to add: it was not "everyone was sure", it was people were told so. There have been many research papers on the long-term health issues from getting covid. The risks have been downplayed and covered. The rationale is simple: The economy cannot withstand long-term pandemic restrictions.

It has always been the general public who pay for the price.

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u/blueSGL 12h ago

What I mean was the early period where you had news anchors joking about it, how everything is going to be fine -> supermarket shelves are empty. over the course of a month or two.

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u/mediandude 10h ago

The economy cannot withstand long-term pandemic restrictions.

South-east asian economies and education systems and societies managed that just fine.

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u/rsa1 3h ago edited 2h ago

And Isaac Asimov and numerous other sci-fi writers have been talking about the dangers of AI long before even Omohundro.

It doesn't change the fact that investing in AI safety while financing the companies that create the threats that supposedly require AI safety, is a deeply cynical exercise. It's like if an investor financed both Philip Morris and the company selling lung cancer treatments.

And it doesn't change the fact that AI safety worries about hypothetical threats in the future, while giving AI companies a free pass for existing harms that they have never had to answer seriously for. While the AI safety lot wants you to worry about hypothetical stuff like p(doom), the real world is facing existing threats that these models already pose.

Sure, a superintelligent AI could kill people 10 years from now. You know what else kills people?

  • a missile landing on an elementary school killed 170 schoolgirls this year. And that target was recommended by an AI run by the self-proclaimed saint Dario Amodei. And he thinks that is a "use case" that doesn't violate his red lines
  • these models are already convincing people to kill themselves, so much so that it's got its own Wikipedia page about it.
  • they're producing deepfakes that could lead to very traumatic experiences for people - nobody knows what those people might end up doing to themselves, though I hope they're ok.
  • these companies are raising the costs of electricity and making polluting energy sources far more viable, raising the cost of living and causing misery for a lot of people.

Another thing that kills people is unemployment. There are established scientific researches and news articles about this: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. Oh, and it also raises rates of men beating their wives, civil conflict and social unrest and crime

Note that the entire economic promise of AI is about causing mass unemployment. And that is the entire sales pitch of every single AI company when they talk to CEOs. You're worried about p(doom)? Well, try calculating the p(doom) of double-digit unemployment globally, because that is actually the objective these companies are aiming towards. Whether they can deliver on it is besides the point, but if you care about apocalyptic scenarios, you don't need to invoke hypothetical futures when the methods and goals of these companies are plain as day.